The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963, and in 2022, is one year away from its sixtieth anniversary, making it one of the oldest theatre companies in the United States. Its founder and director, Peter Schumann—now eighty-seven—discovered an inspiring and flourishing performance world in early 1960s New York, where his dreams of a masked dance theatre troupe became a reality in downtown Manhattan. The rise of ensemble theatre companies like the Living Theatre, the Open Theater, and the Performance Group, alongside the interdisciplinary world of Happenings, dance, and music centered around Judson Church, created a fertile and supportive environment in which Schumann found like-minded and willing collaborators to realize his visions of ritualist dance theatre with puppets and objects. The influence of visionary artist Richard Tyler (founder of the Uranian Phalanstery in a disused Hungarian synagogue on East 4th Street), and activist novelist Grace Paley led Schumann away from loft performances and art-world happenings, and onto the streets and sidewalks of New York where Schumann could present crankie scroll performances and create giant puppet happenings as part of parades organized by the burgeoning anti-Vietnam War movement.While Bread and Puppet thrived in the downtown New York art and theatre world of the late sixties, it didn’t quite fit within the city’s emerging norms of performance. Its techniques paralleled dance and movement concerns of the Open Theater and the Performance Group as well as Judson Dance choreographers Yvonne Rainer, Aileen Pasloff, and Steve Paxton, but Schumann’s interest in expressionist-style masks and oversize rod puppets differed from those companies’ primary focus on the body alone. As Schumann found more and more young artists interested in joining him, he developed a company along the lines of other ensemble theatres, but Bread and Puppet’s use of puppets and its exploration of street performance opened up modes and venues that those other groups were not predisposed to use.1 The outright political activism of the Living Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and El Teatro Campesino was, in a way, more closely aligned to Bread and Puppet, especially since the two West Coast theatres used commedia dell’arte and Mexican carpa performance styles that routinely involved masks and (at times) puppets.Bread and Puppet’s connection to the mainstream U.S. puppetry community was even more distanced. Most American puppeteers in the mid-1960s were either attempting to elevate the low-culture status of puppetry into a serious, recognized art form (on what they imagined was a European model), or they were entranced with the revolution in television puppetry that Jim Henson and his colleagues were creating with their soft-sculpture hand-and-rod Muppets and ingenious use of the camera as puppet stage. Bread and Puppet’s rough, low-cost methods, and its willingness to use its giant puppets in the streets in support of rent strikes in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, or against the Vietnam War in Fifth Avenue street parades, all seemed in direct opposition to the refined marionette and rod-puppet dramas that Frank Ballard, Rufus and Margo Rose, and other American puppeteers were meticulously creating; Bread and Puppet work also inhabited a very different world than the corporate advertisements and variety-show content that the Muppets were creating for network television. Over the decades, Bread and Puppet’s work has been considered a known entity by different audiences who might not have been aware of the multiplicity of the theatre’s distinct performance modes: Happenings, political street parades, art theatre on avant-garde stages, puppet circuses, street performances, and large-scale outdoor pageantry. All of these forms have been utilized, innovated, or invented by Schumann and his collaborators.Jim Henson’s full vision for televised Muppet productions only really gained traction in the mid-1970s when British producer Lord Lew Grade brought The Muppet Show to London. A parallel, if wildly different, kind of European recognition of puppetry happened to Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater in 1967 when Christian Dupavillon, searching in New York for innovative American theatre groups to perform at Jack Lang’s Festival International du Jeune Théâtre in Nancy, France, saw Bread and Puppet’s ritualistic Vietnam War street theatre production Fire. Bread and Puppet’s success in Nancy the following year—the annus mirabilis 1968—led to immense popularity and recognition in the European theatre world, and numerous tours to western and eastern Europe in the years to come.2 One year later, Schumann, his wife Elka, and their five children left their tenement apartment in the East Village (joined by members of their New York company) for an attractive artist-in-residence position at Goddard College, the alternative educational mecca in Plainfield, Vermont where John Dewey-inspired pedagogy had attracted a rural version of the 1960s “counterculture” ethos. It was at Goddard where Schumann’s theatricality embraced the pastoral, with the beginning of his expansive puppet sideshow, circus, and pageant happenings titled Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, which he initiated in 1970 and continued for the next twenty-eight years.The rural environment and the New England political atmosphere of local democracy, town meetings, and independent living softened Bread and Puppet’s activist stance in some ways. Vehement denunciations of the U.S. war in Vietnam didn’t seem to connect well with local Vermont residents at village Fourth of July parades, and the utter beauty of rural Vermont landscapes opened up a rich, colorful, and often peaceful world of influence in contrast to the gray realities of New York City and the ongoing war-making of the U.S. government abroad. In Vermont, Schumann created Bread and Puppet’s trademark 1971 cantastoria Hallelujah, which articulates a vision of a beauteous, fecund, and female World. This World is menaced by deadly U.S. military violence, in the form of Uncle Fatso (a cigar-smoking landlord puppet from the New York days, now wearing an American flag top hat), but the resurrection of the verdant World is implied—or to be more exact, promised—at the show’s end.It was also in Vermont where Allen Troxler and Larry Gordon of the New Hamburger commune in Plainfield introduced Elka Schumann to the early American shape-note traditions of Sacred Harp music: the deeply rich sound of four-part-harmony acapella singing for untrained voices that became a staple of many Bread and Puppet productions to come. A three-pronged Bread and Puppet production approach developed: larger, more concentrated puppet spectacles created in Vermont for indoor theatres and outdoor pageantry; the further growth of concentrated touring at theatre festivals in western and eastern Europe; and a continuing New York City presence via a storefront theatre in Coney Island, for mostly Black audiences. Importantly, Schumann’s theatre was attracting scores of young performers and artists from the U.S. and Europe to participate in a kind of alternative performance with puppets, masks, and objects that they could not find elsewhere in the Americas or Europe, thus strengthening Bread and Puppet’s identity and function as a professional theatre ensemble.I was a student in the early 1970s at the (mostly) straitlaced Middlebury College, on the other side of the Green Mountains from Plainfield, and even more distant from the practice and theory of the thriving counterculture and educational scene at Goddard. A theatre student in the midst of the Vietnam War years, where we worried about the draft, and the Kent State and Jackson State massacres led to nationwide college and university strikes, I was inspired by whatever tastes of alternative theatre managed to arrive to our drama department from New York City’s experiments: Open Theater-style movement improvisations, radical reinterpretations of dramatic texts, a daring production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, and guest artists like dancer Daniel Nagrin, who performed The Peloponnesian War as an analogy to Vietnam. And yet, I remember clearly one of my theatre teachers affirming that the way “Art” works, there could not be important dramas about current issues like Vietnam until decades had passed; it would take twenty years or more for real artists to understand fully, digest, and re-present such stories to theatre audiences. However, not in a theatre, but in a Middlebury gymnasium; not as a “theatre event,” but as part of a rally against the Vietnam War; and not sponsored by the theatre department, but by a pacifist anti-war coalition, I saw Bread and Puppet perform a direct response to the U.S. bombing of the Plain of Jars in Laos. Black-clad, hooded puppeteers enacted the event by pouring a can of rusted nails through the wide-open mouth of a fanged, black-and-gray celastic demon head, so that the nails rained down on a cardboard cutout of a house on the gym floor.Here was a theatre that did not need to wait twenty years for a reasoned response to atrocity; here were images that—without the dialogue of actors theatre—seemed to correspond perfectly with the violence we read about or saw on television, but could not really articulate in our minds. I was enthralled and inspired. For the rest of my college years, my friends and I would look forward to seeing Bread and Puppet performances, driving to Goddard’s Haybarn Theater to see The Revenge of the Law (the 1971 proscenium puppet show in direct response to Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s massacre of inmates following the Attica prison uprising in New York State), or volunteering to sing in the Sacred Harp chorus for The Fourteen Stations of the Cross, a giant puppet passion play (also abstractly reflecting the Vietnam War) performed in another gym at Middlebury, and once more sponsored by the college’s Quaker-led peace coalition. I began to help organize Bread and Puppet performances at Middlebury, and by the time I graduated, not knowing exactly what to do next, I applied to work as a Bread and Puppet apprentice for the summer of 1973.During the following twelve years, as I began working with Bread and Puppet (becoming a company member in 1975, after the theatre moved to the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont, and continuing in that capacity until 1985), I learned a new way of theatre-making which has nourished me to this day. This was a theatre that made sense not just to me, but to the other American, European, and Latin American members of the Bread and Puppet company; to audiences in Europe (especially in Poland) and Latin America; and to engaged audiences we met in tours across the United States, playing in small Vermont towns, in alternative theatres, in colleges and universities (usually at the invitation of student groups; hardly ever through theatre departments). The calm and supportive environment of the (mostly white) Vermont counterculture had taken root in the state’s taciturn, moderate liberalism, where (mostly white) moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats more often than not saw eye to eye. Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield began a profitable ice cream business, food co-ops flourished throughout the state, and anti-Vietnam War activism shifted in the mid-1970s to support for the Equal Rights Amendment, Central American solidarity, and anti-nuclear organizing.The Schumanns’ 1974 move to an ex-dairy farm in Glover, Vermont, purchased by Elka Schumann’s parents John and Maria Scott, provided a long-term base for the Bread and Puppet Theater: space to build and rehearse new puppet shows for touring, and, above all, acres of outdoor performance sites for the continuation of Our Domestic Resurrection Circus. Four of us puppeteers (Trudi Cohen, Barbara Leber, Michael Romanyshyn, and myself) formed the nucleus of the Bread and Puppet company, which toured in Europe and the U.S. during the fall and winter, and then would focus on preparations for the August Circus in the spring. It was during the eighties and nineties that Bread and Puppet’s identity as a groovy, hippy, theatrical equivalent to the Grateful Dead (who had also carved out their own alternative economic and cultural path in the world of popular music) began to emerge, although those of us in the company realized we had much more in common with the theatre-makers we met in New York, Europe, and Latin America. It was around this time that Christian Dupavillon opined to me that Bread and Puppet was not really an American theatre, but a European one. This was true, not simply because Peter Schumann benefitted from his rich German Gymnasium education in European art, literature, music, history, and philosophy, but also—and this took me a long time to understand—because Schumann’s wartime experiences of aerial bombardment, death, and being a refugee amounted to a trauma that emerges in almost all of his work: his anti-war activism, his suspicions about patriotic flag-waving and government bureaucracy, and his distrust of capitalism. Schumann’s war experiences gave him a perspective and sense of urgency quite different than those of American puppeteers and performance-makers like Jim Henson, Richard Schechner, and Allen Kaprow. On the other hand, contrary to Dupavillon’s observations, Bread and Puppet has been fully a product of U.S. culture, with the kind of collective energy and devotion to an art project that mostly middle-class Americans seeking alternatives to mainstream culture might provide.Elsewhere I have noted how Bread and Puppet’s Domestic Resurrection Circus was the theatrical focus of the company from 1970 until 1998, when Elka and Peter Schumann called an end to the event after a festival-goer died accidentally in a late-night fight in one of the campgrounds near the Circus fields.3 That incident was the catalyst for stopping the festival, but in fact the event had outgrown itself, and the 30,000 to 40,000 people who would descend on the small town of Glover each August were more than the DIY organizing of the Bread and Puppet community could handle. However, Schumann was still obsessed with his theatre and art-making; Bread and Puppet continued making outdoor circuses and pageants in Glover as well as touring productions, with a succession of companies comprised of young performers and artists who were increasingly distant in age from Schumann, then in his mid-sixties. To make up for the loss of income from the summer circus, the theatre began a summer internship program, where those game enough to camp out in the fields and live communally for a few weeks in the rustic Northeast Kingdom could learn Bread and Puppet’s methods of “Cheap Art” and papier-mâché puppet activism. The annual summer performance cycle continued, no longer focused on the single August weekend extravaganza of the Domestic Resurrection Circus, but instead on outdoor events and indoor shows (in the company’s Dirt Floor Cathedral) every weekend from June through late August. It is this form, more or less, that Bread and Puppet Theater has continued to this day.Bread and Puppet seemed to reach a peak of theatre-world attention in the 1980s, buoyed by its success in European festival circuits, and acclaim in the U.S. In 1980, the New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow, reviewing the theatre’s performances of Ah! or the First Washerwoman Cantata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, wrote that “Just as the Japanese elevate their most esteemed actors to a higher status, the Bread and Puppet Theater could be considered an American ’national living treaure.’”4 However, as sixties cultural energies waned, and Vermont’s counterculture and New York’s alternative theatre culture faded, the moment of ensemble theatre groups seemed to pass; boisterous downtown performance experiments shifted into high-class performance art, and New York gentrification made it increasingly hard for young artists to realize their own versions of avant-garde performance culture. Although Bread and Puppet continued to perform annually at the East Village’s Theater for the New City, the Times no longer wrote about its productions. Under the radar, the work continued, as it does now, with Peter Schumann now in his eighty-seventh year, alongside a company of diverse, talented, and energetic young puppeteers the age of his children and grandchildren.What has the influence of Bread and Puppet been so far? Schumann’s approach has inspired theatre groups around the world to experiment with puppets, masks, crankies, cantastorias, ritual, pageantry, parades, proscenium theatre productions, and street shows.5 One early example of this was the 1968 Radical Theatre Festival at San Francisco State University, attended by Bread and Puppet, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and El Teatro Campesino, where all three companies performed their versions of Schumann’s street show A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother. 6 Over the past five decades, I think the Bread and Puppet influence has developed in five basic ways.A desire to see puppetry recognized in the U.S. as a mature art form (as it has been for centuries in Asian, African, Native American, and European cultures) has been part of American puppet modernism since the Chicago Little Theatre began in 1911. Puppet comedy reached adult audiences via ventriloquism, and some puppeteers such as Robert Anton (1949–1984) pursued puppetry for adults on downtown New York stages beginning in the seventies, but Bread and Puppet’s uncompromising self-definition as theatre for adult audiences (as well as kids) since 1963 was the most powerful assertion of puppetry’s place as a serious art form. Beginning in 1992, the Jim Henson Foundation International Puppet Festivals have brought together examples of the now-burgeoning fields of U.S. puppetry for adults, following the path Bread and Puppet had blazed.A clear and obvious effect of Bread and Puppet’s work can be seen in the theatre groups created by puppeteers following their own Bread and Puppet experiences. Such groups have emerged in Europe, North and South America, and Asia; some have completed their life cycle, but others continue. A short list of such companies includes Amy Trompetter’s Redwing Black Bird Theater, now centered in Rosendale, New York; In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis, whose May Day Parade became a central feature of Minneapolis community culture; Spiral Q Puppet Theater in Philadelphia; Les Montreurs d’Images in Geneva, Switzerland; Pupi e Fresedde in Florence, Italy; Paperhand Puppet Intervention in Saxapahaw, North Carolina, whose annual giant puppet shows have become a fixture in Chapel Hill; Chicago’s Redmoon Theater (1990–2015), whose community spectacle theatre practices are still embraced by one of its outgrowths, Frank Maugeri’s Cabinet of Curiosity; Great Small Works, an activist collective (of which I am a member) now based in Gowanus, Brooklyn; Pedro Adorno and Cathy Vigo’s company Agua, Sol y Sereno, who create community street performance and theatre celebrating Puerto Rican culture and history in San Juan; Boxcutter Collective, a Brooklyn-based ensemble of recent Bread and Puppet alumni; and Poncili Creacion, a “Puerto Rican punk-DIY performance collective” active in the international art and performance world.7A third area of Bread and Puppet influence can be found in the work of individual artists and puppeteers who, after working with Bread and Puppet, have pursued their own paths, informed by the assumption that puppetry is a sophisticated art form capable of conveying complex and important ideas. This group has included Roman Paska, who worked with Bread and Puppet in Europe before embarking on his career as a solo puppeteer, director, and, from 1999 to 2002, Director of the Institut Internationale de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, France; director Julie Taymor, who briefly worked with Peter Schumann in the early days of Bread and Puppet’s Cate Farm residency before her sojourn in Indonesia; Massimo Schuster, the French and Italian puppeteer who developed a career as a solo puppeteer in Europe, and later served as President of the Union Internationale de la Marionnette from 2004 to 2008; Rosa Luisa Márquez, a director and theatre professor at the University of Puerto Rico and protégé of Augusto Boal; Paul Zaloom, whose work in New York’s downtown performance scene led to his science-oriented CBS television show Beakman’s World; Clare Dolan, a co-founder of Chicago’s Redmoon Theater who then started her own acclaimed Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vermont, and continues to play an important role in Bread and Puppet; Blair Thomas, another co-founder of Redmoon Theater who then created and now directs the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival; Ben Majchrzak (known as Ben Matchstick), a performer and game designer who co-conceived the hit musical Hadestown with Vermont composer Anaïs Mitchell; and Brooklyn-based puppeteer and director Nehprii Amenii, a former Bread and Puppet summer intern, whose recent work includes her 2018 La MaMa production Food for the Gods, an immersive performance about the killings of Black men.A fourth area of Bread and Puppet influence—perhaps a bit more complicated to discern—includes theatre-makers who did not work with Peter Schumann but were inspired (at least in part) by Bread and Puppet’s examples of community-oriented theatre and activist performance. An early example of this was England’s Welfare State International, who from 1968 to 2006 explored “celebratory art and spectacle.”8 The radical Philippines Educational Theatre Association (PETA) has promulgated activist theatre throughout the Philippines since 1967, teaching “movement theatre, Bread and Puppet Theater, realistic theatre, and expressionism” in its workshops.9 Québécois street performers Gilles Ste-Croix and Guy Laliberté regularly traveled to Glover in the late seventies and early eighties to see Bread and Puppet’s approach to a theatrical circus with puppets and stilt dancing before founding their own troupe Les Échassiers de Baie-Saint-Paul, which in 1982 transformed into Cirque du Soleil. Connecticut puppeteer Anne Cubberly was also a regular attendee of Bread and Puppet’s annual summer spectacles before she founded her own Hartford-based annual community puppet spectacle Nightfall in 2012.A particularly interesting category of Bread and Puppet influence includes artists who worked with Bread and Puppet at some point over the past decades, and now work in fields different from puppetry, yet reflect a confidence in activist art-making as a viable means of communication. Filmmaker and media activist DeeDee Halleck, a Bread and Puppet collaborator in the mid-1960s, founded Paper Tiger Television in 1981 and the Deep Dish Satellite Network in 1986, the first grass-roots community television network in the United States. Following his touring work with the Bread and Puppet company in the early 1980s, trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas continued to develop his own particular path in jazz, recording a 2014 album, Present Joys, based on the Sacred Harp music he had discovered at Bread and Puppet, and continuing to include what Downbeat magazine calls a “penchant for activism” in his music making.10 German-born American artist Kiki Smith’s work focuses on sculpture, film, and printmaking rather than performance, but she regularly cites Bread and Puppet’s shows, posters, and publications as a major influence.11More recently, award-winning Bosnian filmmaker Jasmila Žbanić directed Quo Vadis, Aida?, a 2020 film about the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men by Serbian forces in 1995. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2021. Peter Schumann had met Žbanić (then a high-school student) when he led puppet workshops in besieged Sarajevo in 1993 and 1994, and had invited her to Glover for the summer of 1995.12 There, upon hearing about the July massacre in Srebenica, and after being encouraged by Elka and Peter Schumann to make work reflecting her own experiences and perspective, Žbanić created a fact-based outdoor puppet production with a women’s acapella chorus about a woman so distraught over her husband’s death that she drowned herself and her two children. Žbanić believes that working with Bread and Puppet played an important role in her development as an artist. As she told journalist Jon Kalish, “For me [it] was very important to see that politics and art can be joined in something beautiful and powerful, … because many times you hear that art is maybe damaged if it’s talking about politics in a direct way. But in Bread and Puppet, I learned how [art] can still talk about urgent issues of our time.”13It is not surprising that Peter Schumann would form such a strong bond with a younger artist like Jasmila Žbanić. As Jon Kalish has pointed out, Schumann’s own trip to Sarajevo in 1993 “was a painful, emotional reminder of his childhood in Silesia during World War II, when he and his family became refugees in the region,” where he “witnessed bombings and bodies washing up on the shore of the Baltic Sea.”14 The trauma of war and government violence is one of the things that compels Schumann to make his art and his performances, and he continues to attract young artists in their twenties and thirties to work with him. These include a changing cast of Bread and Puppet company members, who bear the greatest responsibility for the theatre’s year-round work of creating and performing new productions in the Northeast, across the United States, and occasionally abroad; additionally, there is a larger summer staff of veteran puppeteers who organize the theatre’s summer internship and performance programs. The European alternative touring circuit of the sixties and seventies no longer really exists for Bread and Puppet, although occasional opportunities can still be found, as in September 2019, when Bread and Puppet performed The Honey Let’s Go Home Opera, featuring musicians of the New York new music group Ensemble Pi and a touring company of twenty experienced puppeteers (and even more volunteer performers), at the World Festival of Puppet Theater in Charleville-Mézières, France. Bread and Puppet long ago stepped away from the mainstream theatre world, and Schumann himself never deigned to engage with the American art scene, so it is unrealistic to expect that those areas of cultural endeavor would pay attention to the work of a sixties-era puppet theatre ensemble. Although Schumann has long eschewed an art-world career, he has always been a prolific painter and graphic designer whose Bread and Puppet Press sales support his theatre company’s work. In recent years, there have been more showcases of his visual art, including Peter Schumann: The Shatterer, a 2013 solo exhibition at the Queens Museum which complemented the company’s major theatre production that year, Shatterer of Worlds.Bread and Puppet Theater in 2022 is a multi-leveled and multi-generational organization of full-time, part-time, and volunteer participants, all of whom at one time or another participate in the theatre’s projects. The current Bread and Puppet resident company is a dynamic group of five, one far more diverse in its makeup than those of previous years, which were largely comprised of white or Latinx members. A larger, experienced group of summer staff members complements the resident company, assembling from June through August to run the theatre’s summer programs. Ongoing care for some of the older company members is now an important task, and plans surrounding the inevitable matter of succession are an ongoing concern. In 2021, after months of failing health, Elka Schumann died of a stroke on August 1, at a moment when her husband and children were all present, and the Bread and Puppet farm was full of friends and puppeteers engaged in summer Circus activities. A three-day wake followed, organized by Elka’s family and Bread and Puppet community members, including a procession to and a green burial in the theatre’s Pine Forest memorial village.Bread and Puppet’s staffing infrastructure continues to grow. The Bread and Puppet Press, which Elka Schumann had created and nurtured, is now the biggest money-earning arm of the theatre, supporting Bread and Puppet Theater with in-person and online sales of posters, banners, and books, augmenting less lucrative box-office proceeds. As Peter Schumann has stepped back from many aspects of organizing Bread and Puppet activities, a larger and invigorated Board of Directors has stepped up to assist. The theatre recently hired an operations manager and plans to hire an archivist.Some of the current concerns of new company members reflect contemporary issues in leftist activist circles about representation, harm, and agency. Should artists create and perform puppets and masks representing races, genders, and ethnicities other than their own? Should popular tunes performed for years in Bread and Puppet Circuses be re-examined for evidence of blackface minstrelsy roots and retired from the repertoire? Should the theatre’s eternal bad-guy villain, Uncle Fatso, who was given his name in the mid-sixties by African American kids in a Bronx puppet workshop, be renamed to avoid a disparaging slur on physical attributes? Should the theatre’s goals include avoiding any possible discomfort for any audience member? Can the theatre’s Glover, Vermont base be considered a “safe space”? Discussions on these subjects within the multi-generational Bread and Puppet community are ongoing.The resilience and capacity of the current Bread and Puppet company is reflected in their Covid experience. On tour in the Washington, D.C. area when Covid emerged in early 2020, the company—led by Josh Krugman, and including Uriel Najera, Amelia Castillo, Rainjana Haynes, and Torri Lynn Ashford—abandoned their touring plans and returned to Vermont, where they lived as a “pod” for the next year. They invented and performed an outdoor winter show, played in driveways for their neighbors, and worked on new productions. To prepare for the coming summer, and with the advice of Clare Dolan (whose alternative job to puppeteering is working as an intensive care unit nurse in a nearby hospital), the company crafted extensive Covid protocols for their company, volunteer performers, and audiences for the outdoor summer Circuses and Pageants. Carefully observing Vermont public health guidelines, the company created distanced seating in its outdoor amphitheatre, provided usher-led parking and pathway guidance for audience members, and even invented a means of passing out bread to audiences after Circus performances using baking peels with extra-long handles.Maintaining a theatre company is a delicate operation: a constant collaborative act that balances a multiple inspirations, talents, types of art-making, organizational skills, communication, and personal lives being worked out (in Bread and Puppet’s case) in the close quarters of collective living. Peter Schumann has managed to attract scores of talented collaborators over the years, who have helped him realize his visions of activist puppet theatre and community performance, and, in the process, developed together with him the theatre’s form and content. The collaborators have come and gone—many (like me and other senior puppeteers) staying on to assist from time to time, fascinated by the possibilities the theatre creates. Schumann keeps painting and sculpting, and his desire to make theater with others is passionate. He has continued to find means of encouraging others to collaborate with him, offering them opportunities to create characters, build puppets, write texts, design stages, invent music, choreograph, print, cook, garden, administrate, and above all participate with each other and with fascinated audiences in the creation of happenings in a variety of different spaces and contexts that inspire thought and perhaps action.