April 28th, 2018
Bread & Puppet Theater returns to Emery Arts Center at the University of Maine, Farmington Saturday, April 28th with a new play, The Basic Bye-bye Show, a manifesto on transformation inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts, birch branches lost during an ice storm, and the daily news.
In The Basic Bye-bye Show a series of quiet object fantasies unfolds in black, white, and grey inside a small fabric stage printed with elementary words — “Resist,” “Bread,” “Yes,” “Sky,” “Riot,” “Byebye.” Outside, an orchestra of nonsense instruments arises, spins, and recedes. A birch forest grows. Sculpted clouds produce hands, chairs, and rain. The storm passes. The episodes that make up The Basic Byebye Show develop in abstract counterpoint to periodic handkerchief-assisted “basic byebyes” to various brutal unnecessities of our current politics.
B&P director, Peter Schumann, says of the show: “The Basic Bye-bye Show is based on the fact that our culture is saying its basic bye-bye to Mother Earth by continuing the devastating effects of the global economy on our planet – which is why our show proclaims the Possibilitarian’s basic bye-bye to capitalism in order to welcome the 1000 alternatives to this rotten system.”