Bread & Puppet Theater: The Persians

Reduced by time to a tidy story, the fateful battle in the Bread and Puppet Theater adaptation of The Persians is preternaturally swift. At first entrance, the heads of the Persian warriors are caricatures, not so much “played” with any truthful realism as paraded. Their massive, bulbous faces, on the ends of poles wielded by company members dressed in red, swagger about the stage. Huge, hideous and inhuman, the Persians become easy targets when the Grecian forces—represented by a team of white horses painted on recycled bits of cardboard with a stark black background—pour in from upstage to trample them into the dust. With martial accuracy, all at once, the horses turn to expose the spectral skeletons on their reverse side—under an exacting gaze, even the so-called heroes are horrific.

I watched the production as part of the 2022 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. That night, the Epiphany Center for the Arts in West Town was abuzz—filled by a festive crowd happy to be in each other’s company again after so much isolation. We clapped along to the pre-show brass band and broke bread together in a former church. The activities surrounding the show successfully offered up the blend of ritual solemnity and “joyful noise” that I expected from Bread and Puppet. While the pre-show atmosphere was exceedingly cheerful, once confronted with the production’s multivalent images of loss, I could not help thinking about how Covid had made casualties the price of normalcy. Yet, as I write this some months later, I recall the same stage pictures and now think of Ukraine.  

Puppets allow the Bread and Puppet version of The Persians to not only have meaning (as if it could be fixed with certainty) but to continually make meaning. Writing about a “vintage” Bread and Puppet creation, Mr. Budhoo’s Letter of Resignation from the IMF, in his book American Puppet Modernism, company member and puppetry scholar John Bell made an observation in a section titled “The Complexity of Simple Images” that resonated with my experience of The Persians. He noted that we might be deceived into thinking that because Bread and Puppet productions have humble origins, they will be correspondingly easy to interpret (Bell, 2008: 205-207). In reality, the shows are “hardly simple to fathom, basically because the meanings of the show[s] are abstract, often ambiguous, told in the multivalent language of images that allow for, and in fact depend upon, individual interpretation by each audience member” (Bell, 2008: 205). The simplicity of the performing objects onstage allows the images to resonate—in the mind of each audience member—with countless constantly changing current events.

After their defeat in battle at the hands of the Greeks, we never again see the initial distorted image of the Persians, presented as if we were looking outwards through Grecian eyes. Rather, we see human faces, poetic puppet memorials, and mourners faithfully pouring out libations for the dead. In one scene, we see a “sea of bodies” painted blue like water and rocked on an unseen tide. In another, fragile paper forms flutter like gray birds’ wings. Hovering over them are two moon-faced, god-like figures, who embrace and protect. The result is an extended meditation on loss, insistent on humanizing the enemy Other. 

In a company known for using volunteer performers and taking inspiration from puppets, as well as people, throughout the creative process, it makes sense to shift focus away from the skill of the puppeteer and toward the performing object itself as the “creator” of both performative moments and their many meanings. The forms of the puppets—including both painted and sculptural elements—create their own dramaturgy, grounding meaning in the very way they are made. Like Bell, I found that these performing objects, despite their seeming simplicity, “rewarded my contemplation” (Bell, 2008: 206).

Aeschylus’ The Persians was originally presented as part of the annual Athenian drama competition, including corresponding communal financial support, so it would have made sense to commemorate the Greek victory over the supposedly superior Persian army.