Bread and Puppet Theater: "Dirt Cheap Money Circus"
Location: St. Stephen Church, 1525 Newton St NW, Washington DC
Giant puppets, dancing zebras, city bred cows and sour stilters will transform St. Stephen’s Church into a big-top circus of political proportions when the world-famous Bread and Puppet Theater returns for three performances.
Thursday, April 15th, 7pm in the Auditorium: "The Dirt Cheap Money Cabaret"
Friday, April 16th, 7pm in the Church: "The Dirt Cheap Money Circus"
Saturday, April 17, 3pm in the Church: "The Dirt Cheap Money Circus"
Cost: $5-$15 suggested donation
The photos on this page are from Bread and Puppet's 2007 performance at St. Stephen's.
Bread and Puppet is one of the oldest activist street theater companies in the country
Both shows will include an opportunity to savor Schumann’s famous sourdough rye bread, laden with garlic aioli, and guests will enjoy the opportunity to purchase the company’s legendary “cheap art.”
The Bread & Puppet Theater is one of the oldest non-profit, self-supporting theater companies in the U.S. The theater has been enacting its radical utopian vision in cardboard and cloth for over forty years, from the spectacle of its larger-than-life puppets at Vietnam War protests in New York City, to the pageantry of its annual event, Our Domestic Resurrection Circus, in Glover, Vermont, which ran for over 25 years. The Domestic Resurrection regularly attracted audiences in the tens of thousands up to the late 1990’s.
Author and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu has praised “the genius of Peter Schumann, the prodigious puppet-God,” writing that “the Bread & Puppet Theater has been so long a part of America’s conscious struggle for our better selves, that it has become, paradoxically, a fixture of our subconscious.”
The company has won distinction at international theater festivals in Italy, Poland, France, Venezuela, and South Korea. Awards include the Erasmus Prize of Amsterdam, two off-Broadway Obie Awards, the Puppeteers of America President’s Award, a Guggenheim Award, the Vermont Governor’s Award, and numerous trophies from local small-town parades. In February of 2010, Bread and Puppet received the Best Performance or Spectacle in New England in 2009 New England Art Award.
