On Sunday (9/5) I went to Fort Allen Park on the East End of Portland to watch "Our Domestic Resurrection Circus," a performance by Bread and Puppet, a non-profit theater company/traveling circus/puppeteers founded by Peter Schumann and currently based out of Vermont, where the company also hosts a summer apprenticeship program. That's how I knew about Bread and Puppet, because Emilia had done their program and loved it, but I knew nothing about the content of the show.
Between Balloonacy and this, I am remembering how inclined I am to enjoy a thing if it is performed live in front of me, particularly if the thing is music or theater. To that end, I very enjoyed ODRC, which had both. The duties of the small troupe were split between either acting/puppeteering or playing in the New Orleans-street-band-style band soundtracking the proceedings.
When the work is so visible and the human element so present, it's hard not to give every benefit of every doubt. Doing/seeing a performance live makes it so easily wonderful.
The hour-and-a-half show played as a series of short, surreal scenes, each delivering a counter-cultural statement. The mood and method altered radically from scene to scene, creating a ongoing tonal whiplash that was equal parts admirable and puzzling. For example, here was a notable sequence:
• A brief history of the U.S.'s political meddling in Haiti over the last 20 years, featuring an appropriately hideous, towering Uncle Sam caricature.
• A hilarious dance by a character named "Mr. Paper Mâché."
After that it was a scene regarding Israel's occupation of Palestine; you get the idea. Sometimes the messaging was clunky, actors silently holding up poster boards with facts and statistics written on them while masked individuals, at first standing, slumped to the ground as each new fact was unveiled. At least 30% of the audience wasn't at reading age yet, and I worried that the valuable moral of these sections wasn't registering with this otherwise impressionable demographic.
The undecorated distribution of information certainly has value, but it doesn't always make for great theater. My favorite scenes (and there were more that I liked than not) found a healthy balance of humor, messaging, and artistry, like the first one, where a clown makes a telephone call to register for unemployment and, while put on interminable hold, has dreams of dancing shrimp.
I would recommend Our Domestic Resurrection Circus to anyone who has a chance to catch it. Watching the show, I never had a clue as to what would happen next. Given that I generally know what will happen second-to-second for 99% of my life, I saw this as a great gift.
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