Some of the puppets featured from a past Bread & Puppet Theater performance.
Photo credit: Bread & Puppet Theater
EASTHAMPTON — The Bread & Puppet Theater will return to Easthampton on Friday, Sept. 12, at Park Hill Orchard with its iconic circus as part of its 2025 fall tour to cities and towns in the U.S.
This year, the company will present “Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution In Progress Circus,” a brand-new show in the tradition of the iconic Bread & Puppet Circuses that began in 1970, while in residence at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
As usual, the show will draw on traditional circus tropes and familiar Bread & Puppet iconography to highlight urgent issues of the day. Stilt dancers, paper mâché beasts of all sizes and a brass band make for a colorful spectacle of protest and celebration that the circus has become so well known for.
After the show, Bread & Puppet serves its famous sourdough rye bread with aioli, and “Cheap Art” — books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press — will be for sale.
“We have a similar structure every year, but the content — the meat of the show — changes every year. We perform on our farm all summer in Vermont and then we take it on the fall in the road,” explained Bread & Puppet Theater Press Liaison Paul Bedard.
The Easthampton show will be at Park Hill Orchard on 82 Park Hill Rd. There is a $20 suggested donation for admission, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
“The folks who run the farm have just been such great fans and allies of the company for a long time. It’s always a great turnout there and it’s a really good time,” added Bedard. “Entry to the show is by suggested donations and we really mean it. No one is turned away for lack of funds. All are welcome. If they’re able to donate into the hat, they will, and if they’re not, then it’s totally fine. Money should not prevent anyone from seeing the show.”
The Bread & Puppet Theater is an internationally celebrated company that champions a visually rich, street-theater brand of performance art filled with music, dance and slapstick. Believing that theater is a basic necessity like bread, the company frequently brings its work to the streets for those who may not otherwise go to the theater. Its shows are political and spectacular with puppets often on stilts, wearing huge masks with expressive faces, singing, dancing and playing music.
“Our show this year is ‘Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution In Progress Circus,’ and with the title, we are trying to provoke a domestic resurrection and slip into the spirit of the people of our community, so we all have the energy and the hope to fight for the world we all deserve. This is a revolution in progress. We are all on a journey trying to figure it out. The threats are at large, but our solidarity is larger,” said Bedard. “The circus has puppets big and small. Topics are serious and silly. Some things quite profound and other things quite pragmatic.”
Recognized throughout the world and now in its 62nd year, Bread & Puppet will tour some of its regular fall stops in the Northeast and Midwest as well as to cities in towns further west and south. In all, Bread & Puppet will play the circus 37 times in 34 places. The full tour schedule is available at BreadAndPuppet.org/tour.
Bread & Puppet remains constantly active performing at its farm in Glover, Vermont, and in local churches, schools and parades year-round. It regularly tours Europe, Canada and the United States, and has recently visited El Salvador, Haiti, Russia and Korea.
Founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side, the theater has been based in the North East Kingdom of Vermont since the early 1970s and is one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the world. To learn more, visit breadandpuppet.org.
“Puppets are so powerful. A puppet can get away with stuff that a person never could. At Bread & Puppet show[s] we regularly have people eaten by [paper mâché] tigers. All of our fires start from cardboard. We light things on fire. We have birds. We can cast any character living, dead, real, not real — anywhere on Earth can be conjured into a puppet show,” said Bedard. “They’re also just a lot of fun.”
