Bread And Puppet Theater Analysis

Speak Up! Speak Out! Bread and Puppet Theater presents puppets ranging in height up to 20 feet, masks, paintings, and other works from Peter Schumann’s Bread & Puppet Theater, which has left an indelible stamp on the world of theater and the American cultural landscape over the past half century. This exhibition focuses on Bread & Puppet’s activist responses to fundamental political and social issues that have defined American culture over the past 50 years, including the war in Vietnam; Central American turmoil and Liberation Theology; the politics of black liberation as represented by the Attica prison uprising and the M.O.V.E. family in Philadelphia; opposition to nuclear weapons and nuclear power; and the war in Iraq. I enjoyed the artwork

I have never heard of it or did research of it. The only other art exhibit I went to was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and I liked the art pieces there but I was not ecstatic about everything there. I found it a bit boring after walking around for about twenty minutes. I went to the Benton with my family during family weekend. While, we were at the Benton we enjoyed the puppets, even though my eleven-year-old brother found some of them a bit scary. I thought it was an innovative and cool way to show us the horrors of the world. It wasn’t too graphic because the artwork looked absolutely fake even though it was not meant to look realistically like a human. The piece that intrigued me the most was called fire. It showed ten people in black robes, and behind the people was a background of what looked to be a village burning down. This piece was ultimately about the U.S. pillaging and burning an innocent Vietnamese village, such as the My Lai Massacre, in the Vietnam War and how much people suffered during it because of our ancestors’ actions. The My Lai Massacre was a mass killing of three hundred forty-seven and five hundred four unarmed civilians in South Vietnam. The picture was compelling and portrayed the pain the Vietnamese people went through by the expressions on their faces. It made me feel upset about the actions that the United States took in Vietnam. It seemed to be an uncalled for war that got many people