Fort Allen Park
49 Eastern Promenade, Portland, ME 04101
USA
The circus is coming! The circus is coming! The Bread & Puppet Theater returns to Portland, Maine with its iconic circus on Saturday, September 7, 2024 at 5pm.
Mayo Street Arts, Maine’s de facto puppet hub and a longtime collaborator with Bread & Puppet Theater, will present the company at Fort Allen Park for “The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus,” a brand new show in the tradition of the iconic Bread & Puppet Circuses that began at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont in 1970.
The show draws on traditional circus tropes and familiar Bread and Puppet iconography to highlight urgent issues of the day. Stilt dancers, paper maché beasts of all sizes and a riotous brass band make a raucous, colorful spectacle of protest and celebration. 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.
Bread & Puppet’s Director, Peter Schumann, describes the show as featuring, “tigers teaching the congress of cowards how to jump over billionaires and acquire the courage to not pay for the atrocities of the latest genocide; the proverbial sheep of the system refusing to be sheep and committing revolution against the system; and the blue horses of the peace and harmony terrorists of the Northeast Kingdom breaking through the wall of threatening clouds that hide the truth from the population and then galloping over the ruins of the truth industry.”
Now in its 61st year, Bread & Puppet will tour the show throughout the East Coast and Midwestern US. In all, Bread & Puppet will play the circus 37 times across 16 states. Portland’s own Mayo Street Arts is the only venue that regularly presents the puppet troupe more than once per year, hosting both Bread & Puppet’s fall circus and their spring tour.
Mayo Street Arts invites audiences of all ages to attend the outdoor performance of Bread & Puppet Theater’s “The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus” at Fort Allen Park in Portland at 5pm on September 7, 2024. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $10-$25.
Mayo Street Arts does not turn anyone away from its events for lack of funds; please contact the organization at 207-879-4629 or info@mayostreetarts.org for information on their pay-what-you-can admission policy. For more information and tickets, visit www.mayostreetarts.org.