Bread & Puppet Theatre
Will Rogers Park, Oklahoma City
October 18, 2025
After the No Kings rally in Tulsa a couple of weekends ago, I headed west to see another kind of festive protest: a performance by Bread & Puppet Theatre in Oklahoma City’s Will Rogers Park. Founded in New York City, Bread & Puppet is a folk theatre troupe that’s been doing what they call “politically radical puppet theater” since the mid-’60s. For this national tour, their set was minimal: the only scenery was a large cloth screen emblazoned with the name of the show (“Our Domestic Resurrection Revolution In Progress Circus”) and a hand-painted cartoon face. Performers wandered around barefoot getting ready.
Bread & Puppet doesn’t use amplification for their shows—they often perform outdoors, both on tour and at their home base, a commune-type farm in Glover, Vermont—and one cast member kept urging us to scoot forward so we could hear better. Families puttered around and spread out blankets. The weather was perfect: not quite sweater weather, but close.
Before the show, a handful of musicians came out, one on stilts, and the band played music my grandmother would have known: Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue, and Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey? A tiny pigtailed kid from the audience clambered onstage and danced to the music, wearing a t-shirt that said “I’m in my toddler era.” She was a hit with the audience, and only left the stage under duress when her dad hauled her off.
Bread & Puppet turned out to be hiding a maximal show behind that minimal set. There were about 15 cast members, all of whom played multiple instruments, sang harmony, acted, walked on stilts, quick-changed costumes, and never missed a beat. Despite their scrappy appearance and setup, they were complete professionals, brimming with talent, moving through their variety show-type skits in perfect sync.
They alternated between making me giggle at their version of the creation story (“Get out of my garden, you hippies,” yelled a God-figure looming large at the back of the amphitheater steps), then mourn for the plight of those in Gaza, then belly-laugh at the tyrant they shit-kicked with a giant boot. They did a funny song about knowing your rights if ICE picks on you (“don’t say anything, don’t sign anything, ask for a lawyer”), and I bet a lot of the audience will remember those steps better after hearing that song than if they’d read them online. There were skits about workers’ rights and songs about unions. There was a game show where contestants competed to become citizens; they used their emergency phone calls to call tigers, who ate the game show host and his assistants. I’ve never loved tigers so much.
It felt so good, sitting there in the balmy late afternoon, hitting the highs and lows with a bunch of raggedy puppeteers and tie-dyed audience members, saying out loud under a bright blue sky and gentle autumn breeze that we love people and want the best for them, that we want to live in a peaceful country where we look out for each other and aren’t afraid of the government.
After the show, the cast served us still-warm bread smeared with aioli. No idea how they managed warm bread while doing a show, but like I said, they’re pros at this.
photos by Alicia Chesser
It was a divine mix of farce, satire, play, childhood, love, and ferocity, presented in a fever dream sequence. On the drive home, I realized why it made so much sense to me: it reminded me of childhood. Putting on shows for your parents, dressing up with your cousins or siblings and making the living room into a stage, having the biggest cousin play the monster wrapped in a sheet and vanquishing him with wooden swords and green food-colored water—in short, the whole theater of working out fears through play-acting—that’s what Bread and Puppet felt like.
With a childlike combination of innocence and gravity, they didn’t take themselves too seriously, but at the same time, they took the subject matter very seriously. Play like this can be a unifying force that gets us ready to talk about next steps—strikes and boycotts and tightening community bonds.
There’s always been power in satire. This was a heartening chance to watch people be silly and serious; to hear foolish, heartless, bullying tyrants ridiculed and exposed as clowns; and to experience human dignity and joy in the face of cruelty. As fall finally arrived in Oklahoma, Bread & Puppet brought some new hope, too.
