Bread and Puppet Theater coming to UMF

FARMINGTON — The world-renowned Bread and Puppet Theater will form “Faust 3” at 7 p.m. Sunday, April 30, at the Emery Community Arts Center at the University of Maine at Farmington.

The performance is sponsored by the center, UMF Arts Division and Temple Stream Theater.

One of the longest-running, nonprofit, self-supporting theater companies in the U.S., the Bread and Puppet Theater uses performance to protest the most urgent political issues of our time.

The performance will begin with a musical greeting by the Bread and Puppet String Band and conclude with serving the company’s famous, free sourdough rye bread and aioli.

As thematically and formally diverse as Goethe’s “Faust 1 and 2,” Bread and Puppet’s Faust 3 draws the audience through a dreamlike succession of scenes from refugee migration, to the pervasiveness of guns, the daily experience of factory workers, the rebellion of prisoners and the adoration of the sun.

The company is directed by Peter Schumann who founded the theater company in 1963 on New York City’s Lower East Side. In 1974 it moved to a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where a 140-year old hay barn was transformed into a museum for veteran puppets.

Admission is $15 for adults, $7 for students and seniors. Bread and Puppet’s books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press will be for sale at the performance.

Bread & Puppet Performs Faust 3