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.