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.