How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Bread and Puppet Theater's "Divine Reality Comedy" needs a little more comedy and a little less reality. The production follows the path of Dante through the Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. Bread and Puppet put their own contemporary spin on this journey by reinventing each stop in the image of today's social and technological climate, hence "The Divine Reality Comedy."
Before the bashing begins, it's necessary to emphasize just how visually stunning the show is. The ensemble cast manipulates enormous painted cardboard cut-outs, like 20 white horses and huge multicolored faces. Large masks and tall ornate figures also become a beautiful visual theme, and the interaction between the actors and these gigantic puppets is especially striking.
The play begins before the audience even enters the theater. As audience members wait outside the playhouse, the Bread and Puppet troupe perform "It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing)" as a brass band on the sidewalk. The stage play begins with the cast performing a waltz with cardboard skeletons, to the music of an accordion and a snare drum.
The role of Dante is played by a tattered and homeless-looking Santa Claus who wears a clown nose and speaks only in fart sounds. Luckily another member of the cast does Santa's real talking for him.
Once in Paradise, the troupe represents America's material fixation by creating a Pied Piper. This figure leads the actors to shopping land, where they then squabble over the contents of Santa's sack. The journey through Paradise continues to illuminate more ills of American society, the funniest being the "Paradise Security System." In this scene, the actors put on huge camera masks and scrutinize the audience and each other.
The switch into Purgatory takes the play on a downhill slope. The trip through Purgatory has only one stop, called "The Shadows of Indefinite Detention." The actors tell stories as they show painted pictures of those "indefinitely detained" in Guantanamo Bay. The effect is quite moving but at times overblown. This Guantanamo theme continues into Inferno, where the actors read accounts of trials and interrogations held at Guantanamo, acting them out with clay figures on a saw table and using a hammer as a gavel.
After a welcome blackout, a few cast members reemerge as Grim Reapers and proceed to hang a papier-mache visage of a detainee. This blunt departure into Guantanamo Bay lacks all subtlety, and though it gets its point across, it forces an abrupt change in the play's mood.
If you are ready to take action against the injustices the government is perpetrating in Guantanamo Bay, then by all means see "The Divine Reality Comedy." But if you still want the beautiful visual effects and lighter subject matter, try the Bread and Puppet Circus on Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. instead.
Zoe Young is a staff writer. E-mail her at theater@nyunews.com.
Bread and Puppet Theater: "The Divine Reality Comedy" Theater for the New City 155 First Avenue Runs through Dec. 16
