Sixty years ago, a troupe of performers toting giant papier-mâché puppets and art painted on bed sheets made its first appearance in a protest march in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This was the Bread and Puppet Theater, founded by Peter and Elka Schumann. In 1970, the Schumanns moved to Vermont, eventually purchasing a farm in Glover, which has been the home of Bread and Puppet ever since.

Peter Schumann told The Vermont Conversation that the large puppets are “so much more persuasive. It's so much easier to make it big, make it humongous. People flocked to us. They wanted not to carry somebody else's slogan, but to be in the puppet (performance).”

Over the course of its six decades, the oversized puppets and art of Bread and Puppet Theater have become the iconic image of protest around the world. It is one of the longest-running nonprofit, self-supporting theater companies in the United States. These days, Bread and Puppet performs in Glover on summer weekends, and tours the country during other times.

In August, I spent an afternoon with Peter Schumann talking about his life and work, and 60 years of Bread and Puppet. Schumann is now 89 years old, his long white hair tumbling out from beneath his trademark hat. We sat in his house, a small wooden structure crammed with books and art. At the center of the house is a cast iron oven where he bakes bread.

Peter has recently experienced some major life challenges. In 2021, Elka, his beloved wife of 63 years and the mother of his five children, died at the age of 85. This spring, Peter suffered two strokes. He desperately wanted to leave the hospital and return home so he persuaded his doctors “by teaching myself to speak as clearly as possible and by repeating myself to have answers” to their questions.

Schumann said that life after Elka has been difficult. “I’m trying to find a way out of the despair,” he said.

One consolation for Schumann is to resume his life of art, protest and performance. He continues to perform with Bread and Puppet each weekend.

Peter Schumann was born in 1934 in Silesia, a region that was then occupied by Nazi Germany but is now mostly in Poland. Having seen fascism as a boy, he fears for the future of the U.S. He decried “this primitive herd of strong men methodologies of how to solve problems.”

What is the future of Bread and Puppet?

“This I don’t know,” said Schumann. “There have to be so many people who want to do it (but) it doesn't mean it's the same. It can't be, it won't be. The only thing that can be transported in a reasonable way is the methodology. What do you do? How do you make art? What do you make it for?”

Schumann has made one concession to his advanced age: he has given up walking on stilts. But he added with a mischievous chuckle, “Come this weekend. I will do something like that. But don’t tell anybody.”

Two days later, I returned to see one of the last summer performances of Bread and Puppet. Near the end of the show, Schumann, dressed in the troupe’s trademark white outfit, climbed 15 feet up a ladder that was held vertical by four puppeteers pulling ropes. He stood atop the ladder, seemingly defying gravity, blowing his horn and directing the performers below as they moved dreamily around a meadow.

One of the people who held the ladder told me afterward that the puppeteers pleaded with Schumann to remain on the ground. He dismissed their concerns.

As he approaches his 90th year, Schumann isn’t going to change his artistic vision to make people comfortable.