What do we do and where do we go when we’re finished waiting? What transformations might be possible in our lives and in our politics if we stopped waiting for them to change, or for others to change first?

Bread & Puppet returns to Mayo Street Arts with Finished Waiting, a new show created this winter by B&P director, Peter Schumann and the storied Vermont troupe of puppeteers, carpenters, bus drivers, musicians, dancers, agitators, and bread-bakers – many of whom do all of the above in the process of inventing Bread & Puppet’s aesthetically iconic and politically plainspoken shows and bringing them to audiences far and wide.

Finished Waiting is a show for this moment of political, social, ecological, and epidemiological rupture and uncertainty, a moment in which many feel the seduction of a stance of waiting: waiting for the pandemic to be over, for better leaders to be elected, for actions to be taken by the powerful to respond to ecological catastrophe, for families to be reunited or seemingly eternal wars to end.

In Finished Waiting, Bread & Puppet invites audiences throughout the Northeast to harken to practices of uprising and take heart from them – as we all participate in the satisfaction of another, equally fundamental kind of waiting: the waiting for spring’s arrival after a long winter. With this show, Bread & Puppet seems to call on us to recognize how nature itself shows us what is possible – what can arise – when we abandon waiting and embrace transformation.

According to Schumann, the show will star “the clock and its customers, skies, cities, mountains, forward dancers, backward dancers, a stop officer, and an eye divinity who teaches seeing to non-suspecting eyes.”

After the performance, Bread & Puppet will serve its free sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread & Puppet’s “Cheap Art” – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets, and banners from the Bread & Puppet Press – will be for sale.