The circus is coming! The circus is coming!

The 58-year-old, Vermont-based Bread and Puppet Theater is presenting its iconic puppet circus at Fort Allen Park here in Portland, Maine.

The Domestic Resurrection Circus is a bright, raucous melee of short acts governed by a brass band, addressing the heart of the current moment with diverse puppetry styles and spanning many moods, from slapstick to the sublime.

In the show, director Peter Schumann says, “Insidious Homosapiens, representative of the Accumulated Evil of the Whole, will be arrested, taken to court, & condemned to a rehabilitation facility where he has to take classes in totally new behavior: how to be an earthling instead of an engineer of the humanity machine, how to cry like a bird & speak like a thunderstorm & then graduate with a doctorate degree to cure the species from its life-threatening diseases like war, capitalism, fossil fuel addiction, weapons obsession, etc.”

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.