Puppetry, as Schumann describes it, is the purest embodiment of “show, don’t tell” of the art forms we’ve studied this quarter, by quite a wide margin. As he writes, “the puppets themselves are mutes,” which means that their appearances and actions convey information while they themselves do not. The differential between, as he describes it, “legitimate theater” and “puppet theater,” however, means that puppetry is not taken seriously as an art form, but it allows puppetry to embrace a rule as a more activist form of expression, the role that it takes in Schumann’s writing. Similarly to the Verfremdungseffekt mentioned by Brecht, the distance from more commonly viewed art forms provided by poetry allows us to ingest its message more effectively.

The relative lack of spoken language in puppetry mentioned by Brecht and practiced by Bread and Puppet Theater allows for a much more form of communication than other theater: through motion and image more than through dialogue. For instance, in Bread and Puppet, around the 40 minute mark, although both characters (I forget their names, but they represent capitalism and communal living) are speaking, far more information is conveyed through their appearances and the non-speaking characters’ movements than through their dialogue, which is mostly throwaway jokes.