Bread & Puppet Theater present “The Christmas Story”
- Wednesday, December 17 @ 7pm
- First United Presbyterian Church, 1917 5th Avenue, Troy, NY 12180
- Tickets (available online here): $20, no one turned away for lack of funds
Join Bread & Puppet for an urgently-needed retelling of the first Christmas. In the tradition of the medieval mystery plays, this show combines reverence and impudence to speak to this exact moment. Mary and Joseph sleep with the cows because they don’t have $26.50 for a room at the Sandy Arms motel. King Herod laments the balance-of-payment deficit. The bubble-headed bourgeoisie of Jerusalem dismiss the star in the east as a publicity stunt. See this ancient story remade for today’s horrors and today’s badly needed cry for an end to war.
Originally created in 1962, Bread & Puppet’s The Christmas Story was performed every year at Christmastime until the mid 1980’s. The puppeteers have revived the show with the help of archival video and interviews with the original performers. In 1967 The New York Times said of the piece: “The scene is at once the holy land and super America; the time then, and now… The approach may seem campy or sacrilegious. It is neither. The play says that Jesus’s world was, in essence, ours; that both need saving.”
