Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann, 91, paints at the troupe’s Glover farm. Photo courtesy Robbie Leppzer Shaftsbury filmmaker Robbie Leppzer was aiming to finish a documentary on Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater when a 2023 interview with troupe founder Peter Schumann spurred an abrupt change of course. “Israel and Gaza blew up,” the videographer recently recalled, “and Peter was really on fire about it.” Leppzer had planned to make a movie about how Schumann grew up in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, created Bread and Puppet in New York City in 1963 and moved the company specializing in political and social commentary to its current home in the Northeast Kingdom town of Glover in 1974. Then the Israel-Hamas war impelled Schumann, who is set to turn 92 this June, to paint signs and produce shows with renewed purpose. “Seeing that he’s doing some of his best work now, I had to keep filming,” Leppzer said. And so the planned retrospective will wait as the videographer unveils a precursor of sorts: “An Artist Responds to War,” a 45-minute feature set for debut in May that explores Schumann’s lifelong push for peace. Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann (front left) directs the troupe at its Glover farm. Photo courtesy Robbie Leppzer “Peter and Bread and Puppet have been icons of cultural resistance and creative resilience for decades,” Leppzer said amid the latest news from Iran and Lebanon. “This is really current, really urgent, really timely.” The film opens with Schumann recalling how he fled his central European home at age 10 as bombs fell during World War II. “Our parents allowed us to pack one little bag of our own choice,” he tells the camera. “I packed the puppets.” Schumann met his late wife, Elka, in Munich a decade later, married in 1959 and moved to the United States in the early 1960s. Soon he was making larger-than-life marionettes from papier-mâché and bed sheets and baking sourdough rye for everyone as a post-performance reward. Naming the troupe Bread and Puppet, he directed some of the earliest artistic demonstrations against the Vietnam War. “Being a war kid helps to fight war,” Schumann says in the film. “The horrors of that — that’s in my bones.” Shaftsbury filmmaker Robbie Leppzer records a Bread and Puppet performance at the troupe’s Glover farm. Photo courtesy Robbie Leppzer Bread and Puppet has staged peace and social justice pageants and circuses ever since. Rallying dozens of volunteers to join anywhere from 15 to 50 performers, Schumann has expanded his early focus on conflicts in southeast Asia to subsequent ones in Central America and the Middle East.  “Bread and Puppet makes a very different kind of theater than most of us are used to,” Maru Martinez, a member from Puerto Rico, says in the film. “It’s not afraid to tackle subjects that are often uncomfortable and upsetting,” adds Amelia Castillo, a colleague from Chile. Leppzer first visited the troupe’s Vermont farm in 1984 after an introduction from DeeDee Halleck, a Schumann friend and media activist. “It stuck in my mind that someday I wanted to make a film,” Leppzer said. The videographer returned a decade ago in hopes of gleaning a few minutes of footage for his 2016 documentary “Power Struggle,” a history of public opposition to the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon. Instead, he left with plans for the larger Bread and Puppet retrospective he’s aiming to finish as soon as next year. “An Artist Responds to War” is set to premiere Sunday, May 3, at Greensboro’s Highland Center for the Arts. It will debut online on May 12 on kinema.com before touring smaller venues yet to be scheduled. “I’ve always wanted my work to have meaning, to have value, to be able to move audiences,” Leppzer said. “To have a film that’s so relevant — I’m just thankful I can release this now.” Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to the wrong region of south Asia. Read the story on VTDigger here: At 91, Bread and Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann keeps fighting for peace. ...read more read less