Marc Estrin
Nonfiction
My fifty years working with Peter Schumann and his Bread & Puppet Theater has been the longest, deepest, and most provocative “institutional” attachment of my life. I use the word “institution” because Bread & Puppet is the only theater, much less political theater, that has been around continuously since the sixties, and thus has institutional status for longevity alone. I use quotes around “institution” because it is the most un- and anti-institutional institution that can be imagined, astonishingly beyond the norms of theater and the business of theater.
The text in this book consists of anecdotes and reflections on more than three decades of experiences with Peter (that’s Peter in the photo) and many other artistically brilliant, politically committed puppeteers from all over the world. The texts deal with eight major archetypes central to the work: Death, Fiend, Beast, Human, World, Gift, Bread, and Hope. It recently won a ForeWord Book-of-the-Year award as the best theater book of 2004.
Back in the 60s, some weird instinct sent me digging paper out of garbage cans, stripping flyers from telephone poles, and pocketing all sorts of leaflets at demonstrations. It was more exuberance about what was going on than a historian’s amassing of sources. Into that collection I interlarded what my own political theater group was up to in the belly of the beast in Washington. The line between theater and life was very thin. This, my first published work, will give you some sense of that.
Vermont recently passed its first death sentence in fifty years after the intervention of John Ashcroft in the murder trial of Donald Fell. The case was traumatic in many ways, and as a result of the trial, it is now possible that capital punishment will be reinstated in Vermont. I published this piece in Counterpunch shortly after the verdict, a consideration of the victims‘ rights movement in propagating the death penalty, and of the culture which nourishes it. The original article can be found at Counterpunch. It is reprinted, with further commentary, at in the Monthly Review.
The first important book to catalogue the contradictions between the official story of 9/11, and the facts — visual and analytical — was David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11. Strangeness and impossibilities stare anyone in the face at the first serious glance at what happened. The implication of the questions Griffin raises (gently, without coming to conclusions) are profound, even world-shaking. I felt the need to draw public attention to both the book and the problems it raises. This review was published on Counterpunch in 2004, shortly after the book appeared. The original article can be found at Counterpunch.
THE INSECT DIALOGUES
In 2016, Marc Estrin decided to publish Kafka’s Roach, the unedited version of the manuscript that a dozen years earlier Fred Ramey had acquired, edited, and published under the title Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa. Estrin’s decision raises questions about the editor’s role in the life of a book, the trajectory of one author’s career, and whether a published novel is a stable thing anymore. All of that is worth a wide discussion, and so Ramey asked his erstwhile author to engage in a colloquy. THE INSECT DIALOGUES is the record of the email conversation that ensued. It may be purchased from its publisher, Leaping Man.
NOTES OF DEVASTATION
A Compilation
of the John, Matthew and Luke Passion Texts
Set to Music by Heinrich Schütz
in the Wake of the Thirty Years War
For a capella chorus, SATB
Translated from the German into singing syllabification
by Marc Estrin
