How do you speak the unspeakable? How then do you listen?

Last night, completely on the spur of the moment, we went to Bread and Puppets Theater‘s production of Fire at the Hooker Dunham Theater.

Bread and Puppets is a 50+ year old collective that seems to take as its goal to more perfectly embody the phrase “a bunch of hippies.” Their art, both the theatrical and the silk-screened cards and flyers they sell after the show, is an act of protest, and offers very little in the way of “entertainment” to soften the message.

Since we couldn’t tell much about the show from the flyer outside, we asked. The girl selling tickets told us it was about the self-immolation of several Americans during the Vietnam War era. Yikes.

The event unfurled in two parts. First, in the lobby, we watched a canastoria (I got that word off the website) called Fire, that consisted of some reciting and some musical notes and some looking at a series of images printed on a canvas sheet. The text concerned the symbolic purposes of fire in our lives: we light fires for warming, cooking, and in times of desperation.

The second and longer part was also called Fire. It was a series of tableaux depicting days in the life of a Vietnamese village. The village is incinerated by fire bombs, and finally a figure sets itself on fire. All this was acted out in wordless but not completely silent slow motion by robed and masked people and life-size puppets dressed all alike.

Trying to more precisely describe the show in words without judging is going to be hard. It was moving, no question. And it made me think a lot more than all the George Clooney movies I’ve seen put together. I didn’t know as much about the history of self-immolation as I do now, nor about the life and death of Thich Quang Duc, whose protest changed the course of the Vietnam War, at least a little. The Arab Spring had its immolator as well in Mohammed Bouazizi.

But Fire was also ridiculous, in the way that creative works become ridiculous for being too refined, too artsy. There was an element of disappointment and emptiness i felt, as if I’d been served a single raw lima bean on a giant plate. The tuneless plucking and arrhythmic clacking in the interstices seemed calculated to be unapproachable. I will continue to enjoy George Clooney movies, because I understand how things work in them. I couldn’t really understand this show.

In fact, I suppose all my discomfort is part of the point, maybe most of the point. This show’s beauty stands on its own, and must stand differently in the eye of each beholder, since there was almost nothing to relate it to: no words or music, no faces or bodies visible, just the rawest and most basic evocations of life lived and taken away.