Bread & Puppet’s imagery packs political punch

When you hear “puppets,’’ you may think of Kermit, Miss Piggy, Bert and Ernie, or Shari Lewis’s Lamb Chop. This isn’t remotely like that. Bread & Puppet’s creations resemble the ancient stone heads on Easter Island, somehow mobilized to enact allegorical rituals. The imposing, blurred mystery of these giant, papier-mâché visages gave “Tear Open the Door of Heaven’’ an air of timelessness, as if it spoke not just with the contemporary voice of opposition but also the voice of antiquity.

Founder and artistic director Peter Schumann once described his troupe’s work as “the art you make in response to circumstances and politics.’’ Since war and environmental destruction are, alas, perennial circumstances on this planet of ours, Schumann and his puppeteers skewered those human follies with particular zest.

As for the art they make in response, it is simultaneously imaginative and easy (sometimes too easy) to grasp, a cleverly nuanced display of visual artistry one moment and a very blunt instrument the next. Bread & Puppet works in broad strokes, making Big Statements from an unrepentantly counterculture perspective, trying to harness the primal power of a venerable medium to deliver a political message.

The narration of the sketches in “Tear Open’’ sometimes has a deadpan, faux-naif effectiveness (“Brutality has to be organized in statistically comprehensible amounts’’) but too often it relies on a lapel-grabbing obviousness, when it’s not sounding like a bad Allen Ginsberg imitation (“Religion is physical therapy for the damaged soul, and whose soul is not damaged by history?’’ a narrator intones at one point).

It is the imagery created by Bread & Puppet, not the words, that has a way of penetrating to the essence of its themes with the immediacy of spontaneous street theater and the staying power of art.