Archived Edition: December 07, 2005 | Back to Current	Sep 03, 2010

‘Animal Farm’ puppet musical to debut at MASS MoCA
Ilya Khodosh - Staff Writer

A few days after President Bush used the word “victory” 15 times in his speech at the Naval Academy and a week after Russia patched things up with Iran through a business deal on antiaircraft missiles, a musical production of Animal Farm is opening at MASS MoCA to show that puppetry and timely political satire make an irresistible combination.

George Orwell’s parable about a farm full of sheep, horses, and pigs so vividly illustrates the gamut of government manipulation and corruption that since its publication in 1945, it has been tied to British imperialism, Soviet communism and Italian fascism. It continues to be relevant today, a worthy tale of caution for any situation in which citizens surrender their civil liberties and live in a culture of fear.

In Animal Farm, a band of livestock lead lives of quiet desperation until prizewinning boar Old Major urges them to unite in the struggle for a worker’s utopia in which all animals are created equal. Under the stirring anthem, “Beasts of England,” the idealistic animals chase away despotic Farmer Jones and set up a system of self-government. When the pigs take it upon themselves to steer the farm toward Old Major’s vision, however, the animals soon find the principles of Animalism betrayed, the fruits of their labors exploited and their comrades mysteriously disappearing.

Animal Farm is a story so poignant and relevant that it was only a matter of time before someone made a musical out of it. In 1984, that someone became Peter Hall of England’s Royal National Theatre, who collaborated with composer Richard Peaslee and lyricist Adrian Mitchell to piece the work together. Hall carefully kept intact much of the novel’s narration.

Two years ago, the piece was re-imagined by Synapse Productions to feature a colorful range of full-body puppets that included shadow, stick-and-rod, hand, marionette and Japanese bunraku. The puppets are not as grandiose as those in “Tall Horse,” but what they lack in pomp they gain in wit, accessibility and charm.

“Animals and puppets are an easy match,” director David Travis wrote in the program notes from the original New York production. “Both are without irony or guile. Fundamentally simple beings, they are easily duped. We may scoff at their naïveté, but are we so different in the end?”

The production opened to critical acclaim off-Broadway in February 2004. “America was going to war for spurious reasons, the recent elections are suspect at best, and the cronyism, sanctimony and hypocrisy of the current administration is shocking,” Travis said. “Animal Farm dissects more of the process by which the elite acquire and secure their power.”

But the production does not assign blame to the government alone. “The animals on Animal Farm are just stupid – in the literal sense of the word…It is a truly terrifying condemnation of the people’s complicity in their own oppression.”

Now that the production is on tour, Travis hopes that audiences across the country will respond similarly. “New York audiences have tended to immediately grasp the contemporary parallels, and I hope that that’s not just a Northeast, liberal bias,” he mused. He hopes that the musical is similarly well-received in the red states they intend to visit of the next few months. Travis feels that in these locales, “the production won’t be preaching to the converted quite so much,” and hopes to open new eyes to the alarming political trends in our current government.

The Synapse Production, Animal Farm: a musical (with puppets), makes the second stop of its tour in the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA. The performance is on Friday at 8 p.m., and student tickets are $12.