Moral and social allegories formed the basis of Shotgun Players’
2009 season, which began with David Hare’s Skylight (a British
drama about class politics) and continued with Mark Jackson’s
Faust (a tale of desire and exploitation). Now the company has
chosen an even more challenging parable, George Orwell’s 1945 novel
Animal Farm, which satirizes Stalin’s regime in the former
Soviet Union. It’s a classic great-booksy text about greed, corruption,
and totalitarianism that belonged to a very specific time and place.
(Anti-Stalinist fables just don’t hit as hard as they used to.) To make
the material not seem dated, Shotgun incorporated hip-hop and spoken
word. Director (i.e., “remixer”) Jon Tracy stripped the text to its raw
components, then spliced the different plot points together. The script
is more a series of samples than a faithful rendering of the source
material. Conceptually, it’s brilliant. As theater, it’s a little
abstruse.
Tracy’s Animal Farm is an ensemble piece, narrated by the
raven Moses (Brent Rose), who stands by and comments on the action. The
other characters are divided by species: Pigs sit at the top of the
food chain and lord over the other animals. Below them are the equines,
a mix of loyal workers, petty bourgeoisie, and intellectual classes.
Beneath them are the lumpen proletariat, whose members include dogs,
sheep, and, at the very bottom, rats. All animals are anthropomorphic
in Orwell’s book; in Tracy’s version there’s almost nothing to
distinguish them as animals, but for a few fur collars and some
paw-mitts. To help clarify things, the cast members have animal names
inscribed on their bodies: “boar,” “sow,” “toro,” “bitch.”
Otherwise, they look like members of an anarchist collective trying
to stage another WTO protest. Their aesthetic borrows from punk,
hip-hop, and skateboard subcultures, combining studded bracelets,
fishnet stockings, and kneepads. Boss pig Old Major (Daniel Bruno)
coordinates the rebellion from a platform atop the stage, where he
bangs a drum set with a pair of mallets (as though to replicate the
sound of a hammer hitting steel). The other animals dance around the
stage like Rhythm Nation cadets, pretending to be members of a
Communist army. They beatbox. They boogaloo. They pop limbs and do
punctuated, staccato footwork that resembles Eighties-era break
dancing. They pilfer lines from Orwell’s book and loop them throughout
the play (e.g., the pigs’ original chant: “Four legs good, two legs
bad!”), rendering it into a kind of hip-hop musical.
Their task, at first, is to overthrow Mr. Jones, the negligent,
deadbeat farm owner who, according to Moses, “drinks his days away in
the taproom at Wellington” and forgets to feed his animals. The pigs
spearhead this rebellion, inciting the other animals with powerful
oration and working patiently to recruit even the most reluctant into
their fold. After clobbering Jones in the Battle of Cowshed, they’re
burdened with building a functional autocratic society.
Therein lies the rub. The pigs pay lip-service to a utopian ideal,
which really isn’t possible when you have three oversize egos jockeying
for position at the helm. Beneath the God-like character Old Major are
three tough power brokers. Napoleon, the malevolent Berkshire (played
with serial-killer ferocity by Chad Deverman) is the play’s consummate
anthrophile — by the end, he’s standing on two legs, having
usurped the position once occupied by Farmer Jones. In the play, as in
the book, he’s absolutely ruthless. He steals puppies from the farm dog
and trains them to be paramilitaries. He even sells a loyal draught
horse to the slaughterhouse. Napoleon’s chief rival, Snowball (Charisse
Loriaux), is modeled after Leon Trotsky. Snowball wins the other
animals’ loyalty by organizing everyone into committees, building a
windmill, and helping to produce a successful harvest. She is
eventually chased out of the farm by Napoleon’s canine security force.
Squealer, the last pig (Ruben Oriol Rivera), serves as Napoleon’s
lackey and chief propagandist. Wearing a gold chain and sunglasses, he
runs around on stage issuing commands through a microphone — a
thoroughly modern agitator.
Orwell’s Animal Farm demands quite a lot of its readers. On
the surface, it’s a morality tale that could apply to any situation of
political malfeasance. But to grasp it on a deeper level you have to
know something about Stalin’s regime, and understand that each
character has its own historical referent. Tracy’s Farm is even
harder to understand since it presumes its audience already has some
familiarity with the book. For the uninitiated, it’s still thoroughly
entertaining, with Elena Wright’s slick choreography and a stage set
that looks less like a farm than a post-industrial scrap-metal
funhouse. (Characters shimmy up poles and wiggle through trap doors.)
But it doesn’t engage you on the same level as a play with actual
humans and character development. The Farm works on an aesthetic
level, but its trendy format outpaces — and detracts from —
the script. Apparently, Orwell wasn’t that hip-hop.
