THE STORY

Animal Farm is perhaps Orwell's best-known work. A barnyard full of idealistic animals stages a rebellion to throw off their chains of slavery and human oppression, and is faced with the challenges of their hard-won liberty: Who is the leader? Who makes the decisions? The pigs, smartest of the animals, quickly accept the task… What follows is a fascinating lesson in civics and a compelling exploration of the problem of direct democracy.Join Napoleon, Snowball, Boxer and friends in their pursuit of a brave new world. Orwell's timeless tale of an idealistic menagerie's attempt to govern itself continues to astonish with its prescient condemnation of the arrogance of power, and reminds us that while all animals are created equal, some are more equal than others.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Synapse's production of Animal Farm brings to life the landmark musical stage adaptation created by England's Royal National Theatre (RNT) in 1984. Former RNT Artistic Directors Peter Hall and Adrian Mitchell collaborated on this adaptation, drawing inspiration from the simple motifs and primary colors of a children's book. The original creative team authorized Synapse Associate Director David Travis to re- imagine the work to include the creation of a cast of extraordinary full-body puppets.

ANIMAL FARM (the Puppet Musical) now features an eye-popping cast of characters designed and built by designers Emily DeCola and Eric Wright.

DeCola and Wright's ingenious designs employ an astonishing array of puppetry forms - from shadow, to stick-and-rod, to hand and bunraku - and enable the performers both to inhabit the animal characters as life-sized puppets and to act - speaking and singing the parts with nuance and clarity. With their help, ANIMAL FARM (the Puppet Musical) transports you to an incredible new world, where horses talk and pigs rule!

THE POWER OF THE PUPPET

While the themes of Animal Farm are serious, their form in the Synapse production is naïve and childlike. The cast of motley farm animals includes nesting hens, a herd of sheep and a pack of savage dogs all played by individual puppeteers; it also includes a diminutive stick-and-rod puppet rat that serves as narrator, as well as the seven-and-a-half foot high Boxer, the intrepid cart-horse. The Pigs, most human-like of all, are human-sized.

The joy of playing with a puppet is singular. To handle a puppet is to supercharge the imagination, and to inspire a basic, fundamental narrative urge. What will it say? What will it do? What will happen?



Puppets transcend our everyday world and remind us of the value of simple sincerity. Puppets aren't cynical, and they aren't ironic. Above all, they are honest, earnest, hard-working storytellers.

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