Searing ‘Animal Farm’ dissects way we live now
Sarah Huckabee Sanders could take a few pointers from Squealer the pig, the propaganda minister serving an equally fact-averse demagogue in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
Late during Friday’s opening night performance of “Animal Farm” on the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s main stage, an outstanding Tiffany Rachelle Stewart’s alternately mesmerizing and menacing Squealer somehow got the audience to clap its approval for the thuggish Napoleon (Melvin Abston). Even as the beleaguered farm animals Napoleon ruled were being stripped of their few remaining rights.
Analogies between then and now — between the Stalinist Russia that was Orwell’s ostensible target and the world we inhabit — come easily in the harrowing and provocative “Animal Farm” envisioned by May Adrales, who writes in her director’s note that “there will always be pigs” willing to steal our food and our freedom. If we let them.
Making the most of the freedom baked into adapter Ian Wooldridge’s script — which gives directors a lot of leeway on how to stage Orwell’s story — Adrales skips the bucolic setting and amber waves of grain. Orwell could be nostalgic about an older, more rural England; conversely, Adrales’ “Animal Farm” plays like “1984.”
The Rep’s “farm” is a meat processing plant; Andrew Boyce’s scenic design is a nondescript, four-walled hell of crumbling tiles and collapsing floors. In the first scene, workers haul and hoist huge slabs of beef onto a table for cutting and packaging; Jonathan Gillard Daly looks on, gun in one hand and whip in the other.
Adrales’ eight-actor cast — all of them playing multiple roles — aren’t humans pretending to be animals. They’re people who’ve become beasts.
Hence Izumi Inaba’s costume design, in which actors wearing overalls suggesting Diego Rivera’s Detroit autoworkers are accessorized with prosthetics resembling hooves, while carrying masks of various animals’ heads.
Those heads aren’t held high for long; even before Napoleon makes short work of his chief rival (Brendan Titley), the increasingly dominant pigs are already directing the best food into their own trough. It’s only a matter of time before the pigs have coined the slogan insisting that some animals are more equal than others.
Must every revolution be similarly betrayed? Orwell didn’t think so, which is why he gave so much airtime to the hard-working Boxer (Stephanie Weeks), the clear-eyed but cowardly Clover (Deborah Staples) and the cynical Benjamin the donkey (Daly).
This trio of actors win our sympathy; they also challenge us to look in the mirror. Their eyes — confused and evasive — give the game away; on some level, they all know that what’s happening is wrong. But they each fail to act on what they intuitively understand: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.
“Animal Farm” continues through Feb. 11 at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, visit milwaukeerep.com. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.