Animal Pragmatism

“Four legs good, two legs baaaad.”

So bleat the sheep in George Orwell’s celebrated novel Animal Farm, as well as in the stage version coming to the Southern Theater this month. Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1945 during the Stalin era, and the story is a thinly veiled attack on Russian communism (and, for that matter, tyrannical and unjust governments of any sort). The animals in the story were modeled on real-life counterparts, most notably Trotsky and Stalin—anthropomorphized in the novel as pigs—as well as symbolic ones, such as the aforementioned mob of ovine.

Bringing Animal Farm to life presents a challenge for actors, designers, and directors. How do humans portray animals without seeming silly? How does a director take a classic and make it seem fresh and exciting? Luckily, director Jon Ferguson excels at this kind of thing. In Or the White Whale, a company-created show based on Moby Dick, he transformed the Southern into Captain Ahab’s ship, harpoons and all. For the 2008 Fringe Festival, he directed an original adaptation of Rhinoceros. His ensemble consisted of kids from the Main Street School of Performing Arts.

Since moving to the United States from England three years ago, Ferguson has earned a reputation for creating highly physical, ambitious, and emotionally touching theater. One of the ways he achieves this is by utilizing Lecoq-style clowning, the same tradition that influenced the founders of Theatre de la Jeune Lune.

“Clowning is relevant [to Animal Farm] because it’s about vulnerability,” says Ferguson. “It doesn’t have to be goofy, and you can take it into dramatic and very tragic territory. You see [these] innocent, hopeful characters, and there’s an innocence and a lightness to their confusion, like when the animals first get executed. There’s that innocence and lost quality to clowns as well. The clown is a universal character. It’s important for the audience to look at these characters and see themselves.”

Ferguson also has a knack for finding good collaborators. After working together on Or the White Whale, John Catron, a local actor, pitched Animal Farm to him. Catron thought that Ferguson was the only person in town who could do it justice. “This story is an allegory, a fable almost, and in order to activate that and drive it home, you have to do something more than a literal staging of the text,” explains Catron. Ferguson “gets people to go further.” Initially, they were going to do an adaptation that Catron had been writing, but they couldn’t get the rights. They chose to do Ian Wooldridge’s version instead. Catron and Dario Tangleson, an Argentinean via New York City, play Snowball and Napoleon, respectively. “I hope,” says Ferguson of Tangleson, “you’ll be charmed and scared by him.”

Though the timing of the production coincides with the presidential election, Catron emphasizes that Animal Farm is a cautionary tale, not a partisan one. “This show is relevant to everyone’s life, in the Twin Cities, in America, in the world,” he says. “A lot of it is about what does it mean to live in a democracy? and what role you have in a democracy, whether you’re a politician or a citizen. What is your job? What are you supposed to do to keep the governing body and the governed healthy? Every single check and balance [the animals put into place] was somehow taken away from them and turned what was supposed to be this democratic commune into a dictatorship. I don’t want this to be a protest piece. It’s about getting people to think about who are your leaders and, more importantly, who are you as a person that’s being led?”

Oct. 31–Nov. 16. Southern Theater, 1420 Washington Ave. S., Mpls., 612-340-1725