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Back to the barnyard

Stage West's production of Animal Farm relies on actors' voices, not costumes or sets.

By BARBARA L. FREDRICKSEN
Published February 18, 2005

SPRING HILL - No costumes, no set, no props. Just seven people dressed in white shirts and black pants sitting on stools reading lines.

That's a theatrical production?

Indeed it is, when it's the actors of Stage West Community Playhouse's Readers' Theater performing an adaptation of George Orwell's classic Animal Farm , an antiutopian satire based on Russia's Bolshevik revolution and its subsequent betrayal by Josef Stalin.

The reading will be presented at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.

In it, barnyard animals overthrow their cruel human masters and set up an egalitarian political system. Before long, the intelligent, power-hungry pigs subvert the revolution and set up a dictatorship more heartless than the system their human masters had imposed.

Animal Farm 's characters are as familiar today as they were when Orwell published his book in 1945. Watching the ideal society collapse under indifference and ignorance is disturbing and thought provoking, but much of the pointed and caustic dialogue is funny.

"This was originally written as readers' theater," said Peter Clapsis, the show's director. Clapsis, who recently appeared as ballet teacher Boris Kolenkhov in the comedy You Can't Take It With You at Stage West, has directed several shows at Hernando High School. He became involved in theater as a young man and has done local commercials on television and for radio.

"As an actor, (readers' theater) gives you the opportunity to use your voice to communicate. As (stage) actors, we rely heavily on movement and props," Clapsis said. "This is almost like doing radio."

Readers' theater groups are quite popular in metropolitan areas. It's a way of presenting many shows in one season, introducing an innovative playwright or offering a show that might be too difficult to stage in toto. The shows require rehearsals, but far fewer than a full-fledged production.

Each of the seven actors portrays two or more of the characters in the play. Instead of character names, they're assigned a stool number and use inflection, accents and attitudes to show which character's lines they're saying. After the play, the actors and director will hold a discussion of the plot with the audience.

John Parsons occupies Stool No. 1 as the Narrator and as Farmer Jones, one of the oppressors. Jim Sutphen (the IRS agent in You Can't ), is on Stool No. 2 as Snowball, the pig who betrays the barnyard animals, and Benjamin.

Others in the production are Michael Benson (Little Shop of Horrors; Jekyll and Hyde ) as Squeaker, the raven Moses and Farmer Frederick; Terri Marwood (director of You Can't ) as Clover the plodding cart horse and the Cat; David Stenger (Grandpa in You Can't ) as Boxer, the cart horse who is also the farm's hardest worker, and Farmer Pilkington; Stuart Van Skiver (DePinna in You Can't ) as Major, the prize boar, and Napoleon, the drunken pig; and Cheryl Roberts (Essie in You Can't ) as the flightly mare Mollie and Muriel the goat.

"We're going to put up little pieces of white fence to suggest a barnyard and do something with the lighting," Clapsis said. Other than that, he is relying on his actors to individualize each character and make the story comprehensible to the audience.

"This is kind of hard to follow from a description," Clapsis said. "But not when you see it done."

WHAT: Readers' Theater's Animal Farm

WHERE: The Forum at Stage West Community Playhouse, 8390 Forest Oaks Blvd., Spring Hill

WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday

TICKETS: $8; buy one, get one free. Box office is open 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and an hour before each show. Call 683-5113

[Last modified February 18, 2005, 00:14:17]