The Orwell Project

The Orwell Project , produced by Synapse Productions, adapts two of George Orwell’s timeless classics, Animal Farm and 1984.

1984 is the American premiere of a cutting edge adaptation of Orwell’s magnum opus on the dehumanizing effects of technology and authoritarian government. Giving a fresh and provocative turn to this timely story, director Ginevra Bull, together with designers Adrian Jones, Marcus Doshi, Fitz Patton and Thomas Dunn, create an explosive theatrical experience using a shifting landscape of two-story high video screens and dense sound design in a state-of-the-art experiment, combining film, video and live theatre. Orwell’s harrowing vision of society controlled through Newspeak, Doublethink and the ever-present, all-seeing Big Brother himself is dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century using break-neck visual theatre.

Animal Farm is a musical adaptation of Orwell’s novel. Director David Travis combines the idioms of vaudeville, children’s musical theatre and satire to create a theatrical experience designed both to stimulate ideas as well as to entertain. Puppet designers Emily DeCola and Eric Wright employ a full range of puppetry styles – including hand, stick-and-rod, bunraku and maks – to create an amazing array of visual perspectives, textures, comedy and terror. The cast of motley farm animals including 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, an intrepid cart-horse. The Pigs, most human-like of all, are human-sized.