You know that kid at your middle school who was always EXCITED for your once-monthly library day?

Yeah, that was me.

Which is how I ended up reading George Orwell's Animal Farm when I was eleven. The librarian looked at me in confusion when I brought it up to the check-out. My parents asked if I was sure I woldn't rather read another Nancy Drew book. (This was long before Harry Potter.) But I loved Animal Farm. Somehow, I got it. Once in a while, you read a book that really changes your life. Animal Farm was one of those books for me.

And so my love for the book, combined with my love for all things puppetry, made me oh-so-excited for Mum Puppettheatre's world premiere adaptation of the Orwell classic by Andrew c. Periale. And fortunately, the show did not disappoint.

One would expect a play about animals performed at a puppettheatre would be full of puppets. Au contraire. The majority of the animals, in fact, aren't played by puppets at all, but rather by actors. It's interesting to see bipedal humans preaching that all animals who do not go upon four legs, or have wings, are bad. And the puppets used in Animal Farm are not like the puppets I've come to expect at Mum. A series of significantly simpler-than-usual hand puppets, for instance, are used to represent the bureaucrat-like pits whose job it is to tell the other animals on the farm about new "legislation" passed by the senior pigs. Their general cuteness belies the fact that the pigs are, in reality, rather evil. But while these puppets were simple, it was the less simple, at first not even noticeable, puppets that proved the most impressive. Animal Farm, as you might imagine, is set in a barn. And like most barns, there are stacks of feed bags stacked up against some of the walls. But aside from serving as periodic cushioning to falling actors, some of these feedbags are also them also serve as puppets, or parts of puppets, most notably at the beginning, as the cast of six (Bernard Bygott, Dave Johnson, Jamie Lynne Simons, Rob Nedoff, Adrienne Mackey, and Bradley K. Wrenn) takes turns manipulating a de-constructed bag that had been re-sewn and stuffed into a burlap pillow in the shape of a hog's head. This is Old Major, the Karl Marx-like pig who sets forth the idea of a Utopian, socialist society for all animals before succumbing to old age. Even though he looked nothing like a real pig, I believed him. We all did.

As with Marx's Communist Manifesto, Old Major's ideas are quickly perverted by those who would want to rule a totalitarian state under the guise of perfect socialist equality, and as things devolve further and further (first, taking Old Major's teachings and transforming them into a religion, then changing the tenets of the religion as convenient), the actors do an excellent job of manically portraying the under-pigs, as well as demonstrating the understandable confusion and sadness on the part of the other animals who are beginning to realize the truth of their situation. Mum Artistic Director Robert Smythe, who also directed Animal Farm, is to be commended for finding a cast of actors who could quickly transition, not just between characters, but between the complete emotional shifts present both across the characters and within them. From the initial "organizing meeting," where the actors encourage audience participation and encourage them to, for instance, lay eggs, to the final, truly jarring image onstage (it's far too worth the visual surprise for me to spoil it here), the actors have to do more in two hours' time than even Mum's shows usually require.

And they do all of it while rolling around the floor in sawdust. It's allergy season, so even members of the audience were suffering from this aspect of the set—but the actors kept right on trucking. And even if the show weren't both beautifully adapted and thoroughly enjoyable, they'd deserve commendation for that.

Adrienne Mackey and Bernard Bygott perform in Mum Puppettheatre's adaptation of Animal Farm, continuing through May 10.