By: Sanner Bennet

     Every year Tempe Prep puts on a play in the spring, directed by the drama teacher, Dr. Sanderson. This year, Dr. Sanderson chose the play Animal Farm, which is based on the novel by George Orwell. The students performed the play three times over the last weekend in April: two evening shows and one matinee. 

     Animal Farm is a political satire that was originally commenting on the Soviet Union and Hitler, but as the narrators said at the beginning, it can be applied to any government, past, present, and future.

    The setting is a farm where the animals rise up to kick out the oppressive farmer and begin to run the farm themselves. The goal of the insurrection is to create a farm where all the animals are equal and have everything they need and where no one is in charge, but instead all of the animals make decisions collectively.

    The pigs of the farm become the rulers and slowly create a situation just as dreadful as the one they had had under the farmers. By the end, the animals become human, a metamorphosis which is represented by all the actors taking off their animal masks.

     The script was written by Dr. Sanderson himself, and it is a combination of dialogue from the book, some of his own dialogue, and scenes from other play versions of this book. He says in the program that “this sort of Frankenstein-style adaptation has been in the making for almost two years, and it has been exciting to bring to life with the students.” 

     Besides the writing and acting, there was also a lot of behind the scenes work. Several sophomore boys were stage hands, who helped move around sets, and Ray Acosta ran the sound board. 

     The way the AV was set up was pretty simple: “With the sound mixing, a lot of the work is done in advance through rehearsals so that on the performance days there are minimal adjustments. In terms of the lighting setup, we only worked with the base fresnel light and the spotlight for the performances,” explained Ray. 

     The show itself went pretty smoothly, except for one of the sets getting caught on the curtain (which, when fixed, was accompanied by some applause). 

    At the very end of the show, Heath Churchill, the actor playing the lead role of Napoleon the pig, thanked everyone involved and made a special comment for the middle school actors— expressing that it was a difficult play to put on and that their pulling it off so well was a great accomplishment.