What: A Happening V: The Bestiary
Presented by Eggtooth Productions and Cloudgaze. An Immersive Festival featuring local musicians, actors, dancers, fabricators, and more!
Where: the Shea Theater Arts Center, 71 Avenue A, Turners Falls, MA
When: on October 31 and November 1, 2025
Featuring: 50 Artists of all kinds in an immersive experience based upon Orwell’s Animal Farm
Utilizing source material from Aesop’s Fables, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, The Nutcracker, newly imagined cautionary tales, and creature myths of all origins, The Bestiary brings together over fifty artists from across the Connecticut RiverValley to create a participatory, interdisciplinary theatrical experience unlike any other.
When audience members enter the Shea, they will walk into the world of Free Range Manor. Set five generations after the revolution of Animal Farm, the main level of the theater is home to barnyard animals preparing for their annual Open Forum, to which the Pigs in charge of the society have invited “feral” animals for the first time – conditional on their decorum.
The basement of the Shea will be transformed into the Feral Forest, in which wild and post-domesticated creatures of the land roam and sow the seeds of rebellion against the oppressive Pigs. As visitors interact with actors, explore the expansive installations throughout the Shea, and watch performances unfold, it will become clear that the line between “civilized” and “feral” is not as firm as it seems, and that there is a new secret around every corner of this mysterious Bestiary.
