Philly Fringe: The Renegade Company get Orwellian at a North Philly farm

For more on the 2016 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, check out our guide to the curated and non-curated shows.

At Life Do Grow, the concrete-and-grass farm at 11th and Dauphin Streets in North Philly, fruit and vegetable gardens are built and grown while conversations are hatched regarding freshly farmed food and the concerns of sustainability.

For the FringeArts festival starting Thursday, however, all manner of niceness goes out the window when the Renegade Company hits the fields and stalks. In its place, dystopia and brutality will get their allegorical due - and, eventually, the audience will get fed - when the company performs (and cooks) Animal Farm to Table, a blackly comic, highly physical, deconstructionist vision of George Orwell's 1945 classic Animal Farm and its savage, satirical look at Stalinism, food shortages, and annoyed animals in revolt.

"I've always been interested in how we can use the five senses in a production and what they evoke, particularly with food," says Mike Durkin. The artistic director of the Renegade Company, as well as its primary writer, Durkin sees Animal Farm to Table as an audience-participatory theatrical work with elements of a town hall discussion, a garden harvesting, and a meal-making.

"Food is powerful and can bring us together or alienate us, or bring us joy or pain. How can we utilize these ideas and share our experience in a communal setting? We don't know and are excited to find out."

This is what Durkin's Renegade Company does best, occasionally in or around Philly's great outdoors. Its 2015 mash-up of films Planet of the Apes, Tarzan, and King Kong - called Damned Dirty Apes! - was performed as farce at South Philly's FDR Park and told as a faceoff between man and monkey. Hunchback of Notre Dame . . . a Mute Play (2014) was done all as mime with the gothic First Presbyterian Church substituting for the haunting Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Bathtub Moby-Dick - Renegade's 2013 look at Herman Melville's work - was executed in a bathroom in Wharton Heights. All were done with the help of community partners such as Jig-Bee Flower Farm, Le Puppet Regime, and Wildwood SoapWorks. (This time out, Renegade's partner is Farm to City.)

"A Renegade experience aims to be completely unique in its environment," says Durkin. "We treat the text as a starting point and we repurpose elements into a current Philadelphia climate."

He's not blaming anyone specifically in Philadelphia for insufficient food access, instead, "leaving the question of who is responsible or at fault open to the audience to decipher."

The Renegade Company will explore the relationship between the audience, their perspectives on food, Orwell's novella, the North Philadelphia community, and an urban farm.

The audience also will have the job of foraging for the food at Urban Creators Farm that will be prepared and shared. (All the Renegades are foodies, Durkin says.)

"You will be walking around the farm, tasting items, and picking them to be made into a meal."

But will there be warring factions, as in Orwell's book?

"There may just be fighting."

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Animal Farm to Table Presented by the Renegade Company, various times Thursday to Monday and Sept. 15-18 at the Urban Creators Farm, 2315 N. 11th St. Tickets: $20; $15 students. Information: www.fringearts.com

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