A Venomous Color, Part Three: The Animals Speak
By Cameron Darwin Bossert
195 E 3rd St., Manhattan, NYC
August 5-17, 2025
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| Ginger Kearns, Adam Griffith, Cameron Darwin Bossert, & Cian Genaro. Photo by Hunter Canning |
The Animals Speak, the final installment in Cameron Darwin Bossert's outstanding Disney-centered trilogy
A Venomous Color, which began with
The Fairest in 2021, followed by
Burbank the next year, is the first play of the trilogy to be set outside the workplace.
The Animals Speak, making its world premiere at the wild project, takes place on a 1941 trip to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile sponsored by the U.S. government, which sent Walt Disney, his wife, Lillian, and a group of Disney artists on a goodwill tour intended to counter fascist and Nazi influence. It quickly emerges in Bossert's play, though, that leaving the workplace several thousand miles behind does not mean that Walt (Cameron Darwin Bossert) can leave working behind, even for a day and despite Lillian's (Ginger Kearns) urging to relax. Walt's obsession with work represents one, fundamental conflict in a compellingly multifaceted play that uses layered, complex characters to think about art, family, class, capitalism, and more.
The Animals Speak is presented by Thirdwing, founded by Bossert as a hybrid theater company combining live performances and streaming content, and a condensed version of
The Fairest that uses special sound design and music, along with color, “stop-motion,” and compositing VFX, has been released to Thirdwing's
streaming platform to coincide with the debut of
The Animals Speak. While the streaming version of
The Fairest is available for individual rental or purchase, Thirdwing also offers memberships, which include two tickets to
The Animals Speak as well as access to all of the company's streaming content, including
The Fairest and
Burbank.
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| Krysten Wagner & Ginger Kearns. Photo by Hunter Canning |
At the beginning of
The Animals Speak, the Disney company is suffering from the animators' strike at the center of
Burbank and the loss of European business due to the war, but, unlike his boss, animator Frank Thomas (Adam Griffith) is determined to enjoy the vacation part of the company's government-funded working vacation in South America. Fellow animator Norm “Fergie” Ferguson (Cian Genaro), Frank's companion on a pair of beach chairs in Brazil, contemplates whether having air conditioning back in the U.S. has spoiled him (a semi-awareness of what we today would call his privilege) but doesn't put up too much resistance to Frank's way of thinking. Frank also reminds Fergie that they need to keep an eye on Walt, who has had what his wife refers to as a "crack-up" once before, to ensure that he doesn't "go crazy." Of course, it's difficult to tell an artist not to work when anything and everything could be part of that work, as Griffith and Genaro infectiously demonstrate with how Frank and Fergie can't help but excitedly bounce animation ideas off one another when they see something that strikes them, from a certain tile pattern to the clothing worn by gauchos.
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| Felipe Arellano & Cameron Darwin Bossert. Photo by Hunter Canning |
Lillian has no need to work, as such, on the trip, but her vacation reading, John Steinbeck's recent novel
Grapes of Wrath (1939), doesn't seem to be particularly relaxing for her. After some awkwardness in their early conversation, she begins to make a connection with artist and animator Mary Blair (Krysten Wagner), whose husband works for Disney as well–and did not join the strike, a fact that, along with their similar painting styles, foregrounds the gendered expectations that Mary faces as a wife. Mary, who admits that she is a "nice" girl, also faces teasing by the male animators for being too classy. Eventually, the two women go off alone (departing down an aisle rather than through an onstage exit) without telling the men, during which time they open up to one another about fathers-in-law and social class among other topics. By the end of the play, Mary's art is undergoing an evolution–historically, her work on the trip, evoked though not shown in the play, would lead to her being appointed art supervisor on two subsequent films and would be used as concept art for the Small World ride at Disney’s theme parks–and Walt receives news from home that makes even him temporarily forget about business.
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| Adam Griffith, Ginger Kearns, Cameron Darwin Bossert, Cian Genaro, & Krysten Wagner. Photo by Hunter Canning |
Along the way, with psychological acuity, plenty of humor, effect, and dashes of historical hindsight such as Walt's already planning a sequel to the underperforming
Fantasia,
The Animals Speak deftly and engrossingly interlaces a number of considerations. Walt's poor delivery of speeches, for instance, prompts him to argue that art (such as Disney's characters) is a more effective mode of (mass) communication than rhetoric, and his continued anger at strike-leader and Goofy-inventor Art Babbit raises questions around 'owning' an idea (an issue that has taken on added dimension and urgency amidst the blight of so-called A.I.). Walt's conversation with their Chilean host, Jorge Delano (Felipe Arellano), touches on the idea of immortality through film and whether that can also be a kind of stasis or is even desirable, as well as on how stories change and persist–or die. In a story Jorge tells, the animals speak quite differently than in a Disney film (a way linked to color and so also to Mary's art), highlighting the productive difference of cultural perspective (in another instance of such difference, Arellano, who invests his scenes with an undertone of intellectual fencing, gives a wonderful wryness to Jorge's comparison of Walt's traveling to South America to fight Nazis to Columbus's own misdirected voyage). Interestingly for a conclusion to a trilogy,
The Animals Speak also, in coming a kind of full circle, puts a lot of focus on origins, particularly those of Walt and Mary, who both came from modest beginnings, if very different family environments, before moving up the class hierarchy. Wagner expertly embodies Mary's increasing self-assertion, which occurs in part thanks to the company of the bold Lillian, a complex character whose frustrations, desires, and love, complemented by her sharp intellect, are magnetically conveyed by a fantastic Kearns. Griffith and Genaro make a great sometimes-comic pair, and Bossert is once again an excellent Walt, taking moving advantage of the chance to show more of the character's vulnerability than in the trilogy's previous installments. Ultimately,
The Animals Speak affirms the necessity to take time consciously to experience the mere fact of being alive in the world, a beneficial recommendation not only for artists but for all of us.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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