Roles crafted in clay

Michael Nehring compares making the canvas mask he wears as Napoleon, the tyrannical pig in “Animal Farm,” to the experience of delivering a baby.

He cut the mask off the wet clay that shaped it, and “it was like doing a caesarean section,” he said. He cleaned it, repatched it, strengthened it, attached foam and a strap to it. “I know it so well because I helped give birth to it,” he said. “It was a huge, cathartic experience.”

Several of the other actors in the Son of Semele production of the dramatization of George Orwell’s classic fable (which opened Friday) had similar experiences, said mask maestro Deborah Bird, who designed most of the show’s 23 masks and mask-like puppets and painted all of them. She believes the actors’ performances will profit from their hands-on contributions to their masks.

“Performing in masks is so uncomfortable,” she said. “It occludes vision and breathing, and it makes you sweat off the top of your head. But if you work on it and see it come to life, you have a proprietary sense of pride. It helps when you go into rehearsal. You develop a comfort level with it, and you also develop a reverence for it. You know not to treat it like some sort of hat.”

Bird, who won an LA Weekly award for her human masks in a production of “The Call of the Wild” and who also creates masks and props in Hollywood, didn’t have much experience designing animal masks when Son of Semele artistic director Matthew McCray asked her to do so.

Animals usually are depicted as “cutified, infantilized” cartoons, she said. “Animal Farm” called for masks “with ambiguity, with duality of features that can be filled in with the weight of the actor’s performance.”

Nehring, who is the chairman of theater and dance department at Orange’s Chapman University, from which Son of Semele’s core group graduated, had met Bird in Bali at a theater workshop in the mid-’90s and brought her work to the attention of the group.

With a production budget of only $6,000 for a three-week run at the 50-seat McCadden Place Theatre in Hollywood, Son of Semele had no money to pay Bird, but, she said, “I really like Orwell.”

And McCray said he never thought of doing the show without masks -- because a key moment in the play is when the pigs remove their masks, having morphed into the abusive humans they had once overthrown.

A member of the company donated a Hollywood garage for use as a studio, and Bird began working in June, joined by some of the actors in September.

For Nehring, “it’s a completely different way of working on character because it’s embodied in this potent symbol. I couldn’t be more anonymous.”

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‘Animal Farm’

Where: McCadden Place Theatre, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood

When: Thursdays-Saturdays

Ends: Nov. 24

Price: $20