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Angela Carter's Hairy Tales. Directed by Matthew Woods. Performed by Imaginary Beasts. The Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, October 4-26, 2013. Performance.
The Imaginary Beasts production of Angela Carter's Hairy Tales, which ran this past fall in Boston, Massachusetts, made a sincere and refreshing effort to remind its audience that fairy tales are not the colorful, sanitized, robustly happy Disney interpretations that have dominated our culture for the past half-century. Neither are they the blockbuster, action-packed melodramas that are becoming vogue in today's cinemas, in which Snow White deftly wields an axe and falls in love with a dreamy and oh-so-irresistibly troubled huntsman. Instead, in the intimate theater of the Boston Center for the Arts, we are brought back to the birthplace of fairy tales-the fireside-and the simple expression of complex thought.
The craft and care taken to transform Carter's radio plays for the stage, giving them wholeheartedly over to the body, is evident throughout the two acts. The set design of Act 1, "The Company of Wolves," is especially minimalist, playfully using the ensemble to represent swaying trees and a ticking clock; the only notable prop is the infamous red cloak. Act 2, "Vampirella, or, The Lady of the House of Love," though it effectively uses a floor-to-ceiling canvas as a veil between the experiences of the living and the reminiscences of the undead, also primarily depends on the actors to set the scene; the most memorable improvisations are the hero humorously mimicking an exhausting bicycle ride and members of the ensemble filling in for the dour vampire portraits on the castle walls. In this way, through the aesthetics of each design, through the similar tension that permeates each act's love (or lust) story, and through his...