My overall impression
Lady into Fox is deeply simple in it’s presentation. Beautifully simple. The actors and creative team are not trying to dazzle their viewers, they are trying just to speak to them. And speak they do, in plain clothing, on a rug surrounded by pillows and books, lamps, wooden stumps, and their audience, who are as much a part of the scenery as anything that existed in the room when they entered.
The story is fantastical (a woman is turned, inexplicably, into a fox!) but Interrobang Departure makes no concessions to this fantasy. They embrace it, and the relative simplicity of the space and the elasticity of the performers allows the fantasy to exist vividly in the minds of the audience members and dance in that glorious space between their imagination and the reality of the actors in the space. Lady into Fox is, at it’s core, not fantastical. It is about a break up: A woman fundamentally changes and her husband is desperate to cling to what they once were.
The performances of all three actors in the ensemble are dually playful and heartbreaking and the allegory clear and precise. Lady into Fox finds a rare and profound simplicity that is difficult to describe, but beautiful to witness.
