My overall impression
This play is not what it seems at all.
On the face of things it looks very simple. It’s a sort of fairytale, about a disintegrating relationship, broken up by cute little postmodern flourishes that break the fourth wall and frame the story. Personal anecdotes from the lives of the actors give the action a stabbing, intimate touch.
These details are all relatively easy to see and understand. But the central conflict of the play is a lot more fucked up than that, even a lot more fucked up that a broken relationship or an alienating transformation (internal or external).
I first got an inkling of this while talking to a fellow audience member after the show. He said very casually that he loved the show, but it made him feel a bit misogynistic or unsympathetic, because while he could clearly relate to Nathan’s character, because he was a human with human conflicts, relating to Claire’s character was much more difficult, because she was a fox.
The moment he said this a hundred alarm-bells went off in my head.
First of all, I had related, on a gut level, much more to Claire’s character than Nathan’s. I’ve led a relatively unconventional life, and I’ve been in more than one situation where my identity or internal impulses felt like they were evolving toward the alien, making me a stranger in my relationships. I went through some significant breakups because I basically become somebody else.
But there was more to it than that— something deeper. The feral, aggressive emotions aroused in me when Claire was dismembering that rabbit had very little to do with my previous experiences— I simply found those feelings MORE COMPELLING AND RELATABLE than the feelings Nathan was expressing. The urge to dig into the antediluvian guts of existence. The urge toward freedom.
This led to my second realization. “Claire’s character is less relatable, because she’s a fox”
…but Claire’s character is NOT a fox.
This is indisputable within the logic of the play. The entire thing is framed as a campfire story, and the actors literally introduce themselves as actors. This is why so much of the play is expositional; the characters drift between that campfire storytelling and BEING the story. But it’s made very clear to us that this is the retelling of a tale by a group of professionals. Even WITHIN THE WORLD OF THE PLAY, Claire is NOT A FOX AT ALL.
So there was nothing strange about me relating to her more. Nothing. Because even within the world of the play, during every moment, she’s a human person like me.
But of course the fox is there. The fox is in front of me. The fox twitches her nose and plays in the forest and kills other creatures and has sex (which was another point of contentious conversation post-play). There is an aggressive pull in both directions. The play explains to me in no uncertain terms that Claire is an actress. But my senses are screaming otherwise.
That ambiguity rests at the center of my feelings, making this play a structural statement far more disruptive than a mere fractured fairytale. It’s not simply that there’s a paradox about what theater is; that’s pretty cliche. This goes beyond that, into a paradox about who I am while watching. The framing device doesn’t just frame. It invades my understanding of myself.
The best way I can explain this is by referencing one of Nathan’s monologues nearer the end of the play, where he’s describing, as an actor, the internal experience of his character— the things the character WANTS to say to his transformed wife, or maybe to the universe, but can’t say, or resists saying. Nathan’s emotions built and built until he was apoplectic with rage. His neck bulged and it seemed like he was rather losing control of himself—not acting like he was, but like Nathan, the actor playing the actor, had serious frustrations with the play itself, and with love.
In that moment all the theory and structure of the play just dissolved, eaten away by the acid of human emotion. It was profound and hard to describe because the current of it sort of occurred in a place beyond words.
The personal anecdotes from the actor’s lives served the same function. They did more than just accent the feeling of the play. At the best moments, they opened this kind of third space— the truth of the play wasn’t in some specific interpretation of the action, but in the actual physical bodies and narrative voices of the people on the stage. Classification failed.
The closest thing I can compare it all to is the sensation I got reading a novel called House of Leaves. In it, a labyrinth opens inside the house of a husband and wife, a series of endless catacombs leading off into uneasy darkness. The labyrinth is clearly a metaphor related to their marriage, but is just as clearly really there. Discussions about the reality of the thing become foolish, and we, as a result, also become foolish in our searching. The fictional elements and the framing elements don’t so much oppose each other as they gesture at something wholly other in the center. The real guts of phenomenological experience, usually ignored.
In moments like this art makes it clear that there’s some wholly other foundation that holds up human experience. It’s not like we regularly research, find facts, nail down definitions that make all our feelings and impulses make sense. It’s quite the other way around. We make fiction and we find fact and we try to be conscious, but all those are tiny cabins on the edge of a very deep forest.
This play made me long to devour a live rabbit. What we are is much bigger than what we think, and I’m grateful to Lady Into Fox for reminding me of that, disconcerting as that remembering may sometimes be.
