Death. Cannibalism. Beheadings.
Oh my.
They all ooze out of the fairy tales that make up Mary Zimmerman’s “The Secret in the Wings,” now on stage at The Rogue Theatre.
Zimmerman — who wrote the brilliant “Metamorphoses,” based on Ovid’s poem — has taken somewhat obscure fairy tales and, though deconstructed a bit, they stick with the original stories.
The frame of the play is this: Thoughtless parents have a neighbor babysit their daughter. She sees an ogre, they see someone who will watch the kid. He asks her to marry him several times (for some reason, this does not come off as creepy), and each time she refuses, he tells her a story, which is acted out by a cast that fully embraces the theatricality of the play.
The stories are dark, as most fairy tales are.
There’s the one about the princess who wouldn’t laugh, and insists that the men who come courting have their heads cut off if they don’t succeed in drawing some mirth out of her. And the seven unruly who brothers are cursed by their quiet-seeking father and turned into swans. Their only hope is a sister who must stay silent for seven years while she makes them jackets that will restore their human form.
Or the one about three queens who are banished from the kingdom by an evil nursemaid. She insists they be killed and their eyes brought back to her as proof the deadly mission has been done. Instead, the queens, each pregnant, pluck their own eyes out and then try to survive on the harsh mountain they have been left on. Two of the three resort to eating their children.
Zimmerman takes each tale to its darkest point, then switches to another one. Eventually, she returns to the stories to finish them.
The irrational fears that haunt our childhood are exploited and brought to too-vivid life by this pristine ensemble cast. Maybe it’s this strong production, maybe it’s indicative of the divisive time in which we live, but there are moments in this play that make this adult feel that fear again.
This play doesn’t have the heft of Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses.”
What it does have, however, is director Cynthia Meier’s deft hand. She eloquently built the suspense, effectively used costumes and props to bring us to one tale and the next and then back again, and incorporated a grand sense of adventure and dread.
And her solid cast made sure the horror, the happiness, the anticipation of what terrible thing was going to happen next, was palpable. Matt Walley was the ogre with the tail and, yeah, he was scary. Bryn Booth was the young girl left with him, and you never get the sense she is playing a child; she is one. Patty Gallagher transformed from a self-absorbed mother to a blind queen to a motherless child with the grace and skill she so often displays. Aaron Shand, Ryan Parker Knox, Joseph McGrath, Hunter Hnat, Holly Griffith and Claire Hancock filled out the cast. Everyone played multiple roles and everyone helped this production jump off the stage.
Underscoring the action was Jake Sorgen’s piano music, which reflected the emotions and the action. It was another, and an important, character in this production.
The Rogue stage was transformed into a shadowy basement, with stairs leading up to a door (Walley’s slow descent down those stairs, tail dragging behind him, is the stuff of nightmares), old lamps, chairs, clothes — every prop, every costume, every set piece needed is in that space. You just knew there were monsters hidden in there.
