Probably the best adjective to describe “The Red Shoes” is “intricate.” It’s a pleasing puzzlement with lots of moving parts, a story that constantly morphs in scale and a staging that keeps you guessing.
Conceiver and director Joel Sass’ new production is a post-modern mash-up that borrows its title, a handful of words and footwear hue from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. The smoky music and staccato dialogue is an homage to American film noir. And a scrupulous and idiosyncratic style of storytelling harks back to Sass’ work with the Mary Worth Theatre Company in the years bridging the new millennium.
The telling is set in a grungy tenement building in a nameless, violent and loud Big City. Kimberly Richardson portrays our nameless protagonist, a mousy thing whose chief occupation is acting out old-style detective stories on a dollhouse-scale stage. As she narrates the story of a torch singer with a troubled past and an ugly future, the story and its attendant characters come alive in some unusual ways.
In an always labyrinthine, frequently funny and sometimes chilling 75 minutes, Richardson also plays the slinky nightclub singer, a fedora-wearing detective, a crabby landlady and others, sometimes almost at the same time
The story emerges in splinters and shards; if you could put all the pieces together, I’m not positive the narrative would hold water without leaking. But it’s a smart and savvy undertaking that holds its own focus and invites ours; a trip that’s more about the journey than the destination.
In Open Eye’s itsy-bitsy performing space, Sass has constructed a set filled with tricks and gimmicks: old-fashioned bulletin boards animate themselves, objects move on their own, characters appear from and disappear to unexpected places. Some of the legerdemain is how’d-they-do-that pieces of stage magic, while other bits are visual distraction. It takes a team of off-stage helpers (Ariane Mass, Rick Miller, Noah Sommers Haas) to keep the machinery running and to create the illusion that Richardson is in more than one place at a time.
Richardson, for her part, is the kind of performer who can control her breath and voice in the smallest of increments and can seemingly manipulate her body molecule by molecule. As the central character, she’s almost like a stop-action animation figure, her movements sharp and abrupt, her vocalizations a series of squeaks and signs and half-gasps. Her other guises are just as physically precise. If it sometimes feels like there’s not a great deal of depth beneath the sublime physicality, it is undeniably an impressive and indefatigable piece of performance.
“The Red Shoes” drops lots of clues along the way, but at the end, it’s a slippery piece of work. If you like your stories nicely knotted and bowed, you’ll likely find frustration at Open Eye. But if you’d like your perceptions tickled, this is probably your ticket.
If you go
- What: “The Red Shoes”
- When: Through March 19
- Where: Open Eye Theatre, 506 E 24th St, Minneapolis
- Tickets: $18
- Information: 612-874-6338 or openeyetheatre.org
- Capsule: With roller skates, slippers and stiletto heels, the footwear is only the beginning of what is bright and bizarre about this production.
