RED RIDING HOOD
by Allison Gregory • Directed by John DiAntonio
THE POWER OF STORYTELLING
Our 56th season is all about storytelling. Dear Jack, Dear Louise reveals the power of story through a series of letters sent over a very specific moment in time. An Iliad gives us The Poet, fated to tell the same story over and over again, who looks for new meaning throughout the centuries. Little Red Riding Hood is a story we’ve all heard, over and over, throughout the centuries and yet we keep coming back to it. Why do we keep coming back to these tales? In the article “Why are Fairy Tales Universally Appealing”, Kate Forsyth writes, “One of the things I was examining in my doctorate is why fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel continue to be told and retold, sometimes enduring for over a thousand years. What I discovered is a story only survives if it articulates some kind of desire or dilemma, some kind of predicament, which is of importance to both the reteller of the tale, and to his or her audience.” This explanation of the enduring qualities of stories, are some of the same reasons why theatre itself is so compelling. Fairy tales originated hundreds, even thousands of years ago. Before early humans drew or painted on cave walls, they spoke their stories out loud. As speech evolved, so did stories. Stories were passed down through families, often to teach young people valuable lessons of good and bad, right and wrong, and the morality of the day. One of the most famous scribes of fairy tales, The Grimm Brothers, wrote their stories after listening to friends and family share them aloud. They added and changed parts of the story to continue its evolution. Storytelling gives us the freedom to expand and change, and this growth allows for these classic stories to be heard by a new audience. When asked what inspired her to write her version of this classic story, playwright Allison Gregory shared, “There are countless variations and versions of Red Riding Hood, dating back hundreds of years, centuries; how could I bring anything new to the tale that hadn’t already been tried? The more research I did the more I came to realize that this was not going to be a play about how a little girl does or doesn’t get eaten by a wolf; it was going to be a play about storytelling. That’s when I really got invested: when it became about the How and not the What. That distinction cracked open the world of the play and gave me a kind of energetic authority to refocus events and rethink the dynamic between Red and the wolf.” And what better way to tell a story, than cracked open through the power of theatre, in front of an audience.
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your theatre, always
(top) Hoodwinked! (2005) explores the classic story from each characters perspective; (bottom) The original cast of Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods, which brings together many of Grimm's classic fairy tale characters
