Thumb through the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen, and one of the first things you’ll notice is how unsuitable many of them are for bedtime reading. Perrault lets the wolf gobble up Little Red Riding Hood—and granny too. Andersen’s Little Mermaid fails to win the affections of the prince and throws herself back into the sea. As for the Grimms, their stories are an almost unrelenting parade of deadpan horrors—one child gets her hands chopped off, another is buried alive, and still another winds up in a stew that’s greedily lapped up by his own unwitting father. Sweet dreams, kids!
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Even when the plots aren’t appalling, there’s a fundamentally unsettling aspect to the best fairy tales. Like bad dreams, they tap into our anxieties about the unmanageable and possibly malevolent forces threatening our safe little worlds. Just as you feared, the stories say, there are witches and wolves in the woods surrounding the castle or the cottage. The main characters may get to live happily ever after, but first they’ll have to overcome some things that aren’t very nice.
It centers on Princess Sara (a wide-eyed Ann Sonneville) and her quest to find her one true love. Traveling with her lifelong friend, Will (Zachary Sigelko), a lute-plucking court musician, Sara has tracked down one magic mirror after another, each telling her that she will never meet her soul mate because he’s already died. The last such mirror in the kingdom contains a wicked wizard named Maldorf, played with enthusiastic contempt by Michael Thomas Downey, who tells Sara that he can bring her dead Prince Charming back to life—provided she agrees to free him from his reflective prison by breaking the glass.
Through 12/22: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, no performance Thu 11/28 Storefront Theater, Gallery 37 Center for the Arts 66 E. Randolphstrangetree.org $15
