"Iron Shoes" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Ben Krantz Studio

I didn't feel any urgency about blogging about this show because it was completely sold out for the entire run, so no pressure to urge people to go (or avoid). Of course, that also meant I didn't have a lot of incentive to write it up at all, so here we are, on the day the show closes, and I'm finally writing.

And it's not that I'm reluctant to write about the show as such, but I will admit that it's been hard thinking about what I was going to say. This is a most unorthodox production of a brand new show, so I find it a bit hard to describe. But I'll do my best.

The Play

I'm almost reluctant to call this a play, but I don't really have any other word that describes it any better. It is kind of a multimedia performance art piece, featuring singing, dancing, and a narration (or multiple narrations) that end up being part of the action. It's really very complex.

The show is a collaboration and joint production between Berkeley's Shotgun Players and the Oakland-based Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble. Kitka is known for a capella  versions of Eastern European-style music. Iron Shoes is a rendering of three traditional Eastern European folk tales that all involve young girls getting tricked and/or taken advantage of, and all having to redeem themselves by walking to wear out a pair of iron shoes.

We start with our narrator and her apprentice describing the story and the ensemble acting it out, with the ensemble singing the music as well. It's all sort of like opera, but with a narrator (or two) instead of supertitles. But as we get into the tales, the narrator loses some of her objectivity and detachment, and eventually starts interacting directly with some of the characters. So in addition to the three folk tales, we also have the narrator's journey, as it were.

Truthfully, the tales themselves aren't all that intricate or interesting. But the method of telling the stories is quite engaging, and the show definitely holds one's interest. The third girl's story kind of gets short shrift, feeling almost like an afterthought. It's definitely the toughest of the stories (as the narrator makes abundantly clear), but it lacks the theatricality of the previous stories with their magical animals and such. It all works, and part of the magic of the show is that it takes three fairly simple folk tales and weaves them into something much more interesting.

The Production

There are times when the whole production feels like it could be just a skit in school, but for the fact that there is this amazing and complex vocal harmony backing it all the time. And eventually, the story line becomes decidedly more involved that any of the simple, original stories. So there is a solid and building soundscape that underpins what seems to be a simple, even simplistic staging of simple stories, but nevertheless it is spellbinding.

Some of that spell comes from the increasing discomfort that the narrator (Beth Wilmurt) begins to express. We start to question how much agency the characters have in their own stories, and by extension, how much we have in our own. By the time the narrator has been co-opted into the story itself, we start to see an answer emerging.

Truthfully, I didn't know what to expect of this show, and even some way into it, I wasn't sure what to make of it. But the blending of clever writing with the exquisite Kitka music and movement and dance choreographed by director Erika Chong Shuch forms a truly spectacular whole that is still quite hard to describe.

Bottom Line

I don't know whether this show has a future beyond this initial joint production, but there is really some remarkable artistry on display, and it was well worth seeing. Sadly, as noted earlier, it closes its run today after literally selling out every seat for the entire run. So clearly there is a market for this kind of show!

I will be interested to see whether this results either in further productions of this show, or perhaps more collaborations down the road. But it's definitely fascinating to see what happens when all these artists get outside the bounds of the usual conceptions of art, vocal music, dance, and theater. Cool stuff happens!