‘Change life! ‘Change society!’
These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space.
Henri Lefebvre
So here’s the thing about fairy tales performed at dusk in an amphitheater: someone decided that the only way to properly fuck with Grimm and Perrault was to drag their corpses outside, shake the dust off those cautionary misogynist parables, and let women rewrite the whole goddamn script under an open sky while the light dies. That’s punk rock in its purest form, not the safety pins and spit, but the absolute refusal to let the story stay where someone else put it.
Lefebvre’s quote sits there like a dare. “Change society” sounds like something scrawled on a dorm room wall after too much coffee and Camus, but pair it with space, actual, physical, claim this ground space, and suddenly you’re talking about something that matters. An amphitheater is a wound in the landscape, a deliberate carving that says “gather here, witness this.” Using it for reimagined fairy tales is like using a cathedral to sell bootleg cassettes. It’s profane. It’s necessary.
The fox, the mirror, the forest, these aren’t symbols, they’re accomplices. Trickster, reflection, labyrinth. Put them together and you get something feral and honest, the kind of honesty that only exists when you strip away the walls and the fourth wall and let the whole performance breathe the same air as the audience. Theater like this doesn’t ask for suspension of disbelief; it demands that you acknowledge exactly where you are, what you’re complicit in by showing up.
And the women writing it, directing it, they’re not fixing fairy tales, they’re detonating them. That’s the real revolution: not the space itself, but who gets to decide what happens there when the sun goes down.
A devised site-specific play
inspired by Rosemary Minard’s 1975 collection
Womenfolk and Fairy Tales
performed at dusk in Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater
Directed by Rebecca Chaleff and Rebecca Ormiston
Written by Rebecca Ormiston