“What's unique about this play is that a lot of people can look at it… and relate to it,” says director Chris Fontanes of the new play the wolf you feed, “[probably] they’ve felt times where they wanted to run away, where they wanted to be supported by this wolf pack, where they wanted to feel somewhere where they felt seen and loved and accepted for who they are, not who they should be.”
The play, by Darcy Parker Bruce, is a modern fable about finding one’s true place in the world. “Imagine if you took the story of Where The Wild Things Are and combined it with the aesthetic of Twin Peaks,” Fontanes explains. “It is about a recently separated woman, Max, played by Rachel Hancock, who is living on at a rundown motel in the middle of nowhere called the Shady Pines Motel. It's at the edge of a national forest and while she's there, she's trying to decide what she wants to do with her life, basically. And while she's deciding this, there's a pack of these wolves that live in the national forest who come out and they kind of hang out in the parking lot of this hotel and they eat the trash from the dumpster and Max befriends these wolves and these wolves want Max to run away with them and to join her pack and the play is about their relationship and Max's decisions.”
Phoenix Shaw, who plays the wolf Pamplemousse, says the role was a natural fit. “I think it was very cosmic for me because I've always just been like a wolf person my entire life,” he says. “It's actually just been my favorite animal and [also] the thing that people would use to describe me if I was an animal. And so I remember reading the play when Chris emailed it to me and being like, oh, I, I got it. I gotta get this [role] like right now. If I don't, who am I?”
Hancock says she identified with the character of Max and also found that playing the role offered her a surprising amount of emotional healing. “In my younger days, I made a lot of decisions that put me in a spot of difficulty,” she says. “And to be able to examine and dig into a character like Max, where she has this team of wolves behind her saying and offering and giving and listening… I look back on my years of not having a group to listen and to back me up and to offer and to give. So it's very healing for me as a person who had a very challenging young adulthood to be with this cast who have just swarmed me with love and care and understanding.”
“That's what I would want people to take away from it,” Shaw says, “is that there’s a pack for everyone. Like maybe you're not in it right now, but they're coming to you or you're going to them, you know? It's going to happen.”
Shaw adds that while there’s a message to take away, the wolf you feed is also just kind of about having a good time. “It's also such a… silly little adventure, you know,” he says. “We're all a bunch of punk wolves running around being like, hey, hey, come play with us, come join, you know? And seeing a bunch of adults just give in to that whimsy and magic is so fun and cool. And everyone comes out of it looking like a little kid again, like I was on the playground pretending to be a wolf. That’s definitely the best part, is that we're just playing and having fun the whole time, so everyone else around us is too.”
'the wolf you feed' is onstage through February 7 at the VORTEX
