Shotgun’s ‘Once Upon a Time’ for our own time
The fairy tale archetypes that open “Iron Shoes,” a collaboration between Shotgun Players and Kitka Women’s Vocal Ensemble, are the sort that have been burned into your brain since childhood: two bad sisters and one good one; a wrathful father who issues capricious enjoinments like “I forbid you to enter that room!”; a prince in the guise of a repulsive animal.
A decade in the making, this world premiere uses 15 performers to tell three parallel stories, sourced from Eastern European myths, about women cursed to walk the world in iron shoes. “Iron Shoes” doesn’t simply retell those old stories, but breaks out of them, endowing the protagonists with the power to rewrite their own “Once Upon a Time.