La Ferme, a women’s-only condominium, boasts meeting spaces, a rustic café, and a place for women to truly be safe. Complete with farm-to-table cuisine and a-list inhabitants, La Ferme is plucked directly from the dreams of feminist thinkers and writers like Virginia Woolfe and Anne Sexton.
This is where we meet Frankie (Dayna Lea Hoffmann), a server and student who acts as the audience’s steward through the complex and absurdist landscape of Shadow Theatre’s All The Little Animals I Have Eaten. We find Frankie obsessing about a term paper, just like many students before her. As the show opens, she details her project: a geometric and non-linear graphic creation, which looks a whole lot like the fortune tellers made by elementary school children. But something’s missing. Frankie just can’t put her finger on what.
Karen Hines’ play leans into absurdity from the beginning. On her 24th day of insomnia, Frankie is shadowed by four figures in jumpsuits (brilliantly played by the charismatic ensemble which includes Coralie Cairns, Elena Porter, Noori Gill, and Sophie May Healey) who support her narration and often step in to create a vibrant cast of characters. We catch glimpses of hilarious figures that she encounters during her serving shift, including an insurance adjuster, an applicant to a position with Teen Vogue, and a rich woman who forgets about her dog because it is so small.
Each new scene is delightfully disorienting and unnervingly funny, filled with hilarious cultural references and dark humour. In one such instance, we enter an extended imagined scenario, in which Frankie declares that Sylvia Plath wouldn’t have killed herself if she had Facebook. The actors dive into the depths of this absurdity, parroting supportive Facebook comments and imaging the numerous likes Plath would receive on early posts of her poems. The result is a sequence that perfectly represents the heart of All The Little Animals: absurd and hilarious, with moments of social commentary balanced with striking moments of heart.
As director Alexandra Dawkins writes in her statement, All The Little Animals I Have Eaten “can, will, does, and fails to mean everything and nothing within the same moment.” But who needs meaning? We’re just happy to be along for the ride.
