RED FOLDER
Steppenwolf Now
January 27 – September 1, $75 for six online productions
www.steppenwolf.org
“Why aren’t you my friend?” a first grader asks his red folder in Rajiv Joseph’s devilishly clever and insightful short Red Folder, part of Steppenwolf’s online streaming portal, Steppenwolf Now. Written, directed, and illustrated by ensemble member Joseph, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and two-time Obie winner whose previous plays include Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Guards at the Taj, and Describe the Night, Red Folder is like an audiovisual children’s book gone mad, a deranged and demented — and repeatedly laugh-out-loud funny — story about fear of not fitting in, of loneliness and being different. “It’s something that I never would have conceived of doing outside of the restrictions that the pandemic has imposed on us,“ Joseph tells Steppenwolf artistic director Anna D. Shapiro in a video teaser.
Red Folder is a calmly told demented tale of a child’s fears in first grade
The tale takes place within a squiggly circle against a solid off-white background, with rather simplistic line-drawn characters and imagery, like a chapter of a miniature DIY graphic novel come to life. Joseph concentrates on red and black, with an occasional flash of green and yellow as anthropomorphic figures haunt the boy’s daily existence, which involves pudding, skulls, blood, a stained coffee mug, a mean teacher, and a beloved Hulk lunch box. The story is narrated in an appropriately cool, dispassionate tone by Steppenwolf’s Carrie Coon (Mary Jane, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), accompanied by Chris P. Thompson’s original piano score, a riff on Vince Guaraldi’s music for A Charlie Brown Christmas. The eleven-minute piece was filmed and edited by Joel Moorman, with animation by Christopher Huizar; it’s essentially a memory play that will send you back to first grade and childhood’s existential dread, remembering your teacher and classmates and favorite lunch box. Hopefully what happens to the boy didn’t happen to you, although you probably experienced the same fears, the same worries, and the same overall horror that accompanies one’s first encounter with institutional authority.
Red Folder is available for streaming as part of the Steppenwolf Now package, which also features James Ijames’s two-person short Zoom play What Is Left, Burns and Isaac Gómez’s audio play Wally World; coming up next are Vivian J. O. Barnes’s Duchess! Duchess! Duchess! in March, Donnetta Lavinia Grays’s Where We Stand in April, and Sam Shepard’s Ages of the Moon in June.
