Little Orange Man, as many theatre-goers found out at last year’s Victoria Fringe Festival, is a play that everyone can take their own meanings and experiences from. The tender story of a little girl desperately looking to connect with her peers is touching and exhilarating; a fact that can be confirmed by audience members of all ages.
“Everyone does come away with something very different,” says Little Orange Man performer and co-creator Ingrid Hansen. “I had a really fantastic little old lady come see the show in Edmonton and she waited for me afterwards, and she said, “You made me feel 62 years younger.” I thought that was pretty cool.”
Hansen is mounting the show for a second time at Fringe, along with director and co-creator Kathleen Greenfield, and it’s a special run for her after she chose to move from her longtime home of Victoria to the big smoke in Toronto.
“I’m really excited to come back and perform there and connect with the theatre community there again,” says Hansen, who also plays the character of Gertie the Gopher on the APTN kids’ television show Tiga Talk. “There are a lot of really stellar people in Victoria.”
One of those stellar people is Greenfield, a UVic theatre program grad who brainstormed the idea of Little Orange Man with Hansen in their respective living rooms, using whatever makeshift props they could find.
“ingrid is tremendous and she always says she isn’t, but she’s also fearless, so it’s really easy to work with her,” says Greenfield. “Playing with stuff in our living rooms was a big part of developing the show, and knowing we were going to take it on the Fringe circuit we didn’t want to rely on the basic Fringe tech.”
The result is a show that cleverly uses household props, puppetry (watch out for a particularly cantankerous hippopotamus), and DIY lighting and shadow effects to tell a fantastical story about a 12-year-old girl named Kitt who uses an elaborate fantasy world to cope with alienation and tragedy.
“The end dance sequence gets me every time,” says Greenfield, “and everything in the story to do with Kitt’s grandfather really touches me. The theme of trying to connect with other people always gets to me and whenever I step back and see the show as an ultimate therapy exercise, I always get a little teary-eyed.”
At the very root of the production is a friendship and creative partnership shared by two immensely talented and creative women, both of whom contributed their own vision to Little Orange Man. “It evolved between the two of us. It wasn’t like we dreamed the entire show up and then staged it. It grew, and mutated, and changed,” explains Hansen. “I love working with Kathleen.”