In the second episode of our series on the forest in fiction, Ellen Handler Spitz - a renowned specialist of psychology and the arts and senior lecturer in the Humaninties program at Yale - and I discuss Sondheim and Lapine’s musical, Into the Woods. 

Into the Woods brings together characters and story lines from several well-known fairy tales, drawing particularly on the Brothers Grimm’s versions, and explores the moral repercussions of the characters’ actions in a second act that begins “Once upon a time… later.” 

In his 1976 book The Uses of Enchantment, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim likens the woods of fairy tales to the unconscious. Spitz gives us a new version of this analogy, arguing that in Into the Woods, the woods function as “the province of and” where the choices we have to make in real life are suspended; where you “can meet a wolf, or a witch, a giant, a spell or a prince,” which may cause you to change or to learn something new. 

But there is no easy resolution in Sondheim and Lapine’s musical. As Red Riding Hood reflects, after having survived her encounter with the wolf, “isn’t it nice to know a lot!…. and a little bit not.”

If you’ve never seen Into the Woods, I encourage you to watch the stage production before you listen to this episode. A big thank you to Stephanie Kovacs Cohen and Adam David Cohen from Arc Stages who allowed me to use audio excerpts from their wonderful 2104 production of Into the Woods in this episode. You can watch their production in its entirety here.

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