From the very beginning, with Little Red wringing the birdie’s neck so she can put it in the little gift basket for her grandmother, Joan Schenkar’s The Universal Wolf strikes a different cord in this highly theatrical rendering of the famous Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. As the play progresses, the things are getting only weirder since one inversion of the original follows the other—the innocents are not so innocent after all, the aggressors turn into victims themselves, the horror becomes funny, the fun becomes scary. In The Universal Wolf, Schenkar has created a truly menacing, unpredictable and unstable world where all our expectations are turned topsy-turvy; the play is a provocation and an invitation for a revisionist reading of the famous fairy tale.