The premise of Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It, the new show from Xhloe and Natasha, the New York-based playwright and performer duo, is rather simple: Bigfoot is little more than a game for two teenagers in an Appalachian town, until they discover a neighbour’s dog torn apart.

The duo split an incredible number of roles between them with great physicality. They play women gossiping around town, police officers, the mayor and other residents, showing the multiple perspectives within the community. Through gossip, misinformation, lies, suspicion and conspiracy theories, the simple game gradually escalates into a gunshot in the night and a disaster for everyone involved. Yet the Bigfoot story is also a distraction from what is actually happening in the town: the water supply is contaminated and damaging the residents’ health. The more the community focuses on the supposed monster, the further attention moves away from the real scandal, allowing the underlying problem to remain hidden.

The performers also create Bigfoot using only a few minimal props, which they later hang from the Stop sign in the background for much of the show. It looms over the stage as if Bigfoot is not a monster in physical form, but a manifestation of the political tragedy of the time we live in. Yet for a one-hour show, there are quite a few false endings that could have given the story more ambiguity. Instead, as the show carries on, it not only loses some of that ambiguity, but also makes the workings of a system of power that would normally be much more hidden increasingly explicit. We begin to see the logic and political satire too clearly, and the show moves further away from the complicity and ambiguity of reality.

Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It has finished its run