The foibles of actualizing male fantasy at the cost of, well, humanity are explored with a wry and mordant vigor ... In the Act swivels toward the cruder shades of heterosexuality, but it... rejiggers a common science-fiction device to explore the murkier truths of marriage.
Much of Ingalls’ fiction deals with the depressive realities of marriage and the frightening disregard, ambivalence or pure hatred husbands have for wives. In the Act is a funny story, well in line with the rest of the author’s vision.
The punchline, though foreseeable, is no less satisfying when it arrives ... The true comic engine lies in the protagonist’s practiced manipulation of her husband. What at first seems like docile submission is in fact carefully organized war theater.
In Helen’s malaise, I cannot help but hear echoes of Betty Friedan’s famous diagnosis of the American housewife’s "problem with no name" ... In Ingalls’s free-market take on Bluebeard, the fruit of female knowledge is neither damnation nor self-determination, but leverage ... As sharp as this particular line of critique is, the narrative refuses neat closures.
