Metamorphoses (review)

Toward the end of Metamorphoses, winner of the 2002 Tony Awards for Best Director and Best Play, Phaeton's therapist, one of the many roles played by Lisa Tejero, offers an explanation for mythology: "It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly."

Mary Zimmerman's play based on David R. Slavitt's translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid works to uncover the public dreams of ancient Rome that still reveal ambiguities of contemporary life. Melding modern language and images with tales of the ancients and their gods, Metamorphoses presents the enduring power of storytelling as the means by which we comprehend love, death, passion, fate, and, of course, change. For New York theatregoers recently affected by a singularly devastating public event—the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—Metamorphoses proves not only to animate Ovid's stories but also to tell a larger tale of human resilience within the creative impulse. Although many of the myths in Metamorphoses detail ill-begotten romances, the play is in many ways a love letter to the theatre itself—a place indeed of public dreams, and of the transformation of sorrowful personal memory to redemptive social narrative.

The greatest strength of Metamorphoses, however, is its stagecraft. Zimmerman, a professor of performance studies at Northwestern University and the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (1998), is a director who attends to visual detail and dramatic movement in an evocative and unusual setting. Since its world premiere, produced by Lookingglass Theatre Company at Chicago's Ivanhoe Theatre in 1998, Metamorphoses has been staged in and around a pool of water bordered by a wooden deck. Two scenic elements—a crystal chandelier hanging overhead and an oversized brownstone-style door upstage left—immediately identify to the audience that this is an unnatural space in which interior and exterior, culture and nature, humanity and divinity are in constant flux. Upstage left a large painting of the sky masks a high platform where actors playing gods and goddesses appear, ready to wreak havoc (at times carelessly) on the lives of hapless mortals below. Colorful lighting shifts this skyscape throughout the production, from "rosy-fingered dawn" to an indigo evening sky. For the initial New York run of Metamorphoses, the entire set was oriented in the proscenium architecture of Second Stage Theatre, providing clean execution of the beautiful images in Zimmerman's mise-en-scène. With the production's transfer to Broadway's Circle in the Square Theatre, however, the orientation of the theatre facilitates a semi-arena staging, with audience on three sides of the pool. Although some images are not as clear as in the off-Broadway production, the thrust allows for a greater sense of intimacy in the storytelling that comprises the predominant structure of the play.

Storytelling takes many forms in Metamorphoses. Each episode utilizes a different narrative form, whether it is the cautionary tale of King Midas told by one laundress to her younger greedy coworker, or the humorous story of adolescent resentment relayed by a god's son, Phaeton, to his therapist. One tale, of the young girl Myrrha, who was damned by a slighted Aphrodite to lust for her father, is actually a story-within-a-story—recounted by a desirous god Vertumnus to his disinterested beloved. In these and other myths of Metamorphoses, the verbal narration often gives way to wild and waterlogged movement sequences that eloquently depict ocean storms, furious passions, and miraculous transformations. Throughout the play, Zimmerman and her agile cast use the pool...