I have to admit that I was surprised to see that the play, Scenes from Metamorphoses, based on the myths of Ovid by Mary Zimmerman, was being offered as part of the USC Department of Theatre and Dance’s season. My friend Ed Madden and I, along with our spouses, saw the play last weekend during its brief engagement, October 28-31, at the Booker T. Washington Lab Theatre on Wheat Street. Having had the opportunity to see the multi-award-winning production at Circle in the Square Theatre on Broadway in 2002, my memories of the experience were profoundly moving, and I remember being as impacted by the starkness of the minimalist set and costuming as I was by the power of the script and the heft of the acting and direction. The lighting in the Broadway production was so finely achieved that it almost became a character on its own.
Was it a good idea for a university to present a project as robust as Scenes from Metamorphoses? I’m still not sure.
A highly sophisticated project, Zimmerman refined her Metamorphoses over years of workshopping productions beginning in 1996 at Northwestern University. By the time it arrived on Broadway in 2002, the final iteration of the project was something pristine and exquisite. A compelling combination of the robust and the delicate that captivated audiences by reminding us of that conflict and resolution—hence, change—are both timeless and essential to life. The fact that Zimmerman also directed the play during its years on and off-Broadway should not be overlooked in terms of the organic flow in which she was able to offer her production.
While the title suggests that the presentation is an incomplete set of vignettes, in reality, we saw the play with all characters, as written, except with fewer actors. Based on David Slavitt’s 1994 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis the play features Cosmogony, Midas, Alcyone and Ceyx, Erysichthon and Ceres, Orpheus and Eurydice, Narcissus, Pomona and Vertumnus, Myrrha, Phaeton, Apollo, Eros and Psyche, and Baucis and Philemon. Zimmerman selected the myths to dramatize in order to replicate the rise and fall of a successful project, with all elements needed to create the arc of a well-accomplished stage play. Her use of the myth of King Midas, before his startling conflict and after his ultimate resolution represent the state of equilibrium that the play opens with and circles back to at the end.
The USC presentation featured Asaru Buffalo, Ezri Fender, Cameron Giordano, Cady Gray, Brighton Grice, Carly Siegel, and Nakao Zurlo, with direction by graduate student, Tiffani Hagan.
There were a number of challenges facing the team presenting Metamorphoses at USC last weekend. The greatest may have been the fit of this play for a group of undergraduate students. It can be difficult to discern where strengths and weaknesses come from—whether it is the actors or the director—without the conceit of knowing what the actors have brought to the table on their own. There was certainly an inconsistency in the performances with some players taking on a conscious meta theme to their interpretations and others a more lackadaisical approach. It was difficult to tell whether some of the nonchalance was prescriptive or organic. Others seemed uncomfortable but I’m not sure if their discomfort came from their roles or their own skin.
Madden made particular note of this. “One of the most interesting lines to me is: ‘You know what happened.’ The play is self-conscious about the fact that we know most of the stories. The art of the play lies in how they are put together and in how they are acted.”
Given the use of the meta-dramatic theme, Madden, who rated the story of Narcissus as among the most beautifully told, based on the “gestures and movement of the actors,” but wondered “why a woman held the mirror for Narcissus—given his love for his own male beauty, it is the one spot in the entire play that could have included a queer element.”
The greatest challenge to this interpretation of Metamorphoses may be found in the absence of the pool of water which is central to every story line and is, in fact, the touchstone of the play. Originally written to have positioned center-stage a large, multi-use body of water serving as a character in and of itself—a place to wash, the ocean, the river Styx, and more—the pool of water should act as the central part of the set, as a prop, as a destination, as a central unifying thread, and as the greatest symbol of change, or metamorphosis, itself. While this interpretation of the play uses a wooden barrel in that role, the barrel also becomes a receptacle for props and discarded clothing, and it is cast aside and ultimately moved off stage in what felt irreverent to this viewer.
The height of the performance, for both Madden and I, was the telling of the story of Phaeton, son of Helios, who hounded his father into letting him drive his chariot of horses across the sky creating the daily rising and falling of the sun. Phaeton’s failure to handle such a daunting task results in the scorching of the land and other earthly consequences as the boy had taken on more than he was capable of accomplishing. We both appreciated the role of the therapist who offered, as Madden says, “a way to understand the myth, and yet the very human story if the teenage boy.”
The epitaph on Phaeton’s tomb is ironically said to read, “Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god's chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.” And while the cast and crew of Mary Zimmerman’s Scenes from Metamorphoses certainly did not fail, there is no doubt that they grew from the experience in the face of so many challenges presented them, not the least of which were the challenges they each wore on their faces—the very emblem of creating performance art in the days of Covid-19: their masks. As Madden says, the masks “Made some of the language difficult to understand, especially if the music was too loud, and may have caused some over-acting because the actors could not depend otherwise on facial movements to carry emotion.”
Kudos to the cast and crew of USC’s Metamorphoses. Every theatre artist should be so lucky to as to have the opportunity to make this play a part of their artistic lives.
-Cindi Boiter with Ed Madden
