METAMORPHOSES
Circle in the Square, 1633 Broadway, at 50th Street, (212) 239-6200.
IT looks like a wading pool, apparently shallow and with a gangplank built round it.This is Daniel Ostling’s startling setting for Mary Zimmerman’s re-invention of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” which moved from off-Broadway’s Second Stage, pool and all, to open last night at the Circle in the Square.
If memory serves, Broadway hasn’t seen a working pool on stage since the 1952 musical “Wish You Were Here,” and “wish you were here” could be a fair quote for Zimmerman’s beautifully translucent, often moving show.
For its Broadway site, the production has been completely refigured and much improved. Adding to its immediacy is having the audience sit along three sides of that pool.
For here is that kind of theater that asks for total, sometimes unquestioning, emotional involvement, and demands the same commitment with which the actors make this re-invention of Greek and Roman myths totally credible.
It’s based, no doubt freely, on David Slavitt’s translation of the Latin poet Ovid, who gave us more than 100 poetic stories along the lines of King Midas, and Orpheus and Eurydice; Zimmerman, the writer and director, has selected eight.
All are presented with what’s known as “a contemporary sensibility,” which doesn’t mean they’ve been dumbed down, exactly, but quite often, sometimes engagingly, Zimmerman takes the line that a myth is good for a smile.
Take, for instance, her conceit in making Phaeton a spoiled rich kid who wants to borrow the keys to his dad’s car – his dad being Phoebus Apollo.
Yet Zimmerman is at her best in evoking the landscape of love – a woman vainly waiting on shore for her dead husband to return from the cruel sea, or the old lovers who, granted the wish to die together, are transformed by the Gods into entangled trees.
Her visual sense is impeccable, and her imaginative concepts have the emotional heft of a Julie Taymor (with whom she is bound to be compared), Andrei Serban or even Peter Brook.
This is talent, and it particularly reveals its individuality in the intimate way Zimmerman molds the performances of her actors – they all seem unaffectedly spontaneous, springing from character to character with the ease of trapeze artists with a safety net.
This is a remarkable show that’s to be seen not for its actors but its acting, not for its stories but its storytelling. It metamorphoses Broadway into a rare realm of magic.