Stage: Metamorphoses
March 16th, 2019 18:48![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopMetamorphoses, written and directed by Mary Zimmerman after Ovid and others - seen on 3/16/19 at Berkeley Rep
It's hard to get a strong response to a story when most of the audience knows exactly what's going to happen. Or is it? In the kinds of stories adapted here, the storyteller often starts by saying in effect "You all know this one" and then goes on anyway, because it's all about how vividly it can be told. Though I don't know how much of Zimmerman's text is straight from Ovid, the parts that seem to be are lovely; but most of what makes this play so memorable isn't the language but the staging, which is usually about stripping things away rather than adding them, and finding efficient and surprising ways to convey an idea.
The stage is a narrow footpath, only allowing movement in two directions, around a pool of water that serves as water or land or whatever's required, with a balcony for the gods. Like a kids' game, the rules of the space are different from one minute to the next but the actors make them very clear. The performances are simple and focused, well balanced between being specific characters and universal ones; it's hard to single anyone out, they're all good in different ways, although Sango Tajima gets to do most of the intense physical acting as Myrrha, Hunger, and Midas's daughter.
The three stories that are probably the most familiar to most people—Midas, Orpheus/Eurydice, and Psyche/Eros—are more or less at the beginning, middle, and end. In each case, while the part that you might think of as the punchline is telegraphed a mile away, the staging still gives it great force. For Midas it's because the passage leading up to it is so quiet and simple—he's just calmly walking around the path, with a little bell ringing at each step to tell us that he's turning the ground to gold—and then there's a single moment of action as he turns and sees his daughter, the first time he's actually looked at her, and it's too late and there's one last bell. For Orpheus, we get a similar turn and look and disaster—but then we get it again and again, like a terrible decision that you keep revisiting in your memory—and then we get the whole thing again differently, as the story changes to Rilke's version. For Psyche, the moment when she sees Eros is actually very small, barely interrupting the story that the narrators are telling, so that she has to move directly into her impossible tasks without having time to acknowledge her loss.
While there are plenty of transformations of the kind you'd expect from the title, most of the central moments in these stories are actually about looking—discovering something hidden or seeing someone in a new way (which could be good or bad: Erysichthon learns to see himself as food). Silenus, describing paradise to Midas, says that it's a place where "the people see each other." Also, the gods aren't exactly the capricious jerks we see in most modern retellings; they can be, but they can also sincerely want to help, or they can destroy you impersonally because that's just their job (the drowning of Ceyx by Poseidon—by hand, in about one foot of water—is another very simple moment of considerable intensity). They're everything you'd better pay attention to.
The form and concept and rhythm are so strong that even the one really bad idea—a psychoanalyst talking about the meaning of Phaeton's story while he's trying to tell it (not coincidentally, this is also the only part where Zimmerman uses anachronistic jokes as the focus of a scene, instead of just for occasional effect)—can't do much harm; the scene still works because other ideas in it are funny in unexpected ways, and also because at the very end the analyst's monologue stops being a shtick and becomes something meaningful. But even the relative goofiness of that scene serves a purpose, since it's a breather in between a story of psychological horror and the two extremely moving final pieces.
This play and this production are well thought out on every level, and basically killed me. To be seen if at all possible.
It's hard to get a strong response to a story when most of the audience knows exactly what's going to happen. Or is it? In the kinds of stories adapted here, the storyteller often starts by saying in effect "You all know this one" and then goes on anyway, because it's all about how vividly it can be told. Though I don't know how much of Zimmerman's text is straight from Ovid, the parts that seem to be are lovely; but most of what makes this play so memorable isn't the language but the staging, which is usually about stripping things away rather than adding them, and finding efficient and surprising ways to convey an idea.
The stage is a narrow footpath, only allowing movement in two directions, around a pool of water that serves as water or land or whatever's required, with a balcony for the gods. Like a kids' game, the rules of the space are different from one minute to the next but the actors make them very clear. The performances are simple and focused, well balanced between being specific characters and universal ones; it's hard to single anyone out, they're all good in different ways, although Sango Tajima gets to do most of the intense physical acting as Myrrha, Hunger, and Midas's daughter.
The three stories that are probably the most familiar to most people—Midas, Orpheus/Eurydice, and Psyche/Eros—are more or less at the beginning, middle, and end. In each case, while the part that you might think of as the punchline is telegraphed a mile away, the staging still gives it great force. For Midas it's because the passage leading up to it is so quiet and simple—he's just calmly walking around the path, with a little bell ringing at each step to tell us that he's turning the ground to gold—and then there's a single moment of action as he turns and sees his daughter, the first time he's actually looked at her, and it's too late and there's one last bell. For Orpheus, we get a similar turn and look and disaster—but then we get it again and again, like a terrible decision that you keep revisiting in your memory—and then we get the whole thing again differently, as the story changes to Rilke's version. For Psyche, the moment when she sees Eros is actually very small, barely interrupting the story that the narrators are telling, so that she has to move directly into her impossible tasks without having time to acknowledge her loss.
While there are plenty of transformations of the kind you'd expect from the title, most of the central moments in these stories are actually about looking—discovering something hidden or seeing someone in a new way (which could be good or bad: Erysichthon learns to see himself as food). Silenus, describing paradise to Midas, says that it's a place where "the people see each other." Also, the gods aren't exactly the capricious jerks we see in most modern retellings; they can be, but they can also sincerely want to help, or they can destroy you impersonally because that's just their job (the drowning of Ceyx by Poseidon—by hand, in about one foot of water—is another very simple moment of considerable intensity). They're everything you'd better pay attention to.
The form and concept and rhythm are so strong that even the one really bad idea—a psychoanalyst talking about the meaning of Phaeton's story while he's trying to tell it (not coincidentally, this is also the only part where Zimmerman uses anachronistic jokes as the focus of a scene, instead of just for occasional effect)—can't do much harm; the scene still works because other ideas in it are funny in unexpected ways, and also because at the very end the analyst's monologue stops being a shtick and becomes something meaningful. But even the relative goofiness of that scene serves a purpose, since it's a breather in between a story of psychological horror and the two extremely moving final pieces.
This play and this production are well thought out on every level, and basically killed me. To be seen if at all possible.
