Change is so November 2008. Better put, the gloss-eyed anticipation of promised change is plummeting out of fashion. It'll surge back like 80's floral print eventually. For the time being, though, a wound-licking population is likely to gravitate towards a wistful, joyful, mature, and comforting comment on inevitable, rather than aspired-to, change. Something that says, "People have gotten fucked over by those whom they trusted and the world goes on!" and provides a catharsis is sure to be popular. Especially if it features a large pool, people hanging from the ceiling, and lots of half-naked attractive people. Enter Mary Zimmerman's
Metamorphoses, a modernized melange of Ovid's allegories which premiered with a grim prescience on Broadway in September 2001.
Water, like change, is fluid, frequently unpredictable, and life-affirming, so a high-walled pool that consumes the playing space is a smart little structural metaphor (though the still, calm, chlorinated water onstage does it a slight disservice). The play mimics the movements of water. Lyrical language condenses into modern vernacular, and the myths slide into one another over some rocky transitions (the myth of Myrrah's passion for her father is crammed into the myth of a god's attempt to snare the affections of a nymph through cross-dressing, and two barely-related myths are corralled in a conversation between laundresses). Then there's technical difficulty of leaping, falling, wrestling, and swimming in the pool without cracking one's head open like a coconut.
Kirk R. Tuck
This script already proposes enough difficulty without unnecessary complication. Simplicity is key here, and Zach Theatre's major mistake is shirking that obligation. Excessive design cripples this production. The steady stream of storyline is frequently obstructed by flailing attempts to making the show bigger, flashier, and more "ooooh"-inducing than ever actually suits the piece. Hell, it's a staging of stories from the oral tradition. The show could've been performed all in white with a refreshing lack of paraphernalia and pomp. Pacing could've been slowed, allowing audience to breathe between comedy and severity and actually register the impact of individual scenes (during the aforementioned Myrrah myth, for example). Instead, this production is manacled with cloying, pandering ploys. Aerial dancers are cool, but they push ticket sales more than storyline; there's hardly a scene where someone isn't hanging from something doing crazy shit for some reason. Preposterous, overly-literal costumes (Hunger wears skeleton pajamas) clash in scenes slathered with easy-choice popular radio music like "Soak Up The Sun" and that ukulele version of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow". An ill-fitting intermission is crammed where it shouldn't be, and transitions are pointlessly showy. Production value is so blaring and pushy as to be insulting. The show actually alienates because of the condescending attempts to make it accessible.
With all the vulgar, transparent chicanery going on, the onstage relationships suffer. Notable portions of the dialogue are high-school poetic and when it's performed in such a small space with so much else going on, a presentational, stentorian narrative delivery void of a genuine connection to the text crushes the impact the interactions could have. Smaranda Ciceu crumbles admirably in the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx, and Sarah Gay laces her Psyche depiction with a tremulous, piquing pain; the issues with performance are not completely across-the-... pool, but certainly commonplace enough as to further hinder an already impaired production.
It's still strange for a discussion of change not to be affecting. In the end, this is a conversation on the topic that, like other ones of late, is better left ignored.
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