Splish Splash
Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses
A parallel Puritan strain in our own culture gives Ovid‘s poetry a contemporary spin that isn’t lost on Mary Zimmerman. Indeed, to get to the heart of the stories, Zimmerman has deliberately chosen to decontextualize them, to pump up the anachronistic jokes (wearing tunics, her gods stand in the upper tiers of the set, puffing away on cigarettes) -- in other words, to appeal to children, while telling the adults in the audience, ”See, this stuff is timeless.“
But I doubt she‘d lose any child’s interest were she to return Echo to the legend of Narcissus -- or deliteralize some of the gestures or rarefy her tone, as she did in her transcendent The Arabian Nights at the Actors‘ Gang Theater a few years ago. Instead, Zimmerman offers us a few jokes, a torrent of passion, and stage images so powerful and beautiful they remain embossed in the memory -- while the fine ensemble, and even the stories themselves, get washed away in sea foam.
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