Metamorphoses
Aerialists add theatrical magic to the myths here, but a Texas twang sounds off
Reviewed by Barry Pineo, Fri., Sept. 10, 2010
Metamorphoses
Zach Theatre Whisenhunt Stage 1510 Toomey, 476-0541 www.zachtheatre.org
Through Sept. 26
Running time: 2 hr., 10 min.
Poor playwrights. They lie at the mercy of their interpreters, and some of those scribes, at least the living ones, don't like it. Edward Albee has been known to send spies to community
theatre productions of his plays to ensure that the actors remain true to his intentions. Samuel Beckett once took a theatre company to court to try to put a stop to an all-female production of Waiting for Godot. And if you try to do some gender swapping with Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein will rise from their graves to prevent it.
But when it comes to the performing arts, artistic license rules, and as long as men are playing the men's roles and women the women's, you can pretty much get away with anything. Which brings us to Zach Theatre's latest Equity production of Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses. Based on the epic of the same name by the Roman poet Ovid, Zimmerman's theatrical adaptation retells the stories of a number of Greek myths – Midas, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Narcissus, among others – in order to focus on that most timeless and endlessly fascinating subject, love. Director Dave Steakley has chosen, in one notable instance, to take one of the stories and update it to the present day, dressing Midas, he of the golden touch, in jeans and a 10-gallon hat and having him speak with a Texas twang.
Steakley doesn't always try to update the myths, which is a good thing. Staging these timeless stories in and around a pool of water on Zach's Whisenhunt Stage, Steakley and his designers, almost without fail, echo the origins of the stories. The gods – Zeus, Poseidon, Hermes, Apollo – are immediately recognizable to anyone with a passing knowledge of myth, thanks to Blair Hurry's sumptuous and character-specific costume design. Add Nicole Whiteside's aerial choreography, through which most every god descends from the upper regions of the theatre – sometimes slipping straight into the water, sometimes hanging in space and performing the most acrobatic of dances – and you have an evening of palpable theatrical magic. Whiteside is ably assisted by multiple aerialists, and although the show is a true ensemble effort in which 15 performers take on multiple roles, one of the aerialists, Andy Agne, particularly stands out with a presence that is magnetic and undeniable – he all but steals the show without ever speaking a word, especially as the angry Poseidon. Among those who do speak, Rachel Wiese brings a believable sense of wicked play to the nymph Oread, of innocence to the doomed Eurydice, and of real tragedy to the incestuous Myrrha.
But that Midas in a 10-gallon hat hangs with me, as does the choice of having so many of the actors declaim the text. This declamation is particularly pronounced in the many narrators that tell the tales. Granted, Zimmerman uses a kind of formal language, but the stentorian delivery doesn't support it, perhaps because this is a play about love – and love, more often than not, is soft, gentle, and caring, not loud, sharp, and precise. And while the parallel between Midas and a rich Texas rancher can certainly be drawn, that Texas twang doesn't sound right coming from this king, and these stories that reach from the distant past to touch us in the present don't seem to sit comfortably in a Lone Star frame.