Metamorphoses at Circle in the Square
I caught this show on Sunday with my friend Greer Lobdell, visiting from California over the amazingly balmy Veteran's Day weekend. It is not the script, particularly, that makes Metamorphoses special. The adaptation from Ovid into breezy American English is serviceable and witty enough, especially as it plays anachronistically against classical times. The Olympian gods don't bother to take themselves too seriously because they are perfectly aware that nobody believes in them today anyway.
The magic of the show resides in its brilliant central gimmick. The audience sits around a large pool of shallow water which, remarkably, supplies the center stage. The actors wade and splash and matter-of-factly play their parts as if ducks in human form. It's a delightful piece of reverse stagecraft to see literal water stand in for dry land rather than the other way around as most plays must have it.
Over the course of the show the pool exploits every association we attach to H2O: the sea, the womb, a highway, a desert, sensuality, purity, and so much else. Most importantly to Ovid's stories, the pool becomes the crucible of transformation. As a character rises from the surface, dripping and soggy from the universal solvent, it is an easy matter for the mind's eye to supply the rest of the metamorphosis as a bird or god or ghost.
Most faithful of all to the spirit of the ancients, the show exhibits a classical ease regarding the human body. Costumes get very clingy when wet, yet no actor betrays self-consciousness about it. Cupid performs his part completely naked except for the leather chest straps of an archer's halter. This reminds me of Columbia's current production of Peer Gynt, and the new ad campaign in which Samuel de Cubber lounges in nothing but YSL's M7 fragrance. The full monty is everywhere these days.
7:22:01 PM 
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