Any stage adapter of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is faced with a quandary: What particular kinds of metamorphoses should be emphasized? The transformations become increasingly plural over the course of 250-plus Greco-Roman myths, which deal not only with the etiologies of objects in the natural world but also with gods taking the forms of animals to pursue their quarry, and mortals being transfigured by the thunderbolt of desire, turned into symbols of a god’s wrath or else petrified in the amber of their most enduring aspects. And that’s a partial list.
Tales of creation and re-creation are on voluptuous display in Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” which opened Sunday at Folger Theatre in Washington. Directed with ludic energy by Psalmayene 24, the “choreo-drama” never settles for a single, snowed-in sense of the title, but revels in instability and reversals. It’s also a marvelous palimpsest, revisioning Zimmerman’s Tony-winning play, which opened on Broadway more than 20 years ago and is based on a translation of Ovid’s epic by David R. Slavitt.
It opens with a striking dream ballet (or is it nightmare?), entrancingly choreographed by Tony Thomas. Figures in matching delft blue and green outfits (designed by Mika Eubanks) dance around a water nymph (Miss Kitty) who wears a horned mask with a corona of hay and a dress with the rough circumference of Saturn. They enact frieze-like tableaus that evoke the ordering of the cosmos from primordial chaos as well as something more sinister. In one, the all-Black ensemble — a first for Folger Theatre — links up arms and sways as if in a ship’s hold. In another, each bang of a drum sends a cast member to the floor, as if felled by a bullet.
Psalmayene 24 has said that his decision to cast the show with all-Black actors was precipitated by the police killing of Tyre Nichols. There’s a strong suggestion from the start that the world as we know it is underpinned by violence and the dispossession of Black people in particular. In her book “A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging,” the Canadian poet Dionne Brand writes: “To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction — a creation of empires, and also self-creation.” Threaded through the impeccable tapestry of this production is the suggestion that metamorphosis is intrinsic to the experience of people living in the wake of the African diaspora.
Skip to end of carousel
End of carouselStyle is where The Washington Post covers happenings on the front lines of culture and what it all means, including the arts, media, social trends, politics and yes, fashion, all told with personality and deep reporting. For more Style stories, click here.
After the opening section, a woman (Yesenia Iglesias) speaks the first words of the play: “Bodies, I have in mind, and how they can change to assume new shapes.” There’s much to admire about Zimmerman’s script, such as the way it elegantly deploys ring composition — a circular narrative rich with digressions — and the way it contemporizes and humanizes gods and demigods from 10 Ovidian myths (plus one by Rainer Maria Rilke).
Orpheus (Jon Hudson Odom), for instance, is figured as a rock star accoutered with a hype man and groupies. Phaeton (a skulking Edwin Brown) tells his therapist (DeJeanette Horne) about his issues with his estranged dad, Apollo (also Odom). The sun god, who appears, fittingly enough, in an aerie, would rather practice his pliés and strangle French words than finish a conversation with his son.
The cast, doubling up on multiple roles, is uniformly excellent, but the preternaturally versatile Odom, who has starred in such tonally different plays as “Ain’t No Mo’” and “An Octoroon,” bears the palm. He has such a large stage presence that it practically comes with its own Zip code. His most delectable role in “Metamorphoses” is as Midas, who saunters onto the stage to the theme music of “The Apprentice”; parallels between another short-tempered, major league narcissist who behaves like the perpetual star of his own reality show draw themselves.
The props and wig designers (Deb Thomas and Rueben D. Echoles, respectively) also leave no stone unturned in connecting the mythical to the mundane. Rolling bodies of water are effectively conjured by yards of cerulean fabric wending down the aisle and by William K. D’Eugenio’s riparian lighting. Eubanks’s costumes are also fabulously revealing: Iris (Renea S. Brown) wears a pink cotton-candy wig and a rainbow-hued skirt; the deity Sleep (Gerrad Alex Taylor) dons an eye mask with nacreous lashes; and Hunger (Iglesias), who prowls her way to the stage on all fours, looks like a vagrant who woke up in a haystack. The devil is indisputably in the details in this gorgeously realized production.
Metamorphoses, through June 16 at Folger Theatre in Washington. Approximately 90 minutes with no intermission. folger.edu.
