Doug Hara and Raymond Fox (Arena Stage/Teresa Wood)
Clichés, like myths, have been so long in existence that one sometimes forgets how useful they can be.
To throw the cliché “still waters run deep” at Mary Zimmerman’s gorgeous, liquidy Metamorphoses which closes this weekend at Arena Stage, is perhaps unfair for a production so ripe with surprises. But it does the trick.
Zimmerman’s series of vignettes based on the Ovid work, featuring Midas, Bacchus, Orpheus, Eros and Psyche and a couple dozen more Last Mythical Action Heros, started out as a graduate school project at the end of the 1980s and has obviously gone through multiple transformations of its own since.
It premiered in Chicago in 1996, then to odysseyed to New York, where it won the Tony Award for Best Director (Zimmerman) in 2002. What’s clear to someone drinking it in for the first time is how greatly the work has been fine-tuned by its encounters with different audiences. That matured quality is palpable in its iteration at Arena: Alive and interactive, it’s pretty damn near perfect.
Centered in and around, even underneath, the large, square pool of a set, each mode of storytelling is different, whether a simple one-on-one interview, a psychotherapy session, a wordless dance, a mocking song or a Rainier Maria Rilke poem.
And like the sloshing, shimmering body of water that serves as playground and stage, the stories can be placid one minute, turbulent the next.
Just how much telling and focus each myth needs depends how worn it is, and how heavy. Zimmerman’s pacing in this regard is adroit. The minimal Narcissus story gives us a winking and brief mirror moment of our own, and the whole thing plays out in the span of five minutes, wordlessly, over just the sound of a broom sweeping.
Other tales are more involved. Unavoidably, the dialogue at times harkens to recognizable, if vague, pop culture references. There are flavors of The Princess Bride and Tootsie. Midas’s monologue about business and wealth could be Gordon Gecko or Donald Trump, and the boozy imp he meets could be straight out of David Sedaris’s “SantaLand Diaries.”
Best of these: A young, spoiled Phaeton, who according to the legend almost burned the entire Earth, reclines on a yellow raft, whining to his therapist about the lifelong agony being the son of The Sun (Helios). This is legitimately how I imagine it goes like when Rob Kardashian talks to his shrink about his stepdad Bruce Jenner.
Metamorphoses also hosts some things you simply haven’t, in all likelihood, seen before; at least, not in this kind of presentation. Like visual uppercuts, you get a snake poised to bite Orpheus’s new bride; Eros, naked, blind, floating in a red bed; Midas striding through the water, his steps turning the ground into gold.
When we get to witness one of Poseidon’s furious thunderstorms at sea, it is primal, unrelenting and absorbing (and one of a couple moments in which the front row gets utterly soaked).
Spread across the entire theater, from the top of the stairs to the nooks and crannies under the pool’s walls, the ensemble cast wears the water, playing with it like a newly discovered toy.
Standouts are almost impossible to identify in such strong group work. However, Ashleigh Lathrop’s movements are hard to believe when, as Myrrha, the young woman afflicted and destroyed by carnal desire for her own father, she actually melts before your very eyes (this is no Wizard of Oz trickery either).
Lathrop is also pretty frightening as Hunger, a growling, insatiable monster clinging to Erysichthon (Chris Kipiniak, full of the elements and thunderous as hell) as he thrashes through the waves. When, as the brutal myth concludes, he begins to devour his own flesh, we’re given one of the night’s many strange but endearing zingers: “Bone appetit.”
But there is a gnawing sensation of a different sort present, which elevates this production beyond mere entertainment/showmanship. As over-the-top as these interactions between God and humanity can be — and as many laughs as they get—grief is a central character, too.
As poor Orpheus puts it, “I’ve tried to master this grief and I can’t.” With a few happy exceptions, amour-stricken couples gasp and claw at each other, at once sad and sexy and disturbing to the marrow.
In other words, bone appetit.
Metamorphoses runs through March 17 at Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth Street NW, (202) 488-3300. Tickets $40-$70.
