Awards
2002 Tony Award winner for Best Director
2002 Tony Award nominee for Best Play and Best Scenic Design
Time magazine's "Theater Event of the Year (2001)"
Synopses & Reviews
Mary Zimmerman's
Metamorphoses brings Ovid's tales to stunning visual life. Set in and around a large pool of water onstage,
Metamorphoses juxtaposes the ancient and the contemporary in both language and image to reflect the variety and persistence of narrative in the face of inevitable change.
Metamorphoses played around the country and Off Broadway before moving to Broadway's Circle in the Square Theatre in March 2002.
Based on David R. Slavitt's translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid.
Review
"Writer-director Mary Zimmerman's lovely, deeply affecting work...recaptures the primal allure of the theater....[I]t shows that theater can provide not just escape but sometimes a glimpse of the divine." Time
Review
"Mary Zimmerman's beautiful and deeply humane Metamorphoses...reanimates [Ovid's myths] with a combination of agile storytelling and enthralling stagecraft. Funny one moment, achingly sorrowful the next, Metamorphoses somehow manages both to lift you out of the moment you're living in and speak to it with piercing directness." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"With its emphases on love, loss and the transforming powers of memory and the imagination...the production has been reducing calloused New Yorkers to sobs." The New York Times
Synopsis
Based on Ovid's fifteen volume work of transformation myths, the tone of Mary Zimmerman's drama superbly echoes the play's theme of change as its physical production evolves onstage.
Metamorphoses' literature-into-drama approach gives the book a dual role in the marketplace, both as literature and as a script for performance. This is the first version of the play to appear in printed form.
Synopsis
Called by
Time the "theater event of the year," Mary Zimmerman's
Metamorphoses brings Ovid's tales to stunning visual life. Set in and around a large pool of water onstage,
Metamorphoses juxtaposes the ancient and the contemporary in both language and image to reflect the variety and persistence of narrative in the face of inevitable change. Nominated for three 2002 Tony Awards, including "Best Play,"
Metamorphoses earned Zimmerman a Tony for "Best Direction of a Play."
About the Author
Mary Zimmerman is a professor of performance studies at Northwestern University. She has adapted-directed The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, The Odyssey, The Arabian Nights, Eleven Rooms of Proust, and Journey to the West. She is a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, an ensemble member of Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company, and a Manilow Resident Director at the Goodman Theatre.
Table of Contents
List of Photographs
Production History
Metamorphoses
A Note on the Casting