42 2 Chirico

Zimmerman's Metamorphoses: Mythic Revision as a
Ritual for Grief

Miriam M. Chirico
Comparative Drama, Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 2008, pp. 149-179 (Article)
Published by Western Michigan University
DOI: 10.1353/cdr.0.0014
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Universidad Nacional de Colombia (22 Jul 2014 23:07 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cdr/summary/v042/42.2.chirico.html
149
Zimmermans Metamorphoses:
Mythic Revision as a Ritual for Grief
M:n:nm M. Cn:n:co
If we werent thinking all the time in terms of persons, if we were thinking of
Nature, all Nature going on and on, parts of it dyingwell not dying, changing,
changing is the word I want, changing into something else, all those elements
that made the person changing and going back into Nature again and reap-
pearing over and over in birds and animals and owersUncle Craig doesnt
have to be Uncle Craig!
Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
W
hen artists turn to Greek or Roman mythology as the source ma-
terial for their works, they invite their audiences to contemplate
themselves through a collective dream. Mary Zimmermans Metamor-
phoses, which premiered at the Lookingglass Teatre in Chicago in 1998,
allowed audiences on the cusp of a new millennium to return to these
ancient myths and consider their contemporary relevance. In a meditative,
ninety-minute production, the actors performed nine of Ovids tales on
a minimalist set dominated by the unusual presence of a twenty-seven-
foot-long pool. However, when the play transferred to New York City and
opened at the Second Stage Teatre shortly afer September 11, 2001, the
classical myths about death and loss took on greater resonances than
before.
1
Te performances in New York moved beyond the illuminat-
ing dramatization of Ovids mythology that the Chicago audiences had
witnessed to provide the New York spectators with an opportunity for
contemplating their communal loss and grief.
Teater, when it responds to social or political events in compelling
ways, can serve as a political barometer for our times. Te particular
conuence between a plays performance and a moment of historical
upheaval results in another text, a text that exists midway between the
150 Comparative Drama
performance and the audience who witnesses it. Te best way to approach
such a collaborative text is through studying the audiences response to
a theatrical performance. Te aective power behind Metamorphoses
comes from a synthesis of two distinct, provocative forces acting upon
the audience: the spiritual associations myth possesses, combined with
ritualistic theatrical devices. Te productions hermeneutic dramaturgy,
which not only involves retelling myths but emphasizes the very process
of re-vising or re-seeing them, prompts the audience members to
rethink their own conceptual understanding of death, not as loss, but as
transformation.
With its origins in reader-response theory, spectator-oriented dra-
matic criticism establishes a methodology for analyzing how a play works
upon the audience. A perfect example of how an audiences response to
a play can dier from a readerly response appears in Una Chaudhuris
essay Te Spectator in Drama / Drama in the Spectator.
2
Her article
focuses on Peter Shaers Equus and illustrates the discrepancy between
the critical and popular receptions of the play. She points out how the
theater critics who panned the play failed to grasp the inuence of extra-
dialogic factors upon the audience, such as the conguration of the stage
into a dissecting theater, which permitted the audience to participate in
analyzing the boys disturbed neurosis. In her opinion, the critics were too
preoccupied with the literary merit of the piece and failed to appreciate
the works intuitive appeal for the audience. Turning to reader-response
theory, an approach that minutely describes the dynamics of an event
and studies what the text does to a reader, Chaudhuri nds an ideal
mechanism for bridging the divergent responses. As Chaudhuri focuses
on the semantic eld created during the performance of Equus and
studies the response-structure within the audience, she creates a read-
ing of the play that is an analysis less of its themes or dialogue and more
of the eect the archetypal images and staging had upon the audience.
Te audience takes on a collaborative role during the performance that
the theater reviewers failed to appreciate. Fortunately, for the purposes of
this article, the theater reviewers of Metamorphoses judiciously took into
account the mediation between the spectator and the performance, and
I draw upon their reviews to substantiate my own reading of the plays
performative power, to support the claim that the production encouraged
Miriam M. Chirico 151
New York audiences to respond to the traumatic events of September 11
within the shielded, collective environment of the theater.
Evidence indicates that many audience members drew a connection
between the production of Metamorphoses and the events of September
11.
3
In one New York Times review, Ben Brantley writes how the play
speak[s] with a dreamlike hush directly to New Yorkers souls and that in
the portrayal of Ovids tales of transformation, themselves the product of
an era of uncertainty and a shaken empire, Ms. Zimmerman gives physical
life to the forms that grief assumes.
4
Another reviewer, William Meyers,
also reads the tragedy of September 11 onto the play: When Metamor-
phoses opened in New York shortly afer the World Trade Center attack,
audiences responded with open emotion to the way it confronted the
ineluctable. Even today, nothing one sees happening on Zimmermans
stage is any more unbelievable than that the World Trade Center should
have been metamorphosed from twin towers of steel and glass to two in-
substantial beams of light.
5
Julia Whitworth in Teatre Journal mentions
how the play works on theatergoers in New York City recently aected
by the terrorist attacks of September 11; she notes how the play does
not merely present Ovids stories, but that it also tells a larger tale of hu-
man resilience within the creative impulse.
6
Each reviewer projects onto
the production the catastrophic loss New Yorkers suered and impresses
onto these myths a narrative of grief.
Catastrophic and unexpected death is meaningless and unfathomable.
Te deaths that occurred on September 11 manifested the disorder, terror,
and hatred that exists within our global society and raised questions that
are ultimately unanswerable. Te production of Metamorphoses, with its
movement outside of secular time and its mythic stories and ritualistic
gestures, provided the audience a pattern of experience by which to ex-
amine feelings of loss and grief. Oering a play afer September 11 that
confronted death so obviously and frequently was courting emotional
risk, and Zimmerman felt apprehensive on opening night. She noted in
an interview:
When we had our rst audience, I was tremblingI mean shaking, really
hard, because we were about to present these stories that had such resonance,
that were full of sudden violence and transformation. I thought, I dont
know whos here or what their proximity to the [September 11] event isand
they dont know what were about to drag them through.
However, by the end of the evening, Zimmerman sensed a calming
reaction from the audience: Oh, so thats what catharsis is. Tis thing
Ive read about my whole life, that the theater is supposed to do, Ive
just witnessed it: going through pity and terror, and surviving it.
7
Tus,
taking Chaudhuris directive to pay explicit attention to the spectators
experience and to distinguish between what a play says (or seems to say)
and what it does to the spectator,
8
this article explores how Zimmermans
production of Metamorphoses had a spiritual and cathartic eect upon
New York audiences.
I. Metamorphoses and Mary Zimmerman
Best labeled an adapter-director, Mary Zimmerman draws her perfor-
mance pieces from literary texts, creating a genre known as Readers
Teater. Because of her keen attention to stage pictures and choreography
in her productions, her work has also been described as theater of im-
ages
9
and likened to the style of Robert Wilson, Pina Bausch, and Julie
Taymor. While her plays are drawn from numerous sources, such as Prousts
memoir-novel and Leonardo da Vincis mathematical notebooks, many
of her productions come from mythical or folkloric sources: she brought
to life Tales from the Arabian Nights (1992); her play Journey to the West
(1995) was based on Hsi Yu Chi, an ancient Chinese tale; and Mirror of
the Invisible World (1997) was inspired by Haf Paykar, a tenth-century
Persian tale. She also dramatized stories from Homers Odyssey (1999)
before turning to Metamorphoses. Zimmermans dedication to dramatizing
mythic texts is due to their origins in oral poetry: by staging [myths],
she reveals, I feel like Im returning them to their natural environment.
Teyre very amenable to staged performance.
10
Ovids lengthy poem Metamorphoses, written during the Augustan
period, consists of a collection of loosely connected tales that trace the
origins of the world and end with the deication of Julius Caesar, who
died the year Ovid was born. Taking his stories from Greek and Roman
legends and shaping them according to his own sensibility, Ovid provides
a panoply of human and divine characters, mysterious sights and en-
chantments, that range in tone from comedy and romance to horror and
violence, all sharing the common theme of physical transformation. His
stories are like Chinese nesting dolls, each one tumbling out of or inter-
rupting a previous tale. Audience members are frequently familiar with
the characters, even if they have never read Ovid: references to Pygmalion,
King Midas, Icarus, and Orpheus abound in popular culture. Zimmerman,
basing the dialogue for her play on David Slavitts 1997 translation, stays
true to this narrative style in performance, where the characters of one
story become the narrators of another tale.
Metamorphoses, despite its literary origins, is more performance art
than dramatic literature, and this article draws heavily upon a reading
of stage imagery, choreography, and ritual to consider the eect of the
production upon the audience. While the dialogue is occasionally lin-
guistically rich, the characters are nondeveloped types and the plot is
determinedly linear and simple. Te acting style itself is precious and
self-conscious, in the manner of college students conducting a tour of
a university art gallery, but this non-naturalistic manner is necessary
because the actors are portraying archetypes instead of characters.
11

Enacting myth does not require creating a plausible character, but rather an
emblematic gure who demonstrates a particular, identiable human trait.
King Midas, for example, stands in for all greedy mercenaries throughout
time. Similarly, this theater of human sculpture, where the body undergoes
unusual gurative transformations into a tree or a bird, arrests the eye and
the imagination. Te production was, in fact, reviewed as a dance piece
because of the degree to which it incorporated lyrical movement.
12
Tese
alterations of human form, in addition to being Ovids central motif, un-
derscore the very premise of theater itself: physical transformation. Tus
Ovids motif of bodily transformation as a sign from the gods is doubly
reinforced by the medium of the theaterwhere actors are converted into
characters and a bare stage is transformed into a magical locale.
II. Myth and the Teater
Myths are hereditary, fantastical stories that have their roots in particular
classical cultures. Mythic tales create an unworldly resonance for the spec-
tator; the setting lifs the individual out of ordinary time and the present
moment, and places him in mythic timean ambiguous term for the
timeless quality myths manifest. Tey are told in bold strokes that suggest
the universality of experience and provide the listeners with a sense of
connection between them and centuries of people who have heard these
tales before. Tere is also a quality about myth that makes people feel as
if they are standing in the presence of great truths, possibly because the
heroic gures, the ubiquitous gods, and the fatalistic endings convey a
sense of sacred wisdom. Mircea Eliade speaks about this rareed quality
when he writes, Myths reveal the structure of reality, and the multiple mo-
dalities of being in the world. Tat is why they are the exemplary models
for human behaviour; they disclose the true stories, concern themselves
with the realities.
13
Myths concretize for us the basic patterns of human
existence, without the supercial minutiae of our quotidian lives.
Te theater, like myth, has long been associated with sacred experi-
ences, in large part due to its origins in ancient celebrations of the di-
vine. Te City Dionysia festivals in ancient Greece, which incorporated
theatrical contests, the proximity of the temples to the theater, and the
presence of divinities as characters in the plays, reinforce the close con-
nections between theater, ritual, and religion in classical Greece. Seated in
amphitheaters and witnessing plays about destiny and free will, audience
members were prompted to reect upon the spiritual dimension of their
lives, not as individuals, but as a collectivitya practice that has all but
disappeared in modern theater. However, the communal nature of telling
sacred stories in the theater caught the attention of several reviewers of
Metamorphoses; Ben Brantley notes how the thrust-stage arrangement was
reminiscent of a Greek stage. Tis stage provides felicitous associations
with Greek and Roman amphitheaters, he wrote, adding, the correspon-
dence is more than symbolic. Here you are always aware of the other people
watching, appropriate for a show that stresses the value of shared cultural
myths and the emotions they summon.
14
Brantley does not use the word
spiritual, but he does point out the communion of audience members
and their collective awareness of each other due to the seating arrange-
ment and their shared mythic heritage. Richard Ouzounian also refers
to the audiences collective unconscious in reviewing the play: Simply
put, Metamorphoses is one of those rare works that returns theatre to its
sacred origins, turning it into a place of awe and wonder that is capable of
dealing with the most profound issues.
15
Deborah Garwood, reviewing
the production for PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, compares the
process of attending the production to psychological therapy: Teatre
and therapy do converge. Viewers experience the cumulative synergies
brought together by the players and stage magic towards the end. Audi-
ences responded to the play as if gripped by the cathartic eect of an
ancient Greek drama.
16
Teater has always provided a means of giving
physicality to the imaginative life, but Metamorphoses goes a step further;
it facilitates a communal and sacred interpretation of classical myth by
the dramaturgical devices it incorporates in performance.
Te play, rst of all, emphasizes mythology over science. A scientist
begins the play, speaking of the worlds origins. She wears a lab coat and
heavy-rimmed glasses, and shakes a jar of water and sand as empirical
evidence of the worlds origins, yet her speech harkens to mythology when
she reveals how a god brought light into the world and separated the water
from the dry land. Tus, if we believe that the primitive belief system of
mythology was replaced by rational analysis, this production corrects that
vision: science has not completely taken the place of myth. While science
can explain the world through deductive reasoning, it is not capable of
expressing the mystical or irrational component of human existence. In a
later scene, a psychologist comments on our psychological need to revisit
these ancient myths. Turning to the spectators, she beckons them to view
myth as a resource for intuitive understanding and wisdom; she states,
the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we
give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal
escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions.
17
Secondly, as a genre, myth speaks abstract truths though a symbolic
system that is aective rather than informative, and Metamorphoses re-
inforces this discursive mode. Te production stages various tableaux
that strike the imagination and leave haunting aferimages: Psyche enters
holding a candelabra in the dark and wades through the pool to peer
at her lover whom she imagines to be a monster; Midass daughter lies
frozen on her back from having hugged her father, her arms and legs cir-
cling the nothingness where her father was; Orpheus kneels in a shower
of rain to plead with the gods for Eurydice. Like a Beckettian symbol of
two men and a scrawny tree, Zimmermans postural attitudes work upon
us suggestively. Tese carefully constructed groupings are based on im-
provisational exercises and arise organically from the actors work in the
studiofurther proof of the unconscious nature of these visual tableaux.
Psyche (Antoinette Broderick) satisfies her curiosity to see Cupids
(James McKay) body in the dark in the Hartford Stage Companys
2004 production of Metamorphoses. Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson.
Doug Hara, an actor who works extensively with Zimmerman and has
performed in seven of her shows, attests to her being a very image-based
director. Her strength continues to be creating incredible stage pictures
and directing the movement of those pictures.
18
In addition to the actors poses and positions, the scenic elements
work upon the audience at the unconscious level. Te set is comprised
of three rectangular structures: an oversized oaken door with a transom
window, a suspended canvas painting of white clouds, and a wooden
platform surrounding a shallow pool. Brantley describes the set as evoca-
tive, mentioning how it recalls the enchantment of Jean Cocteaus fantasy
lms and notes how Daniel Ostlings set has the dislocating timelessness
of a Magritte painting due to the 1920s-style brownstone door on one
side of the stage and [the] scrim with projections of shifing sky on the
other.
19
His nod to two key surrealist artists who dealt in Freudian al-
lusions clearly indicates a set designed to tap into the audiences primal
selves. Te larger-than-life doorway signies transition to another place
or state of existence. Te glass chandelier denotes Gilded Age opulence,
reminiscent of romance or fairy tales. Te set evokes the four elements and
can thus be divided into realms: water (that magnicent pool), heaven
(the cloud-ecked scrim behind which the gods plot and pity) and the
world of mortals (the wooden door).
20
Te large swimming pool may
stand in for a baptismal font, suggestive of new beginnings, or conver-
sion. Zimmerman explains its multiple dimensions: Being named dif-
ferent things, the water becomes dierent things, besides being a symbol
of transformation transculturally, as an element that both puries and
corrupts. Everyone changes. Change is so necessary, yet so painful.
Its the condition of human life. Tere will be transformation, and you
will grow old.
21
And psychologists hold that in dreams, any large body
of water signies the unconscious. Terefore, the properties upon the
stage, though deliberately ambiguous in their denotations, work together
to suggest the deep realms of the human psyche; the set design is allusive
enough to be open to many interpretations and primes the audience to
move away from the contingent and toward the sacred.
Furthermore, Metamorphoses reliance on the techniques of Readers
Teater engages the audience as a collectivity. Readers Teater is a par-
ticular kind of theater dened by its intention to present a narrative text,
such as a poem or short story, to an audience, rather than a play script.
Certain conventions dene its practice, as detailed in the book Readers
Teater: Toward a Grammar of Practice.
22
In addition to its origination in
literary texts, this theater is very simple and requires the least amount of
theatrical devices; sets, costumes, and properties are kept to a minimum.
Its stripped-down nature draws our attention to the language and the
stories. Readers Teater ofen incorporates onstage narrators to highlight
further the literary origins of the work or to provide information that can
only be oered by a character outside of the story. Tese narrators speak
directly to the audience in a presentational style and hold a manuscript
in their hands from which they read. Te characters method of directing
their lines toward the audience, or delivering their lines in a presentational
manner tends to universalize the experience,
23
in addition to creating an
intimate connection between narrator and audience. Tus, the presenta-
tional style of Metamorphoses readily draws the spectators into tales that
seem personal and prevalent.
Each tale in Metamorphoses has an onstage narrator: the scientist who
lectures about the formation of the world or the laundresses who gather
together to gossip about Midas as the action unfolds before our eyes. Te
mythic depiction of Phaeton setting the world on re is conveyed in nar-
rative style: Phaeton engages in a session of psychoanalysis, describing
to his therapist how he lost control of Apollos sun-chariot. Tis device
of turning and speaking directly to the audience positions the spectators
as active listeners rather than passive observers; they become a group of
children gathered expectantly for a bedtime story. As Frank Galati recounts
Zimmermans use of legends and fairy tales, She reaches for meanings
that work on levels of the unconscious, levels operating when audiences
become children again.
24
Once congured into the role of nave listeners, the audience members
more readily accept the mystical messages behind the myths, almost as
if they were adherents of a collective faith, gathered in a sacral environ-
ment. For example, the narrator will occasionally presume the audiences
spirituality. One narrator, upon seeing a wife nally discover her lovers
dead body afer a period of anguished waiting, remarks, Te gods are
not altogether unkind. Some prayers are answered (31), and later says,
When you see a miracle like that, how can you deny the existence of the
gods? (32). Other narrators provide critical commentary to increase our
moral understanding of the play: referring to an avaricious, self-centered
individual, Erysichthon, the storyteller notes, Te emptiness within him
was unappeasable. Youve seen such men yourself, Im sure. Te godless
are always hungry (3940). Te constant framing of the onstage action
with a critical commentary directed at the audience might be construed as
heavy-handed.
25
But in the atmosphere of this world, unlike a realistic play,
the device of storytelling puts the audience into the role of acolytes and
encourages them to see the myths as manifestations of signicant truths.
III. Myth, Catharsis, and Conceptual Metaphor:
Death-as-Transformation
Of the nine myths that Zimmerman chose to stage, six are about demise
of a loved one. But because the stories are mythic rather than realistic,
the production is not personally intrusive; unlike the intentions behind
realism, the artistic style behind this production does not ask that the
audience identify with individualized moments of contemporary loss.
Te play opens with its most fantastical tale about loss, the myth of King
Midas and how his thirst for money caused his own daughter to turn to
gold. Although she has been changed into a statue and thus lost to him,
she is still present, though transformed; she lies on her back, her arms
and legs frozen in an O-shaped embrace, until another actor hoists her
up and carries her ostage. Te eect of her transformation is powerful
and introduces the overriding motif of the play: death as an alteration
of form.
Te performances of Metamorphoses revealed a remarkable conu-
ence between mythic revision, that is, dramatizing myths upon the stage,
and the dramaturgical rituals that initiated a cathartic experience within
the audience members. Aristotles concept of catharsis has been debated
by scholars and philosophers over the centuries, but most agree that
catharsis is a purging or cleansing of the emotions that the spectators
feel in seeing the events of a tragedy unfold and come to completion.
Psychotherapists also use the term catharsis to refer to a process patients
undergo to relieve themselves of painful and ofen repressed emotions.
Te elds of drama and psychology have ofen intertwined, chiey in
using dramatic re-enactment for therapeutic means; the chief theorist
of this eld is Jacob Moreno, with his 1946 work Psychodrama. Recent
articles have been written about the therapeutic application of theater
afer a catastrophic incident, such as Ivy I-chu Changs essay about chil-
dren who were traumatized afer the 1999 earthquake in Taiwan.
26
While
Metamorphoses is in no way a psychodrama, the ways in which audiences
responded to the play signify that the aect upon them was therapeutic
and allowed them to work through emotions of grief and loss.
One scholar and director, David A. Garrick, has compared the psy-
chotherapeutic model of catharsis to the experience spectators have of
emotional release and cognitive insight. He discusses therapeutic work
done with World War II soldiers suering from post-traumatic stress
disorder. When a soldier is led by a trained therapist through certain sug-
gestive scenarios that compel him to relive painful moments, he is able to
bring unconscious material to light and work around emotional obstacles.
Te process specically involves two steps: abreaction and catharsis, that is,
reliving the repressed episode and releasing the concomitant emotion.
27

Te rst phase involves hearing the story of anothers emotional loss, typi-
cally the loss of a loved one. Tis other is a faintly disguised version of
the patient. Te patient, listening to the story, experiences the arousal of
his own intense emotions and relays these feelings to the therapist. Tis
rst phase is not unlike the experience of watching Ovids tales unfold
upon the stage, although the audience members are silent witnesses. In
the second phase, catharsis, the patient accepts the therapists explana-
tions about these intense feelings and thus develops a cognitive under-
standing about his emotions. As he does so, he is nally aware of a quiet
emotional equilibrium because the previously unresolved emotional
work has been completed.
28
Garrick is quick to state that catharsis in the
theater is only analogous, and not identical, to the experience of catharsis
in psychotherapy,
29
and one must admit that spectators who enter the
theater cannot typically be compared to traumatized patients in need of
therapy. However, it is fair to say that New York citizens, following the
events of September 11, were traumatized and had, as a collective group,
experienced loss. And since many of the myths consist of tales about
transformation from one state of existence to another, the production of
Metamorphoses extends to the audience a variant model of death, much
as a therapist provides the patient with a heightened cognitive awareness
of his painful situation.
As each character in this play dies, his death is not understood as
eternal absence, but as change. Midas loses his daughter when she turns
into gold, but she is still physically presenta fact that enables Zimmer-
man to rewrite the myth when he is reunited with his living daughter at
the plays end. It is likewise with Baucis and Philemon, a husband and wife
whose love for one another is so great that the gods fulll their request to
die at the same time; the two turn into trees simultaneously at the end of
their lives, their branches locked in an embrace. Witnessing the characters
onstage transform into another physical state provides the audience with
a conceptual model for death as a continual existence, albeit in an altered
form. Te alternative model may be termed death-as-transformation
rather than the typical construction of death-as-absence.
Tis paradigm of death-as-transformation comes in part from Joseph
Solodows discussion of what metamorphosis represents. In Solodows
study of Ovids Metamorphoses, he writes that there are two essential
elements in the Ovidian concept of metamorphosis continuity and
permanence.
30
He perceives metamorphosis as a change which preserves,
an alteration which maintains identity, a change of form by which content
becomes represented in form. An essential element of a persons identity
is maintained even as he or she changes into something else. In fact, the
characters identity may be seen more clearlyor is clariedby the
transformation. Metamorphosis is a process by which characteristics of
a person, essential or incidental, are given physical embodiments and so
are rendered visible and manifest.
31
Te character of Lycaon, a particu-
larly brutal and bloodthirsty individual who is transformed into a wolf,
is one example of such continuity and permanence because the dening
trait of the individualhis savageryis thus maintained. Similarly, gos-
siping women are transformed into magpies, the weaver Ariadne into a
spider, and the treacherous King Lyncus becomes a lynx. Tis concept of
death-as-transformation emphasizes the continuation of the individual
and diminishes the threatening aspect of death; death no longer seems
so much an annihilation of self as an alteration of the self s form. And
an alternative model of death, no matter how fantastical, does much to
loosen the painful grip of despair and grief.
Te model of death-as-transformation can be best understood as
a conceptual metaphor. Metaphors are typically understood as gures
of speech, but George Lakos inuential essay introduced the idea that
humans understand the world and take in new knowledge through meta-
phorical thinking.
32
Lako demonstrated how one realm of knowledge
can illuminate our understanding about another domain of experience.
Referring to such phrases as our relationship has hit a dead-end street,
look how far weve come, and their marriage is on the rocks, he illus-
trates how relationships are ofen understood by comparison to a journey.
Te conceptual metaphor provides greater knowledge about abstract
concepts and enables more exible comprehension without diminishing
the original subject.
Metaphorical thinking can be likened to a conduit that can move the
viewer between an older way of thinking and a new model: metaphor
can provide a rational bridge from the known to the radically unknown,
from a given context of understanding to a changed context of under-
standing.
33
Te presentation of a new concept of death, not as extinc-
tion, but as an altered state of existence, runs throughout the production
of Metamorphoses chiey in the way that human bodies, at the point of
death, are transformed into another object, be it a tree, a bird, or a rain
shower. Tus, by comparing death to transformation rather than nihilism,
the production forces the audience to reimagine its models of death.
Te tale of Ceyx and Alcyone is one such myth where the nal image
acts as a conceptual metaphor of death-as-transformation. In this tragic
tale, Ceyx, a king, leaves his wife, Alcyone, to go on a sea voyage, and he
and his crew end up perishing in a storm. Te gods send Alcyone a dream
to inform her that her husband has died, and when she goes down to the
beach to mourn his death, his body appears in the waves. As she bends
to kiss it, both she and Ceyx turn into birds, and the two are joined in
ight.
Te production exemplies the theme of loss by signaling three dis-
tinct moments of separation between the two lovers: rst, Ceyxs departure
from Alcyone by ship; second, his appearing to his wife in a dream to
inform her of his death; and nally, her discovery of his dead body upon
the shore. Relative to other scenes, Zimmerman relies heavily upon Ovids
text to dramatize the moment that Alcyone watches Ceyx sail away on
his ship and devotes a great amount of stage time to the scene, as if to
underscore the moment when the two lovers last see one another alive:
Tere were no more details lef to be checked,
no last-minute changes to make, and the men, arranged on their benches,
were ready to row and go. He boarded and gave the sign.
And then he turned to wave at her.
She waved at him while the ribbon of black water widened between the ship
and shore. She gazed at him until he was no longer distinguishable
but still she could see the ship. And she narrowed her eyes to the horizon
and watched as it receded to a smaller and smaller object. And then
the whole hull was gone, and only the sails remained,
and then they, too, disappeared. (22)
Ceyx and Alcyone wave good-bye to one another in slow motion, draw-
ing heavy circles in the air. Te speed of this choreography denotes the
heaviness (i.e., painfulness) of their gestures as well as their growing
separation. To suggest great distances between people in the theater, actors
move slowly, thus creating the same view of things we would experience
moving away from a stationary object. Te audience experiences viscer-
ally the process of leave-taking: the unwilling good-byes, the losing sight
of the individual, and the drawn-out moment of departure as the space
yawns between the two. Dwelling on the moment of Ceyxs departure
through choreography and staging, Zimmerman directs this myth as a
trope of repeated loss.
Furthermore, the dramatization of this leave-taking oers the audi-
ence a unique godlike perspective unavailable to either Alcyone or Ceyx.
Te stage is split into two tableaux: Alcyone on shore, waving to her
husband, and Ceyx on deck, surrounded by his oarsmen. Ceyx and his
rowers sway in rhythmic unison caused by the rocking sea vessel; Alcyone
remains rm. As Ceyx sails away in his vessel, another character draws a
small boat through the water, tied to the end of a cord. Tis toy ship is a
miniature version of the boat that Ceyx is sailing on, and serves as a syn-
ecdochic detail; it is Alcyones only view of the ship that bears Ceyx. She
no longer sees him as the audience doeslife-size, calling to the rowers,
gazing upon the sea. Rather, for her, he is already gone, and the image of
his vessel receding on the horizon is all that remains. For a moment, the
audience has a split vantage point and they view a scene from two dier-
ent perspectives: Alcyones diminished view of her husbands boat as she
Alcyone (Erika LaVonn) watching Ceyxs (Kyle Hall) boat growing smaller and
smaller as it draws farther away from her. Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson.
stands on the shore, and Ceyxs view of the open sea, which precludes him
from viewing his wife. When Ceyx drowns at sea, the audience has the
comfort of knowing the outcome of the storm, whereas Alcyone spends
sleepless nights lacking the reassurance of the truth. Only the audience
members are privy to what occurs in both placeson land and on the
seaand hold an omniscient point of view as if they, too, were gods.
Tis contrast between the audiences omniscient perspective and the
characters limited one is worth considering for its resemblance to real-
life tragedy. During the attack on the World Trade Center, people were
bewildered about what was happening. Although the media reported
much of the destruction that day, it would take over a year before a full
report could be compiled from the events. So much of our knowledge
about September 11 comes from piecing together details from telephone
messages, eyewitness reports, emergency dispatches, and ight plans of
the hijacked planes in an eort to get the complete picture of the sequence
and timing of the events. Much of the evidence from the destruction was
withheld from human knowledge: the Twin Towers disintegrated into
nothing, airplanes shattered, and bodies disappeared. Likewise Alcyone
pines for knowledge of Ceyx: where is his ship? Where is his body? Te
overall narrative is not available to the individuals who suer through
the actual circumstances and can only be pieced together afer time has
passed. Even if tragedy is impossible to prevent, the presence of the gods
provides a depiction of human suering that is witnessed by a sentient
observer; their presence indicates that human pain does not go unac-
knowledged. Tus the total dramaturgical experience, in which audience
members witness the separation, loss, and grief of the lovers from the
perspective of the gods, grants them a temporary sense of control over
human devastation.
Te story of Alcyone and Ceyx, with its incidents of loss and death,
was particularly worrisome to Zimmerman when the play opened in New
York. As she relates in an interview,
Our rst audience, when we got up to the beginning of Alcyone and
Ceyxwhere hes about to set sail and be hit by that stormI just started
shaking really violently because it has such uncanny echoes. But then I had
to admit to myself that thats what catharsis is. Tese myths have a redemp-
tive power in that they are so ancient. Teres a comfort in the familiarity
of the human condition.
34
The ghost of Ceyx (Kyle Hall) comforts the grieving
Alcyone (Erika LaVonn). Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson.
Catharsis for Zimmerman involves the purging of painful emotions
within the hearts of audience members as they are reminded of their own
losses. Such lines as Alcyones to Ceyx, If you die my life is over / and I
shall be cursed with every reluctant breath I draw (21) or, later, afer he
has died, Tis is no good, no goodthat I should be living / and you be
elsewhere or nowhere (29) are the verbal equivalents to the audiences
own experience of death. Zimmerman implies that viewing these tur-
bulent scenes might be akin to abreaction, whereby the audience relives
its own losses vicariously through the characters words and gestures.
Her use of the word catharsis also implies that individuals move past the
feelings of pity and terror and ndas she terms itredemption in the
universal experience of suering and loss that the myth reveals. During
this cathartic phase, the spectators are more amenable to an alternative
concept of death, prompted by the peaceful image of the husband and
wife transformed into birds. Dramatically, the moment is mesmeric: the
two actors rise from the water in shadow, statuesque and serene, with only
the blue overhead light outlining their features. Tey form a symmetrical
pair, their dark arms extended in a mirror formation of one another, and
they seem to glide like birds across the water. As Solodow remarks, Te
love of Ceyx and Alcyone is made manifest and permanent in the behavior
of kingshers, which are noted for their conjugal aection.
35
Te mutual
aection that has been the dening aspect of their relationship is retained
in their aferlife.
IV. Mythic Revision: Seeing Tales Anew
Possibly the most familiar story of disastrous loss is the tale of Orpheus
and his beloved Eurydice. Tis tale has held the fascination of countless
artists and has been retold many times, in paintings, poems, and ballets.
It represents the ideal of romantic love: Orpheus feels such anguish for
his beloved that he pursues his dead spouse into the underworld and ne-
gotiates with the King of Death, Hades, for her return. Orpheuss loss of
Eurydice for a second time strikes us as more tragic than her actual death,
perhaps because it is truly irrevocable, or perhaps because his simple, ar-
bitrary gesture of looking backwards has such grave consequences. Of all
the myths that Zimmerman dramatizes in this production, this is the only
one that is enacted twice; the story is depicted from Ovids point of view
and from that of Rainer Maria Rilke, the twentieth-century German poet.
By performing this myth twice, the production foregrounds the process of
mythic revision and, more subtly, suggests a revised concept of death.
Mythic revision is a singular artistic genre, both in literary works and
in painting and sculpture. Myths, as Francis Fergusson notes, only take on
a concrete, real existence when an artist shapes them into a painting, poem,
or ballet according to his or her perspective: Until some imagination,
he notes, that of a poet or only a reader or auditor, is thus fecunded by a
myth, the myth would seem to exist only potentially.
36
Tey demand to
be retold and even corrected. Zimmerman herself addresses this literary
tradition of mythic revision and likens it to a river of dierent versions
that have owed from generation to generation:
I openhandedly admit that we are doing a version steeped in our own culture.
Tese are texts that have been done in so many dierent forms that its as
though Im joining a chorus [of interpreters]. Tese are texts that belong to
the world. I dont own them. Apart from being intimidated by the baggage
these texts carry, I feel the humility of just another person stepping into the
giant stream of people telling these tales.
37
Her version of King Midas, for example, interlaces several popular preoc-
cupations with the myth. Midass speech echoes the American concept of
the self-made man founded in Horatio Alger tales: But all it takes is hard
work. Plain and simple. And those who havent got it in them, well, what
can anyone do? Tey just havent got it (9). Additionally, his disregard
for his daughter in favor of making money is directly paralleled to todays
prioritizing of career over family: But you know, I never forget that I do
it all for my [he cant remember] lets see, all for my its all for the, uh
for the, um the family (10). Tus the revision illustrates that men
like Midas exist throughout time and bear repeated scrutiny within the
contextual frames of American materialism and work ethic. Te practice
of revision grafs onto the myth present-day ideas, voices, and allusions
in order to cultivate the myths rich yield of meanings.
Presenting two versions of the Orpheus myth one afer another
epitomizes this revisionary nature of myth. Each version has a designated
narrator who stands on center stage with a podium, unlike the other myths
whose narrators were characters from other tales. Each narrator pointedly
begins the story with the title, again, unlike the other tales: Youve heard
of Orpheus, the greatest musician of all time, and his bride Eurydice? His
was the unluckiest of wedding days. Orpheus and Eurydice: Number
One: Ovid, 8 (41). By designating an onstage narrator and having
him or her announce the title, Zimmerman underscores the selective
handling of the mythic material. As both Ovids and Rilkes versions and
their consequent views of death are dramatized side-by-side, the audi-
ence sees the possibility of reimagining old stories or reinterpreting old
paradigms, namely, our conceptual framework of death.
Te scene of Eurydices death is depicted eciently. Eurydice appears,
dressed in her white wedding dress, anked by maids of honor carrying
white stoles. Suddenly a black carpet is laid at her feet, symbolizing the
snake that bit her; and she is rolled up in this same black carpet and taken
away. Te compressed portrayal of this moment suggests that her death
is not the crucial part of this myth, but merely the catalyst for Orpheuss
bargain with Death. When Orpheus descends into the Underworld to
regain his bride, he is greeted by a variety of creatures: Hades reclines lust-
fully with Persephone, his mistress; two Fates laughingly cut the thread of
humans lives; Sisyphus pushes his rock; and Tantalus tries to drink water
from the pool. Te ery-red lighting suggests a seraglio of the underworld,
while the cacophony of soundssnippets of rock music, a jackhammer,
an ambulance sirenis discomting. Orpheus kneels before Hades and
begins his plea; as he does so, a shower of rain opens above him, and he
delivers his lines in a deluge of water that embodies his grief:
Ive tried to master this grief and I cant.
I understand we all come here in the end.
My bride Eurydice will soon enough be your citizen
in the ripeness of her years. I am asking for a loan,
not a gif. If you deny me, one thing is certain:
I want you to keep me here as well. (42)
Orpheuss words, Ive tried to master this grief and I cant, convey
precisely the overwhelming nature of grief and the subsequent loss of
emotional control. New York audience members in particular would
recognize the desire to strike a deal with God or with Death for the
return of the beloved, no matter how irrational the belief is. Brantley, in
an interview on National Public Radio, summed up this sense of loss:
Te retelling of Orpheus, I think, is quite extraordinary, because I think
recently, especially, weve all had that sense of looking over our shoulder
In Hades, Orpheus (Kyle Hall) pleads that his wife Eurydice
(Anne Fogarty) be returned to him, while the narrator (Chris
Kipiniak) looks on impassively. Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson.
and nding the person we thought was there is not.
38
Orpheus is granted
his request, but as the narrator reminds us matter-of-factly, you know
what happened (43).
Zimmerman oers an interpretation of the myth through the addition
of dialogue and gestures not found in Ovid. One of the most bewildering
aspects of this myth is the interdiction against the backwards glance. Te
limitation that Hades imposes upon Orpheus not to look at Eurydice until
they have ascended from the underworld seems arbitrary, and Ovids ver-
sion oers no explanation for the condition. Zimmermans Hades gives
a warning speech that implies Orpheus lacks condence in his beloved:
Remember, hesitation or doubt and our gif must be returned (43). Her
staging also emphasizes the importance of the backwards glance by draw-
ing out the moment in which it occurs. Te three characters slowly circle
the stage as they journey out of Hades; Orpheus leads, and Hermes follows
holding Eurydices hand. Te narrator oers a possible explanation as to
why Orpheus turned back: Concerned for her, / or not quite believing
that it wasnt a cruel delusion, / a dream, or a mirage, he turned (43). As
soon as Orpheus turns around, the stately progression freezes: abruptly
Hermes lifs Eurydice into the air, placing her almost on his shoulder,
out of Orpheuss reach. Tey remain in this position, Eurydice stretch-
ing her arms down to Orpheus, while he kneels on the ground, grasping
upwards. Tis critical moment of separationOrpheuss backwards turn
and Hermes lifing Eurydice high in the airis repeated three times, im-
plying that this nal image will haunt Orpheus forever. Tis repetition of
choreography represents symbolically the nature of trauma. Psychologists
liken trauma to a broken record upon which the needle endlessly goes over
the same music, unable to leave the groove in which it was set. Similarly,
the tableau is reminiscent of the recurring televised images of terrorist
destruction that New Yorkers viewed over and over again. Not only does
the lif convey a gulf of space between the two of themOrpheus on the
ground reaching upwards, Eurydice gazing down on him from the elevated
height of Hermes armsbut by borrowing an idiom from classical ballet,
Zimmerman can accentuate the ssure between the two lovers. Lifs, most
ofen found in pas de deux, traditionally represent romantic love between
a couple because they demonstrate a synergy of movement between the
two. Eurydice, captured as she is by Hermes movement, has entered into
a pas de deux with the wrong partner; she dances with Deaths messenger
rather than her husband.
Concurrently, Zimmerman uses this repeated ballet lif to signal a
discussion about mythic revision, compelling the audience, much as a
therapist would ask a client, to analyze the meaning behind Orpheuss
loss. Te narrator, at each lif, questions aloud what the myth could mean:
Is this story a story of love and how it always goes away? he asks. Te
characters re-enact the motion and again he questions, Is this a story of
how time can move only in one direction? Hermes lowers Eurydice one
last time, she steps forward, and Orpheus looks back: Is this story a story
of an artist, and the loss that comes from sudden self-consciousness or
impatience? (44). Instead of exploring what the loss means to Orpheus,
Zimmerman asks what the myth could mean to an audience in the
twentieth century. Te audience is directed to engage in the hermeneutic
function inherent in myth and asked to evaluate its own interpretation
of this of-told tale.
Tis moment of separation has always dened the myth and, conse-
quently, has always dened Eurydice. She has had neither autonomy nor
subjectivity of her own in this myth; she is merely the beloved who is lost
due to Orpheuss error. When the second narrator, a woman, announces,
Orpheus and Eurydice: Number Two: Rainer Maria Rilke. 1908 (45),
she signals that another version of the myth will be enacted, but only
from the moment that the trio journey from Hades. Rilke focuses solely
on the ascent from the underworld; he devotes the rst half of his poem
to Orpheus and his nagging doubts as the three travel up from the un-
fathomed mine of souls.
39
In the second part of the poem, the part that
Zimmerman dramatizes (4647), Rilke turns his attention to Eurydice
and her inner transformation as she follows her husband. In other words,
he rewrites the myth from the perspective of Eurydice, repositioning the
focal character.
40
Te resultant poem oers a new interpretation of the
myth, a feminist one certainly, but one that focuses more on the state of
death rather than on art and love.
Zimmerman divides the lines of Rilkes poem among the narrator
and the three characters, and each recites lines of the poem as they trace
slow steps about the stage, echoing the stately progression from the rst
version. In fact, the exact repetition of the simple choreography rein-
forces how both Ovid and Rilke worked with the same mythic material
but engendered variant interpretations. Rilkes version, while attesting to
Orpheuss lament over Eurydices death, reveals that Eurydice no longer
wants to return to Orpheus, or at least no longer has the human capacity
to feel the loss of her beloved:
Eurydice: She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
lled her beyond fulllment.
. . .
Hermes: She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young ower at nightfall, . . .
. . .
Narrator Two: She was no longer that woman with brown eyes
who once had echoed through the poets songs,
no longer the wide couchs scent and island,
and that mans property no longer. (4647)
41
Rilke oers an interpretation of the myth that expands upon or overrides
Ovids version. In short, he has changed the focal point from Orpheus to
Eurydice. Looking at the story of returning from the dead from the per-
spective of the deceased, he discovers her ambivalence or even resistance
to the act. For Eurydice, death places her outside the dynamics of desire.
As a self-contained being, she no longer feels sexual or romantic love, nor
does she experience the marital bond to Orpheus.
As the second version of the myth is enacted, there is no cataclysmic
moment of loss. Allowing Rilkes poetry to speak for itself, Zimmerman
keeps the stage direction very plain, reducing it merely to the characters
rhythmic parade about the pool. As audience members, we have been
prepared to anticipate the powerful lif in the air from Hermes and the
outward-stretching hands of Eurydice and Orpheus, but that painful
moment and concomitant choreography do not occur. Instead, when
Hermes tells Eurydice that Orpheus has looked back, Eurydice looks at
him uncomprehendingly and questions, Who? (47). Tat one word hangs
over the theater, eerily pointing out that Eurydice is not only physically
separated from her husband, but sentiently as well. Te longing for the
return of the deceased only exists in the hearts of the living.
Te Rilke version suggests an alternative vision of deatha vision
of death not as demise but as freedom from the bondage of human
emotions. Here death is not irretrievable loss; rather it allows Eurydice
a self-contained identity not subject to human ties of love or dependency.
Joseph Brodsky comments upon Rilkes image of Eurydice, describing her
as an utterly autonomous entity. He writes, And what lls her up is death.
Te underlying metaphor is that of a vessel dened by its contents rather
than by its own shape and design.
42
In other words, Eurydice no longer
symbolizes Orpheuss loss, but has a self-contained identity apart from
him. By presenting the two stories side by side, Zimmerman provides the
audience with two ways of understanding death: from Orpheuss perspec-
tive we see the painful loss of the loved one, but from Rilkes perspective
we understand that Eurydice has no need for sympathy as she has gone
beyond the equation of human suering.
One of the nal myths of the play, Apuleiuss tale of Psyche and Eros
from Te Golden Ass, is not enacted so much as it is narrated, with two
onstage narrators engaging in a kind of question-and-answer dialogue,
similar to the therapeutic model. Te characters, an interlocutor and a
responder, literally cast as Q and A, sit on opposite sides of the pool
and narrate the events in stage-whispers as the actions are simultaneously
pantomimed by actors playing Psyche and Eros. Psyche, in love with and
loved by Eros, is made to doubt this relationship by her jealous sisters
who insist that the reason Eros never visits her except in the dark of night
is because he is a monster. Seeking proof, she approaches him while he
is sleeping and discovers the truth: he is a supreme god. However, he is
startled awake and oended by her doubting him, which leads to her
punishment at Aphrodites hand.
Like the parallel versions of the Orpheus myth, the question-and-
response process used to dramatize this mythic tale underscores the her-
meneutic nature of reading any myth. Te question always persists: what
truths does this myth reveal? Te story of Psyche and Eros is popularly
understood to be about a lover who does not see the loved one for who
he is, but judges him and their relationship by societal standards of ap-
pearance and worth. Zimmermans production recasts this interpretation.
Not characters in the tale themselves, Q and A stand at a slight remove;
they represent the audience members who do not simply eavesdrop on
the scenes but must collaborate in interpreting the symbolic portent of
each myth. For example, when Eros (Love) appears and lies down on the
red silk raf oating on the waters surface, Q wonders aloud why he is
winged, naked, and blindfolded. A responds with a symbolic reading:
Eros has wings to enable him to y from person to person, he is naked to
make our feelings transparent to one another, and he is blind to encour-
age us to see one another with our hearts. Te standard conception that
a blind Cupid signies our foolhardy choices in love is dismissed; instead
Zimmermans characters oer another reading: He is blind to show how
he takes away our ordinary vision, our mistaken vision, that depends on
the appearance of things (69). Next Psyche moves into the pool with her
candelabra, her wet gown clinging to her legs. Again Q wonders aloud
why Psyche feels the need to examine her lover at nighttime and hazards
a guess: To make certain / With her eyes, to which A responds Yes It
happens all the time, acknowledging that inexperienced lovers doubt the
veracity of their loved ones. She doesnt trust what she has felt herself?
Q asks, to which A replies, Not with the radical trust we need (72).
43

Te onstage narrators not only instruct us to see the myths lesson about
loving with the heart, not the head, but encourage us to interrogate all
myths for whatever personal and illuminative insight they may provide.
Te plays ending oers one nal opportunity for conceptual revision,
a chance to perceive death as transformation, rather than loss. As Baucis
and Philemon stand with their arms entwined around one another and
Midas embraces his living daughter once more, the entire cast enters the
pool with small candles and oats these glowing lights upon the water.
Baucis and Philemon have attained their wish to die the moment [their]
love dies and the actors turn the request into a refrain; they whisper in
the darkening light, Let me die still loving, and so, never die (83). With
its religious iconography of water and candles, coupled with the actors
incantatory murmuring, this scene of redemption moves us into the
hierurgical: we sense what Emile Durkheim termed the collective ef-
fervescence of ritual.
44
Tis collective eervescence is akin to the quiet emotional equilib-
rium that Garrick indicates as the nal stage in cathartic therapy. Te
anguished emotions that the spectators have experienced while empatheti-
cally identifying with Ceyx and Alcyone or with Orpheus and Eurydice
are now laid to rest. Tey may have accepted, however provisionally and
temporarily, the concept of death-as-transformation and in the last mo-
ments of the performance have a renewed sense of peace. What allows
this cathartic release is the spectators agreeing to believe the incredible
events that have been staged before themtheir willingness to suspend
their disbelief. In describing the power behind Zimmermans production,
Matthew Gurewitsch specically isolates the the spectators wish to be-
lieve as the key phenomenon at work: We see what is and we see what is
not. As for the meanings, they do not concern the eye alone. Interviewing
Zimmerman about her dramaturgical process, he nds she uses similar
language in discussing the audiences participatory role. What attracts
her to the theater, she reveals, is the collusion between the audience and
what is happening onstage, believing what they know not to be true.
45
Te audiences choice to collude signies more than a willingness to
engage in a game of lets pretend; it is the spectators determination to
see a force or presence that does not exist and to believe in a mythological
world where gods involve themselves in human aairs. It is no surprise
that audience members should be willing to seek solace in ancient tales
and to invest them with their anxieties about modern destruction, and
that people suering could wish to see what is not. Referring also to
Tales from the Arabian Nights, one writer notes how Zimmermans plays
receive their biggest and most emotional responses when the contem-
porary world is suering through a crisis with a specic geographic and
historic reality.
46
Te connection between the archetypal and specic
may be prompted by Zimmermans work, but the audience must complete
the picture, must participate not only in a collusion of make-believe, but
a collusion of meaningfulness. Tey must be willing to think beyond the
sociopolitical scenario playing out within the connes of their daily lives
and envision a more consecrated realm. For the theater demands a belief
in the invisible. Te pleasure of the theater, she notes, can be found in
the slippage of dierence between what youre seeing and what you know
youre seeing. In movies, its a special eect. Here, its achieved by an
act of faith.
47
Participating in this act of faith turns an audience into
religious celebrants and places their belief in a higher order.
Eastern Connecticut State University
No1vs
I would like to thank William Dansby Evans for his assistance with this article.
1
Metamorphoses transferred to Circle in the Square in 2002. It was nominated for Best Play
and received two Tony Awards for Best Direction and Best Scenic Design and received the Lucille
Lortel Award for Best Play of 2002.
2
Una Chaudhuri, Te Spectator in Drama / Drama in the Spectator, Modern Drama 27
(1984): 28198.
3
Metamorphoses is not an example of post-September 11 drama, for it was written and per-
formed in Chicago long before the event. Te dramatic designation post-September 11 drama is
reserved for specic allusions to or realistic depictions of the days events. Marvin Carlson denes
the term in an article about the New York theater and its creative response to September 11 and
the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In it, he oers a comprehensive list of plays that were
connected to the tragedy, such as Anne Nelsons Te Guys, about New York reghters, and Tony
Kushners Homebody / Kabul. See Carlson, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq: Te Response of the New
York Teatre, Teatre Survey 45 (2004): 317.
4
Ben Brantley, How Ovid Helps Deal with Loss and Suering, New York Times, October
10, 2001, sec. E.
5
William Meyers, Cheering Metamorphoses, Commentary 114, no. 1 (July/August 2002): 57.
Meyers, similar to other critics at the time, chose to compare Zimmermans production with another
mythic revision also currently running: Charles L. Mees True Love. John Rockwell, writing for Te
New York Times (Revisiting the Ancients for Renewal, March 17, 2002, sec. 2), also brought into
his comparison the Wooster Groups To You, the Birdie! (Phdre).
6
Julia E. Whitworth, review of Metamorphoses, Teatre Journal 54 (2002): 634.
7
Elysa Gardner, Tragic Drama, Positive Eect, USA Today, February 7 2002, sec. D.
8
Chaudhuri, 286, 290.
9
Rockwell.
10
Jan Breslauer, Its Classical Lit 1-Oh!-1: With Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman Sets Out
to Make Ovid Come Alive Again, Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2000, Calendar section.
11
Ben Brantley, Dreams of Metamorphoses Echo in a Larger Space, New York Times, March
5, 2002, sec. E.
12
Not just one, but two dance journals oered reviews of this production: Hilary Ostleres
mean-spirited review appears in Ballet Review 30, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 6566, and Sylviane Gold
reviewed it for Dance Magazine 76, no. 1 (January 2002): 40.
13
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: Te Encounter between Contemporary Faiths
and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 15.
14
Brantley, Dreams of Metamorphoses.
15
Richard Ouzounian, Ancient Tales of Love and Loss Strike Deep Chord in New York,
Toronto Star, March 18, 2002, sec. E.
16
Deborah Garwood, Myth as Public Dream: Te Metamorphosis of Mary Zimmermans
Metamorphoses, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25, no. 1 (January 2003): 78. Garwood, in
fact, notes the large number of producers (twelve) who attached themselves to the show when it
moved to Broadway for its production at Circle in the Square (February 2002); she attributes this
signicant number of producerswhich is typical for commercial productions, but not experimental
showsto the great enthusiasm these producers felt for the therapeutic quality of the show.
17
Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses: A Play (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
2002), 6768. Quotations are from this edition and are hereafer cited in the text.
18
Breslauer.
19
Brantley, How Ovid Helps.
20
Brantley, Dreams of Metamorphoses.
21
Matthew Gurewitsch, Teaters Quicksilver Truth: All Is Change, New York Times, De-
cember 2, 2001, sec. 2.
22
Joanna Hawkins Maclay, Readers Teatre: Toward a Grammar of Practice (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1971), 521.
23
As opposed to characters who direct their lines toward one another, representing naturalistic
conversation, which particularizes the situation.
24
Sid Smith, Director, Actor, Artist, Scholar: Where Else but the Teater Could Mary Zim-
merman Play Out All the Roles She Lives? Chicago Tribune Magazine, November 22, 1998, 20.
25
As one critic criticized the style of the production, Metamorphoses work[s] so hard to
beautify, and to explain, the mysteries of love and loss; see Whitworth, 635.
26
Ivy I-chu Chang, Teatre as Terapy, Terapy as Teatre: Transforming the Memories
and Trauma of the 21 September 1999 Earthquake in Taiwan, Research in Drama Education 10
(2005): 285301.
27
David A. Garrick, Constructing Cathartic Moments in Teatrical Drama: An Ancient
Teory of Drama Meets the New Psychotherapy, New England Teatre Journal 9 (1998): 106.
28
Ibid., 11216.
29
Ibid., 102.
30
Joseph B Solodow, Te World of Ovids Metamorphoses (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988), 183.
31
Ibid., 174.
32
George Lakos theory is helpfully summarized in Hugh G. Petrie and Rebecca S. Oshlag,
Metaphor and Learning, in Metaphor and Tought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2
nd
ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 56084.
33
Ibid., 584.
34
Michael Giltz, Genius at Work: Touted Grant Winner Revisits Myths, New York Post,
October 7, 2001.
35
Solodow, 178.
36
Francis Fergusson, Te Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1957),
163.
37
Breslauer.
38
Play Metamorphoses and Its Treatment of Mythology, National Public Radio Weekend
Edition, April 13, 2002. Transcript retrieved via LexisNexis Academic.
39
Rainer Maria Rilke, Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes, in Selected Works, trans. J. B. Leishman ,
2 vols. (New York: New Directions, 1960), 2:188.
40
Grard Genette, in Palimpsestes: La littrature au second degr (Paris: Seuil, 1982), creates
a term for this shif of focus, transfocalisation, to explain what occurs when a story is retold from
another characters point of view. An obvious example is George Bernard Shaws Pygmalion, in
which he shifs our attention from the sculptor of the statue to the statue itself, which becomes
the live woman.
41
Te characters quote Rilkes poetry word for word. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems
of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).
42
Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1995),
414.
43
Because Psyches name means soul, A adds further interpretation: Te soul wanders in the
dark, until it nds love. And so, wherever our love goes, there we nd our soul (76). Zimmerman
admits in an interview that this idea is not her own; she received this line from a previous romantic
partner. If we consider her own intersection with the myth, that is, her use of personal experience to
understand it, then the revision of this story serves as interpretative gesture par excellence, whereby
the writer has projected upon the tale her personal vision of love and romance.
44
Emile Durkheim, Te Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New
York: Collier, 1961).
45
Gurewitsch.
46
Chris Jones, Te Zimmerman Touch, American Teatre 19, no. 3 (March 2002): 19.
47
Gurewitsch.

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Zimmerman's Metamorphoses: Mythic Revision as a

Ritual for Grief

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