Myrrha and Cinyras in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses.  Image credit:  Dana E. H.

From its opening lines, the first-century Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses reveals itself to be as mercurial as its shape-shifting subjects.  While the poem begins in the familiar rhythm of Ovid’s earlier poetry – the lilting, rising-falling meters of elegy, a common form of Roman love lyric – a surprise awaits its Latin readers in the second line when the poem reveals that it’s not going to be in elegiac couplets after all, but in the grand epic hexameters of the Iliad and the Aeneid.[1]  In two manuscript variants, Ovid even seems to crack a joke about the metric switch-up at the exact moment it takes place:  “Gods, breathe on my beginnings (for you’ve changed those, too)” (“nam vos mutastis et illa” (I.2)).  But the surprises don’t stop there – the Metamorphoses boldly announces a break from poetic traditions by remixing old myths and genres.  While the poet’s ambition to tell stories from “the earliest origins of the world to my times” aims for history-making on an epic scale, his invocation to the gods to help him “spin a song” suggests the finely spun and resolutely anti-epic aesthetic of the Hellenistic poet Callimachus.  Slippery contradictions and abrupt changes are thus woven into the very fabric of the Metamorphoses itself.

But while the theme of transformation wasn’t new to Ovid, who finished the poem five centuries after the Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s well-known aphorism “everything changes,” his poem’s particular brand of metamorphoses reached dangerous new extremes.  Thwarting classical distinctions between human and beast, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as one critic writes, “exults in the body’s seemingly endless subjection to physical change and continually finds new metaphors and situations that intensify rather than allay anxiety.”[2] Slick, witty, and urbane, Ovid’s stories are also notoriously full of trauma and violence, especially committed by gods against women.  In the first two books alone, three girls are raped by Zeus, while a fourth is nearly raped by Apollo before being mercifully turned into a tree; meanwhile, the gods wipe out the race of men, and the son of the Sun streaks through the sky, his flesh consumed by flames.  Bodies are transformed left and right: girls turn into cows and bears, gods disguise themselves as bulls, grieving sisters take root in the earth and ooze tears of amber. It’s as if unable to erase these acts of violence, the universe of the Metamorphoses tries to contain them by changing both perpetrators and victims into forms beyond human recognition.

The humanoid cylons of Battlestar Galactica. Image credit: Justin Stephens/Sci Fi Channel.

Throughout the centuries, Ovid’s Metamorphoses has functioned as an unlikely cultural barometer, with various stories, motifs, and themes falling in and out of favor depending on prevailing moods.[3]  If every period reimagines Ovid’s tales as their own, then the Ovidian remakes of the last century – ranging from the explicit, such as Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid, to the oblique, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and every vampire, zombie, superhero, and shape-shifting monster-of-the-week in between – have seemed especially obsessed with the dark eruptions of violence in Ovid’s myths. (What’s the sex-switching killer Marty from Season 1 of the X Files than an Amish-alien update of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus? Or Battlestar’s gorgeous Cylons but a race of deadly Galateas?) The editors of the volume of poems After Ovid tellingly highlighted the Metamorphoses’s “affinities” with twentieth-century terrors and anxieties, including “holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, hetero- and homosexual love, torture, war, child-beating, depression and intoxication.”[4]  It’s all a far cry from the anonymous fourteenth-century French author of Ovide moralisé, who insisted that the tale of incest between Myrrha and her father Cinyras was an allegory of love between the Virgin Mary and her Heavenly Father!

Interestingly, however, one of the most beloved Ovidian adaptations of the last several years – MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Mary Zimmerman’s Tony Award-winning production Metamorphoses, featuring a monumental, ever-shifting pool of water at its center – has taken a sharp turn away from the contemporary focus on violence in Ovid’s work.  The acclaimed director, playwright, and professor often mentions in interviews that she’d always been drawn to Greek and Roman myths (beginning with a childhood encounter with Edith Hamilton’s popular 1942 volume Mythology:  Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes) because of their frightening, bloody and sexual content, and it’s true that the myths Zimmerman uses in her play correspond to some of the most disturbing stories in Ovid’s work that feature, among other horrors, self-cannibalism, blood sacrifice, rape, and genocide.  In addition, through a tragic twist of history, Zimmerman’s play itself became intimately linked to trauma, attaining symbolic status as public therapy for grief when it was performed off-Broadway a few weeks after 9/11.  “For New Yorkers today who encounter the same recorded visions of terrorist destruction whenever they turn on their televisions,” New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote at the time, “Ms. Zimmerman’s portrayal of tragic scenes repeated has an anxious and immediate familiarity…[It] is speaking with a dreamlike hush directly to New Yorkers’ souls.”

What makes all of this ironic, however, is that Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses isn’t really about trauma and violence at all, but about the redemptive power of love.  Not that these themes are incompatible, or course, or that the play abandons the former entirely.  But what struck me as I watched the revival of the original 1998 production of the Metamorphoses at the Lookingglass Theatre this past January was how often – and how resolutely – Zimmerman’s work swerved away from violence:  the darker elements of Ovid’s myths were repeatedly swapped out for more heart-warming renditions, and one of the most romantic stories, the tale of Eros and Psyche, was imported from another source (the second-century author Lucius Apuleius’s Metamorphoses) to underscore the play’s central theme of love.  During these episodes, I couldn’t help feeling that something was lost in the sentimentalizing. (I’m not alone in this view – classicist Justine McConnell described aspects of the play as “almost cloying,” and Brantley suggested that in another context, it could register as “too precious…too arts-and-crafts.”)  Instead, for me the most powerful moments in Zimmerman’s visually ravishing production took place when the mythic narratives confronted horror head-on; furthermore, these moments were most effective when they were closed off in ways that were most Ovidian, through a sudden shift in genre or tone, a breaking of a frame, or a silent dissolve into nothingness.

Midas and his daughter.  Photo credit:  Liz Lauren.

Zimmerman’s warming art

The nested tale structure of Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses begins and ends with the story of King Midas.  As in Ovid’s version, Zimmerman’s Midas is a foolish and greedy king (updated here as a self-absorbed tycoon) who reluctantly rescues the god Bacchus’s companion Silenus from his drunken wanderings around the neighborhood.  The grateful Bacchus grants Midas one wish, and the king prays for everything he touches to turn into gold.  (“That’s a really, really bad idea,” Bacchus says, dryly.[5]) Still, Midas gets his wish, and as he races around the pool he becomes giddier by the second as each touch yields more riches. But then, the inevitable tragedy happens:  Midas’s young daughter leaps into his arms and is instantly transformed into gold. Grief-stricken, the king begs Bacchus to reverse the magic, but the god refuses.  Bacchus does hold out a glimmer of hope, however – if Midas journeys to the end of the world, he will find a pool of water that reflects the stars; once Midas washes his hands in it, everything will be restored.  And indeed it is, as the contrite Midas and his daughter are happily reunited at the end of the play.

Illustration of Midas and his daughter by Walter Crane, from A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1893. Image credit: Library of Congress.

Zimmerman’s style has been described as an “original and warming art,” with the “ability to transform an audience into willing (and often weeping) children.”[6] As it happens, the story of Midas’s daughter isn’t found in Ovid’s poem but in an 1852 children’s collection of myths called A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys by none other than the author of the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  (Charmingly, he gives Midas’s daughter the very nineteenth-century name of Marygold.) While Zimmerman’s borrowing of this plot element from a  children’s book (a kind of Ovide moralisé, as it were) resonates with her own nostalgic childhood encounters with classical myths, it also reveals something about the pattern of editorial changes throughout her play, where the very adult motifs of sexual desire are often transformed into far more idealized and innocent notions about love.

One striking example was Zimmerman’s comic retelling of the story of Pomona and Vertumnus – a nymph who prefers gardening over boys, and a strapping young god who’s desperate for her love. In this episode, the hapless Vertumnus dons disguise after disguise to get ever closer to his beloved, and in an old woman’s garb, he tells Pomona the tragic story of Myrrha, a young girl who scorned love and was thus cursed by Aphrodite to fall in love with her father Cinyras.[7] While “this story got Vertumnus nowhere,” as the deadpan narrator informs the audience, Pomona suddenly turns to him and orders him to peel off his old woman’s clothes one by one.  Startled by her boldness, Vertumnus obeys, and the tale ends happily with young love fulfilled:  “When at last the god revealed himself just as he was, much to his surprise, he had no need of words.  Little Pomona was happy with what she saw, unadorned and undisguised.  Soon enough, the vine was clinging to the tree.” In Ovid, the tale of Pomona and Vertumnus is the final “love” story in the closing book of the Metamorphoses, completing the arc from the first “love” story of the river nymph Daphne and the god Apollo in Book I, which isn’t a love story at all, but a story about attempted rape.  As if the parallels are too obvious, Ovid simply hints at rape in the later story, stating obliquely that Vertumnus is “prepared to use force” (vimque parat, XIV.770).  Fortunately for everyone, Pomona is instantly taken with the god’s naked beauty and the hinted act never takes place – instead, sex occurs naturally and consensually within the idyllic boundaries of the garden walls – but the troubling specter of sexual violence haunts the supposed happy ending and closes Ovid’s entire work with an ambivalent commentary on the ever-fraught relations between women and men.

In contrast, Zimmerman’s take on the theme of love throughout her play tended to be idealistic and a bit clichéd, as in her retelling of Pomona and Vertumnus, and in the hushed call-and-response narration at the end of her adaptation of Apuleius’s story of Eros (“love”) and Psyche (“soul”).  “It’s just inevitable,” said one narrator.  “The soul wanders in the dark, until it finds love.  And so, wherever our love goes, there we find our soul.”[8] Such optimism – Zimmerman’s “warming” effect – carried over even into stories that had little to do with romantic love.  In the tales of Phaethon and Erysichthon, the traumas at their core were substituted or softened with more agreeable, audience-friendly details.  The tragic myth of Phaethon, for instance, was turned into a droll exchange between a spoiled rich brat and his therapist.  Stretched out on a floating raft in the pool, the whiny Phaethon confessed the anxieties and insecurities of a son who once craved the attention of his absent father – the sun god Helios – and begged his dad to prove his paternity by (what else?) handing over the keys to his car.  Starkly missing from this story was the terror of Phaethon’s epic fall from the sky, the smell of his burning flesh, the wails of agony from the scorched earth, and the murderous justice of Zeus.  While a few of these details were briefly mentioned in passing, their mythic, cosmic force was diminished in the comic treatment, replaced instead by a comfortably familiar Freudian family drama.

Phaethon taking a dip in the pool.  Image credit: Liz Lauren.

However, a darker psychosexual subtext was eliminated entirely in Zimmerman’s retelling of the story of Erysichthon, a king who scorned the gods and chopped down the goddess Ceres’s sacred tree.  Ceres punishes Erysichthon by summoning Hunger to possess his stomach until his appetite becomes insatiable. Once he pawns off everything he owns for food, Erysichthon turns next to sell a member of his family.  In Ovid’s legend, Erysichthon ends up prostituting his daughter, who in a chilling prayer begs the god Neptune to rescue her:  “Save me lord, you who stole my virginity!” Her former rapist does in fact hear her prayer and instantly transforms her into a fisherman.  When Erysichthon learns about his daughter’s new shape-shifting abilities, he eagerly sells her off again and again; each time she changes into another form – a mare, a bird, a deer – and successfully escapes her captor.  The ugliness of the irony rests in the parallel between the rapist who becomes the girl’s protector, and the supposed protector – the girl’s father – who becomes her pimp.  (This only goes so far, of course, until Erysichthon ends up feasting on himself.)

In Zimmerman’s retelling, I was surprised to see the character of Erysichthon’s daughter replaced by his elderly mother, whose relationship to Neptune and resulting transformation was vastly different in tone:  “From the briny deep, Poseidon heard her prayer, pulled her into the water, and changed her back into the little girl who used to play along his shores.  The salty water licked the years away, until she emerged:  the one who gave him praise in childhood, shouting as she ran among the waves.  This is the kind of sweet, unbidden praise the gods adore and do not forget.”  While this brief, charming scene – featuring an adorably doddering performance by the actress playing the mother – provided welcome relief from the desperate, rangy hunger of Erysichthon and captured a childlike aesthetic of wonder that Zimmerman strives for in her work,[9]  I couldn’t help thinking that if Zimmerman had kept the story of the daughter intact, it would have actually strengthened a key thematic arc of the play, reinforcing the motif of daughters and shady fathers who are also bad kings (Midas, Erysichthon, and Cinyras[10]).  Together, the three tales would have constituted a powerful overarching narrative about the downfall of rulers who violate the rules of family, sex, and nature and are in turn violently consumed by their own lusts.

. . .

Silent currents

But there were a few tales that I felt Zimmerman’s production really got right.  Among them was the tragedy of Ceyx and Alcyone, whom Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare had all championed as an ideal embodiment of married love, but – perhaps unsurprisingly – to whom modern Ovidians have tended to give short shrift.  It was great to see this story get the powerful, operatic staging that it deserved.  After the opening sequence of the Midas myth, which ended too abruptly – while the image of Midas’s daughter freezing into position was shocking, we weren’t given time to absorb the tragedy of her transformation – the long, drawn-out narration of the story of Ceyx and Alcyone felt well paced, with all of the hybrid elements of the story slowly coming together and building up an unbearable degree of tension until the terror-stricken Alcyone came face to face in a dream with the ghost of her drowned husband. Also moving were the tales of Orpheus/Eurydice and Myrrha/Cinyras, whose emotional force was heightened in relief against the comic tales that framed them.  I especially loved Zimmerman’s beautifully rendered two-part narration (and in some parts, a literal pas de deux) of Orpheus and Eurydice.  While Part One was a faithful adaptation of the famous version in Ovid, in which Orpheus leads his dead bride out of the Underworld but loses her forever when he glances back to see if she’s still there, in Part Two — based on the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1908 poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” — the perspective shifted to Eurydice, who was slowly revealed to lose all memory of her human self as she retreated further and further into the state of death.  It was here, at the dead center of the play, that life and love lost all meaning, and death absorbed Eurydice – and all the audience with her – into a strange state of peace and oblivion.

Orpheus begging Hades for Eurydice’s return.  Image credit:  Liz Lauren.

Critics frequently mention that the visceral power of Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses lies in its images, which haunt the memory long after they disappear. (The most-cited images, interestingly, are the ones where figures are frozen or caught acrobatically mid-air in postures of grief or death.)  My own heart stopped when Myrrha melted away into the water, disappearing underneath the edge of the pool, as the story suddenly shifted back to the sparkling comedy of Vertumnus and Pomona. It was like watching the drive of incest literally plunging into the unconscious and lurking there, hidden, as the next few stories (Phaethon, Eros/Psyche) continued to riff on lighter psychodramatic themes.

But this unresolved dark current made the final sequence – the story of Baucis and Philemon, rounded out with the reunion between Midas and his daughter – seem too pat an ending in comparison. I do admit that in many ways, the story of Baucis and Philemon was a perfect coda for Zimmerman’s play — a tale of faithful love in old age, with the poor elderly wife and husband rewarded by the gods for welcoming them (Zeus and Hermes disguised as weary travelers) into their home and, unlike Midas, asking for a wish rooted in love rather than greed.  (Their wish:  to die at the same moment.  The gods’ gift:  to give them a grand new home, and to turn them into trees at the moment of their death.)  Zimmerman’s play concluded in a magical, softly lit tableau, with the entire company kneeling in the pool, arrayed around the transformed Baucis and Philemon and surrounded by bowls of glowing candles, whispering to the audience, “Let me die still loving, and so, never die.”  When the lights went out, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, including mine.

But there’s more to the story in Ovid — much, much more.  While it’s still about the love between an old couple and their selfless generosity towards strangers, and even includes light touches of rustic humor, with the gods chuckling as they watch the old couple huffing and puffing as they chase their goose around to catch and cook it for supper, there’s also a holocaust, where Zeus and Hermes wipe out an entire country in a massive flood to punish people for their lack of hospitality.  In a heartbreaking scene, the grieving Baucis and Philemon are shown weeping for the death of their fellow neighbors and mourning the destruction of their homeland.  All this, compounded with the fact that the gods destroy the couple’s lifelong and beloved cottage with its cozy hearth, only to replace it with a cold marble temple and install the old couple – who acquiesce less through desire than fear – as its servants.

In Ovid, in other words, there is no heartfelt sense of closure.  There is only the wrath of the gods, the stiffening of bodies into bark, and a desperate whisper — “Farewell.”

. . .

Of course, there’s nothing more Ovidian than altering Ovid and, in the process, creating new stories with transformed new meanings (the Latin word “auctor” in the classical and medieval periods meant both “author” and “one who adds” to already existing material — both of which Ovid was a master), and Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses is supremely Ovidian in the breadth of its emotional range and the sudden shifts in tone, genre, and perspective within its various tales.  But despite the complexity of the interwoven narratives and their near-flawless and moving execution in performance, Zimmerman’s production raised many questions about what, and how, these classical myths are supposed to mean for modern audiences.  Should they feel “universal,” like so many critics praised about Zimmerman’s retellings, transcending time and place and somehow revealing to us an unchanging commonality about human experience?  Should they be “redemptive,” uniting everyone in the end through love and repentance? If so, then Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses succeeded beautifully, not least of all by creating a sacred space where the audience could share in the experience of marveling at these direct transactions between humans and gods.

In reality, however, these myths don’t provide any kind of resolution or consolation. The gods aren’t just, and these ancient archetypes aren’t meant to be empathetic, or even “relatable.”  By skirting the darker elements of the myths and bringing the various threads together in an emotionally satisfying coda, Zimmerman’s work seemed to avoid the more difficult questions of how to deal with the aspects of myth that remain stubbornly beyond understanding, full of random terror, violence, and mystery. And yet, based on the rapturous reception that the show has received since its debut, perhaps Zimmerman’s humanized Ovid has become “our” Ovid — a luminous, familiar balm for our times.

. . .

5.19.13 — As always, Daniel Mendelsohn says it best, this time re: a new staging of Euripides’s Herakles in a new article in NYRB.