Of all the wonderful things to be catalogued in Mary Zimmerman’s extraordinary version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the most wonderful is probably the pool of water that dominates the stage. It’s rectangular and must be at least a foot and a half deep in places, and it’s finished with a wide wooden deck that, like so much in the production, contrives to seem both ancient and modern at the same time. The deck is a narrative space, primarily. From there, actors and characters tell stories of gods and mortals, talking sometimes to us, sometimes to other characters on the stage, while others act them out in the nonnarrative zone that the pool represents. The pool is symbolic space, given over to figurative action—incidents, events, and gestures which aren’t necessarily to be taken literally or mean more than one thing or set off a series of associations that may come into play again later.
Metamorphoses was Ovid’s great mock epic purporting to tell the story of the entire history of the world, “from the creation right up to the present day,” which from Ovid’s point of view would have been the first decade of the Christian era. It was written in the shadow of Virgil’s The Aeneid, which traced the history of Rome from the fall of Troy. Virgil had been dead for around 20 years when Ovid embarked on his opus, so it was in that reverential hush and climate of high seriousness that the poem was begun. It’s antithetical to Virgil’s poem in several ways: formless where The Aeneid is highly structured; mirthful and irreverent where The Aeneid is solemn and devout; and steeped in a fascination with psychology and human nature where The Aeneid rather priggishly sees nature as something mankind really ought to be able to rise above. Virgil’s poem is about a man who does the right thing to the despite of everything and everyone around him, Ovid’s is largely about people who can’t behave.
Most significantly, where Virgil was hymning permanence and absolute morality—a Rome worth any sacrifice that would last forever—the dominant themes in Ovid’s poem are impermanence and fluidity. It’s not just the idea of transformation that links the stories together but the way each one flows into the next. They’re the myths we all grew up on and others, hundreds more, that are less familiar, either because they fell into obscurity or because Ovid himself made them up. Of the dozen or so that Zimmerman and her cast of ten present, some—like the stories of Midas, Phaeton, Orpheus, and Baucis and Philemon—are part of the mental luggage we all carry around with us. Newcomers to Ovid will find others less familiar—like the story of Myrrha, who seduced her own father and wound up weeping herself into a fountain, or that of Alcyone (Alcyon here), whose love for her husband, lost at sea, led to their transfiguration as sea birds.
For her text, Zimmerman relied chiefly on David R. Slavitt’s ebullient 1994 translation of the poem, which was new to me. It’s the only one I’ve ever encountered that actually caught what’s chiefly fascinating about Ovid’s poem. This isn’t so much the stories themselves as the ways in which they morph into each other. Ovid uses the strangest and most idiosyncratic kinds of segues, an object or place that calls one tale to mind, a kind of behavior that causes someone to tell a story. Often the connections are as resonant and provocative as the stories they link, so that the whole poem really becomes what Ovid claims he has set out to produce—one long continuum from the beginning to the end of known time.
This spirit of fun, which Slavitt’s translation captures, is transmuted in Zimmerman’s text into theatrical images—images that use the form of theater itself as a force of change. We watch actors transform into different characters and we watch objects take on different kinds of significance. On the surface, Zimmerman’s gift would seem to be for visual juxtaposition. She creates images that are as eloquent as they are startling—a God lighting a cigarette, a 19th-century oak door frame through which chitoned characters pass—but what’s ultimately so potent is the message about theater itself. The idea inherent in Zimmerman’s reading of the poem is that transformation, which stands at the axis where creation and immortality meet, is a result of love—love gone wrong, love denied or indulged, love triumphant. Whatever. This is incredibly moving and potent stuff, some of which you find yourself thinking about days later. Depending on your frame of mind this can be a two- or possibly three-hanky show.
What’s brilliant about Zimmerman’s liquid-pool device is first of all the way it substitutes water for whatever forces in the poem effect the magical transformations (gods, usually) and secondly the way it embodies the idea of transformation itself. While never visibly changing, the water becomes a medium for different kinds of information. It’s a set that becomes a prop that becomes a literal element in the stories. In this way, the pool ends up embodying the whole idea inherent in the production—that theater itself is alchemy because of the different meanings it can assign. A chandelier can become the stars or the lightning or the firmament just as an actor can, in a storm-at-sea sequence, become a god or a drowning shipmate in literally no time at all. What’s magical is our realization that no force has acted upon what we see transformed but context and imagination.
Imagination is what’s chiefly lacking in the revival of Hedda Gabler currently at the Ambassador on 49th Street. The production hails from the Williamstown Theatre in Massachusetts. It was directed by Nicholas Martin, Williamstown’s artistic director, whose producer, Michael Ritchie, is married to its star. Kate Burton is an actress who might very well shine in quiet, docile roles. I have only ever seen her try to play interesting women. On these she is death. Here she gives a performance of almost transcendent mediocrity.
Whatever else Ibsen’s Hedda might be—and she’s intermittently scheming and sadistic—she has to be interesting, otherwise you have no play, you only have one of those plodding melodramas of the sort that Ibsen’s theater was a departure from. The heroines of his early and middle plays are all women who do (in Shaw’s characterization of the morality of the day) “unwomanly” things: they yearn for more, behave assertively or aggressively, or simply refuse to suffer and martyr themselves dutifully. Hedda is probably the most openly aggressive and to that extent perhaps the most potentially interesting to a contemporary audience. That said, unless an actress can bring some intelligence or complexity to the role, Hedda’s disappointment with her husband, Tesman, her baiting of his maiden aunt, her ambiguous relationship with Judge Brack, and her strange manipulation of Lovborg and the young matron who has abandoned her own husband and stepchildren—all these become the expression of a mean, shallow, devious, and wildly self-gratifying soul rather than the half-blind gropings of a tragic heroine.
That seems to be what has happened here. It’s partly owing to Mr. Martin’s insistence on presenting everything in the play exactly as Hedda sees it, particularly other characters. Hedda sees Tesman as a dry-as-dust academic, fumphering about with meaningless trivialities; accordingly, Martin’s direction assumes that must be all there is to him. There’s no reason for this. It isn’t even an interesting proposition. The wrongheadedness consists not in presenting Tesman as a dry-as-dust academic—he is one—but in stopping there. Who’s to say that Tesman doesn’t realize his own limitations, or approach his work with a soupcon of self-deprecating irony, or have some shred of the sort of love for Hedda that would make him tragic (or at the very least sympathetic)?
For today’s audiences Ibsen is a problem playwright—and not in the literary-critical sense. It’s hard not to see his prose dramas as embarrassingly heavy-handed. He was an exceedingly bad writer. This isn’t to say that Shaw was wrong in his estimation of Ibsen. But he and William Archer, Harley Granville-Barker, and that whole turn-of-the-century theatrical generation who thought Ibsen made the sun rise and fall, were viewing his work through the prism of social structures and assumptions that they deemed hypocritical and outmoded. What they saw as realistic and revolutionary was a matter of content, not style or form. In any case, Shaw was a bad writer too, strictly speaking—a worse writer for the theater even than Ibsen. There’s very little reason to perform any of his plays; you don’t need to see them in order to enjoy them. You can get just as much out of them staying home and reading them by lamplight. That’s never true of really good or great playwrights. (It’s not true of Wilde, certainly, nor of Granville-Barker.)
The one essential ingredient we need for Hedda’s plight to be tragic is a sense of what she yearns for—and this has to be more than excitement and a more active social life, which are the only things she actually complains of. There is no other agenda. You could have an Aunt Julia who was not as unconditionally loving as the lines suggest, a Tesman who was boring but not completely blind, even a Tesman as irritated by Aunt Julia as Hedda is. The point is that there has to be something else going on with Hedda—something other than what she says—and it can’t come from the page.
The script that playwright Jon Robin Baitz has fashioned from a literal translation of Ibsen’s text would seem to allow for ambiguities and for subtleties of this kind. (Tesman, for instance, describes the fruits of his scholarly efforts as “utterly vital minutiae.”) But this would seem to be too nuanced for Martin, who has half the actors playing their roles from Hedda’s point of view and the other half playing figures in some Theater of the Ridiculous version of the piece. Michael Emerson’s Tesman is effeminate as well as ineffectual, while Ms. Burton, in a flame-red dye-job, is playing Cruella DeVil. She roars and cackles wickedly, taking three faltering steps backward to indicate surprise (“Eilert Lovborg, why do you say that?”), telegraphing irritation or discomfiture like a silent movie star. She practically rubs herself up against Judge Brack to make sure she gets her sexual boredom with Tesman across, while as Brack, Harris Yulin (who, poor man, is dressed like a bookie) spends the evening making goo-goo eyes at her. David Lansbury, whether by nature or design, is a hopeless Lovborg: he’s playing Grosvenor and got up to look like Bunthorn, all paunch and hair. The only performer to emerge unscathed is the gracious and talented Jannifer Van Dyck, who as Thea Elvsted spends her time trying with both hands to seem less interesting than Hedda. It’s impossible not to spend the evening wishing that she, and not Ms. Burton, were married to Mr. Ritchie, as her Hedda would probably be something to see.