Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses” at Arena Stage

Here’s what happens when your stage is a pool,

which is how it is with playwright Mary Zimmerman’s famous

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“Metamorphoses ”

In the theater, patrons get wet.

Audiences in the first few “splash zone” rows may find towels in their seats at Arena Stage, where Zimmerman and
her longtime team of designers and performers have brought their singular play. “We go though 50 or 60 towels a night,”
says stage manager Cynthia Cahill. That’s towels for audiences, actors, and mop-up duty by the crew, because:

Backstage, everything gets wet.

Zimmerman says, “The backstage life is a colossal, frenzied, sopping wet, ripping-clothes-on-and-off nightmare.”

Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses,” based on Ovid’s myths, has been an unusually fabled and durable phenomenon on the recent theatrical landscape, especially for a non-musical. Zimmerman started it at Northwestern University in 1996, where she was (and still is) teaching. Two years later it was produced professionally by Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre and Zimmerman was a MacArthur “genius” grant winner.

By 2002 the show was on Broadway. Its tales of transformation featured such familiar figures as Poseidon and Narcissus, and the themes of love, suffering, loss and redemption were particularly moving in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The water was spectacular, but also a fluid metaphor for change; Zimmerman won a Tony for her direction.

Last fall it was revived as part of the 25th anniversary season at Lookingglass, where Zimmerman is a company member. That show — the same one now playing at Arena — features all the designers and many of the actors who have been with “Metamorphoses” since the early days in Chicago. Yet water issues persist as everyone adjusts to the vast rectangle of Arena’s Fichandler space.

“I don’t know that I’d say it’s a well-oiled machine,” says set designer Daniel Ostling. “But we have a clearer sense of what works and what doesn’t.”

Costume designer Mara Blumenfeld says, “Because the water places so many demands on the technical elements, it’s never just a simple remount. There is a lot of wizardry behind the curtain.”

Here, then, are some of the liquid’s lessons, or the Tao of the Pool:

The water

Arena will feature the biggest “Metamorphoses” pool yet, and the first that’s not resting on a floor. Beneath the Fichandler stage, a forest of iron poles holds up the pool’s structure. That’s also where you’ll find the drainage buckets that catch water sloshing onto the pool deck, plus the pump and two water heaters.

The actors’ contract calls for the water temperature to be 99 degrees or above. During the show, the pump and heaters are turned off to eliminate sound and the vibrations that can ripple the water’s surface. The water cools considerably, but the show is only 90 minutes long. When the pool’s not in use, the crew uses a standard cover (a material similar to bubble wrap that floats on the surface) and an additional tarp to preserve heat.

“That helps a lot,” says stage manager Cynthia Cahill, who worked on last fall’s Lookingglass production.