‘Meta’ Metes Out Magic

Just taking your seat before IU’s production of Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses” can be an unusual experience. Younger theatergoers at the Lee Norvelle Theatre & Drama Center giggled at the bare-chested and toga-clad cast Friday night, whose physical endeavors conveyed a freshness of expression and an ethereal ease. The guffaws force one to pay ever closer attention, only to be floored by the most intoxicating 75 minutes of IU theater this year.\nBut walking pretty is just one of the things this cast pulls off in one hour and 45 minutes with no intermission. Each actor takes on a main role, followed by several others, relying on imaginative pantomime and elegant narration to create the world of ancient Western myth and carry the audience through the dirty, as well as divine, realms of that world.\nThe show’s technical strengths could not better suit the creative engine of the cast. Just because these actors can play and pantomime doesn’t mean graduate student Alicia Bailey’s prop mastery, graduate student Jared Rutherford’s epic scene design or graduate student Mary Weber’s dreamscape-worthy carpentry go unappreciated. Also displaying distinctive talent were dyer/painter Angie Burkhardt, a graduate student, cutter/draper Lara Berich and more than a few folks with inspiring, original taste in costumes and use of lighting to craft atmosphere and transform it on cue.\nWhen Ceyx (graduate student Harper Jones), an adventurous man, starts feeling, as he says, “afraid, domesticated, diminished ... kind of (like) a lap dog” in the undying happiness of his marriage to Alcyone (freshman Kate Suffern), he journeys overseas to find an oracle. Her pleas for him to stay and avoid Poseidon’s malevolent winds are dismissed with chauvinistic swagger. His vessel succumbs to “an enormous green catastrophe,” out of which Poseidon (junior Graham Sheldon) emerges, a spiny, eyeless face barely visible in the dim light of a pendulum-like bulb overhead. Drowning, Ceyx entreats the gods to let his body wash ashore, where Alcyone alone may find him. When his ghost visits her, however, she shrieks and hides her eyes. “Does death undo me so?” he calls to her. “Look at me, my little bird.” At once, the cheerless confines of the stage extend into the hearts of the audience – not swept up in a shallow sappiness, but pricked by a fundamentally recognizable emotion – and what before was met with laughter now finds silence.\n“Metamorphoses” is a montage of the tragic and the comic kept seamlessly together by the boundless energy and aplomb of actors who, consistent with Director John Maness’s direction and the demands of their script, understand why audiences should bother revisiting these ancient stories: for their timeless themes and plethora of parallels to our own lives.\nGraduate student Jeff Grafton’s portrayal of Midas (the king of greed who faces fatal consequences for his wish that everything he touches turn to gold) is unforgettable as an unctuous, unlikable businessman babbling about family values, as well as Theias, another lust-filled monarch whose daughter is forced by Aphrodite (senior Melanie Derleth) into seducing him again and again until he finally chances to look in her face. Senior Dylan Weinberger plays Erysichthon, an arrogant brute who mocks the gods and cuts down a favorite tree of the agricultural goddess Ceres, who curses him with an insatiable appetite. He, too, pays a grotesque penalty.\nManess, having made his mark upon 12 truly able actors, has birthed something markedly different from any stage experience one will see at IU this year. It will run Tuesday, Feb. 5 through Saturday, Feb. 9.