An Extraordinary Metamorphoses; A Transcendentally Dull Hedda

Of all the wonderful things to be catalogued in Mary Zimmerman's extraordinary stage 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 or complex action-images and incidents, events and gestures that aren't necessarily to be taken literally or that mean more than one thing at once or that 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 theme in Ovid's poem is change, the idea of transformation. That's what links the stories together. They're the myths we all grew up on and others, hundreds more, that we don't know, either because they fell into obscurity or because Ovid himself made them up. Of the 12 or 13 that Zimmerman and her cast of 10 present (I lost count), some?like the stories of Midas, Phaeton, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Baucis and Philemon?are part of the mental luggage we all carry around with us. Others will be new to non-readers of Ovid, 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 a 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 ultimately becomes one long morph 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. It's all a big continuum, which you find yourself thinking about days later. This is incredibly moving and potent stuff, some of it?and depending on your frame of mind this can be a two- or possibly a 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 ascribe with context and imagination. 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. The final transformation is to the process itself, the one the play is about: it becomes something engendered or set off in us.

Metamorphoses, through Dec. 2 at the Second Stage Theater, 307 W. 43rd St. (8th Ave.), 246-4422.

Hedda Gabler By Henrik Ibsen Imagination is what's chiefly lacking in the revival of Hedda Gabler currently at the Ambassador on 49th St. The production hails from the Williamstown Theatre in Massachusetts. It was directed by Nicholas Martin, Williamstown's artistic director under Michael Ritchie, who is married to its star. Kate Burton, despite the grandeur of her theatrical heritage as Sir Richard Burton's daughter, is at best a competent actress who might do adequately in secondary or tertiary 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 heavyhanded melodramas of the sort that Ibsen's theater was a revolutionary 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, or they behave assertively or aggressively, or they simply refuse to suffer and martyr themselves dutifully. Hedda is probably the most interesting to a contemporary audience inasmuch as she is the most openly aggressive. That said, given the nature of the things that Ibsen gave her to do and say (a function of his own time and views of the female condition), unless an actress can bring some complexity of character and feeling to the role, Hedda's disappointment with her husband, Tesman, her baiting of his maiden aunt, her ambivalent relationship with Judge Brack and her strange manipulation of Lovborg and the young matron who has abandoned her own husband and stepchildren?all these things 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 Ms. Burton's limitations as an actress and partly 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, therefore (according to Martin's direction) that must be all there is to him. But 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 half a suspicion of self-deprecating irony or humor, or have some shred of the sort of love for Hedda that would make him tragic?or at the very least sympathetic.

For us, today, Ibsen is a problem playwright?and not in the literary-critical sense. It's hard not to see his prose dramas as embarrassingly heavyhanded. He was a bad writer, which isn't to say that Shaw was wrong, or William Archer or Harley Granville-Barker or that whole turn-of-the-century generation who thought the sun rose and set in his eyes. Strictly speaking, Shaw was a bad writer, too?a worse writer for the theater than Ibsen was. There's really no need to go to the theater to enjoy or appreciate Shaw's plays. You can get just as much reading them in a book. That's never true of really great playwrights. It's not true of Wilde, certainly, or even of Granville-Barker.

For Hedda's plight to be tragic, we need to be able to sense what it is she yearns for?and it has to be more than excitement and a more active social life, which are the only things she actually complains of. That's really the only essential. Beyond this, you could have a Tesman who, though boring, was not completely blind, or an Aunt Julia who was not as unconditionally loving as the lines suggest. Hell, you could have a Tesman who was just as irritated by Aunt Julia as Hedda is?below the surface, of course.

What's illiterate about this production is the lack of anything at all below the surface. 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 Martin can't seem to get his mind around such contradictions. He has half the characters playing their roles from Hedda's point of view and the other half playing figures in some Theater of the Ridiculous version of the play. Michael Emerson plays Tesman like Pee-wee Herman, not just ineffectual but gay, 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 communicate her sexual boredom with Tesman, 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.

Hedda Gabler, through Jan. 20 at the Ambassador Theater, 219 W. 49th St. (betw. B'way & 8th Ave.), 239-6200.