Sportive Immortals

By * T.E. Kalem

From the wonderful people who gave Broadway Story Theatre comes Ovid's Metamorphoses. If the current show seems a trifle less exhilarating than Story Theatre, it may be that Director Paul Sills' way with a fable is not applicable to every author. A childlike romp through the Grimm Brothers' goose-pimply fun house is distinctly different from a childlike romp through aphrodisiacal Jovian glades and bedrooms. It de-eroticizes Ovid. He has been altered, as one says of a cat. Ovid was a great worldly poet and wit. Arnold Weinstein, who freely adapted the Metamorphoses, is an infectious spoofer keenly aware of the uses of anachronism, from which much of the evening's humor arises.

All of the fables are done in mime, song and dance, plus direct asides to the audience. The performers are all toe, tongue, and letter-perfect. The company can boast of one of the standout contemporary clowns, Paul Sand. While he cannot reproduce the menagerie of animal sounds in this show that he does in Story Theatre, he is vastly amusing as a pixilated Mercury and equally funny as Phaeton, the cocky offspring of Phoebus (Apollo) who finds that he cannot actually control the horses that draw the chariot of the sun.

Among the faces and talents freshly added to Metamorphoses, Avery Shreiber is a comic treasure. Rather resembling a stocky, mustachioed Sicilian just off the grape treadmill, he is a muscle-brained Vulcan. Enraged to find his bride Venus cuckolding him with Mars, he exposes the pair in a hilariously crafty bungle. He is equally diverting as a Pygmalion who cannot get over how "real" his diaphanously clad Galatea is, a true lovely of a girl played by Mary Frann. Another splendid addition to the company is a lissome black dancer and actress, Paula Kelly, whose Circean seductiveness is apparent far past the footlights.

Metamorphoses may offer only a Cyclopean peek at Ovid's sportive immortals, but even Cyclops would agree that it is an amusing and salubrious eyeful.

sb T.E. Kalem

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