2003-02-10 1:39 p.m.
innnnnnpuuuuut...Number Steve is alive!

Recent media ingestion yields warming and soothing insights.

Went with L to see Mary Zimmerman's "Metamorphoses," a show that, by all rights, shouldn't be as good and as successful as it is on Broadway. We got $40 second-row tickets through TKTS (mad props to L's daddy-o) and sat through one of the best and most briskly-paced (just over 90 mins.) adaptations of Greek mythology I've seen in a long time.

The ensemble was ten or so large, and everyone played at least six parts in the seven Ovid stories that were woven together. Performances were fun, rich, and yet controlled (with a very few exceptions, and usually limited to one actor in one story), never falling into random cryptic gesticulation or hamming it up worse than Eddie Murphy on a bad day...everyone threw mildly modern spins on their deific characters, steered clear (mostly) of museum-piece cliches (again, props to the costume designer; all of the pieces were period, but could still deal with a dousing in the stage-sized pool).

And then, there's the water. The stage was a huge pool with a narrow walkway around the edge, an entrance and catwalk upstage for Olympian entrances.

The water, much to my surprise, was never a gimmick; it was a tool for the actors to play off of, to throw emotions and cries into. It was the punching bag for one character's rage when he was cursed with endless hunger, the liquid stage for a feverish taboo roll-in-the-hay between a girl and her father, the canvas for a queen caressing the cheek of her absent king, and, of course, it was a pool for the son of the sun-god to lounge in as he begs his dad for the reins to his chariot in the sky.

Simple, luscious, beautifully effective staging.

It also lit a fresh fire under my ass about mythology in contemporary life. D and I are slowly at work on a comic that's going to incorporate some of that, but a column's definitely percolating on the subject in the meantime. Litcred aside, I'm dying to see Demeter perched atop a New York City skyscraper, flowers and green all around her, eating a juicy peach, the juice dribbling off and smacking a random businessman on the nose, snow blowing 'round all the while.

Quick film plug: go rent "Human Nature," written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), directed by Michel Gondry (most of Bjork's videos), and starring Tim Robbins and Patricia Arquette. It's a very funny, very sick poke at what it means to be civilized (and hairy) in today's society. L and I couldn't stop laughing, which just proves that we're demented bastards. Heh.

Yeeks. From my site's stats, it's really scaring me how many people find this diary through a keyword search for 'spooning'. Maybe I need more/less pornographic entry titles?