This production is a second staging (at the invitation of Arts Emerson) in the larger setting of the 150-seat theater space. In 2010 Boston’s then five-year-old Whistler in the Dark Company mounted a production using Ted Supple and Simon Reade’s adaptation of 10 of Hughes’s poems. Most recently in the United States, Mary Zimmerman wrote and directed her own theater piece drawn from the poem. There have been theatrical adaptations of the work all over the world. During the Middle Ages throughout the Christian West, it became the most popular work from the classical era, a source-book of imagery and situation for artists, poets and the life of high culture.” The Metamorphoses was a success in its own day.

“This licensed him to take a wide sweep through the teeming underworld or overworld of Romanised Greek myth and legend, The rightman had met the right material at the right moment. an account of how from the beginning of the world right down to his own time bodies had been magically changed, by the power of the gods, into other bodies.” (and) completed the Metamorphoses around the time of the birth of Christ. His excitement about the project is palpable in his introduction to the work: “Ovid was born the year after the death of Julius Caesar. In the 1990s, British poet Ted Hughes composed new translations of 24 poems from this compendium. Some of its story lines-Pygmalion, Pyramus and Thisbe, Narcissus, Midas-are familiar from readings in Greek mythology others-like Myrrha and Tereus-are less familiar and shock even in 2012. Ovid’s Metamorphorses, a narrative poem in 15 parts composed at the dawn of the Christian era, has served as artistic inspiration and source material for writers, visual artists, and composers over 2000 years. If you’re interested in young, state-of-the-art theater, performers courting danger within spitting distance of your seat, a director culling from dance, circus, and story-telling and bringing twenty-first century technology to still-stirring first century material, go see Tales from Ovid. The physicality never flags in TALES FROM OVID.

Tales from ovid by ted hughes