By Bill Marx

The Berkshire Theatre Group production of Metamorphoses is consistently engaging and, at times, deeply powerful.

Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman, adapted from David R. Slavitt’s free-verse translation of Ovid’s poem Metamorphoses. Directed by Isadora Wolfe. Staged by the Berkshire Theater Group on The Larry Vaber Stage at The Unicorn Theatre,  6 East Street, Stockbridge, through October 26.

Kelli Simpkins, Ferda Ramirez-Olivares & June Carryl in BTG’s production of Metamorphoses. Photo: Tucker Bair

In her poem “Water Flows,” Margaret Atwood posits: “Water does not resist. Water flows./ When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress./Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you./ But water always goes where it wants to go,/and nothing in the end can stand against it.” While it’s easier to imagine water’s caress and untamable freedom when reading Ovid’s epic, it presents a challenge to dramatize on stage, where bodies inevitably thump against one another and the walls. One of the remarkable achievements of director Mary Zimmerman — who won a 2002 Tony Award for her adaptation of selections from the poem (which includes verses by Rainer Maria Rilke) — is her ability to theatrically embody Ovid’s vision of blurred boundaries between gods and humans, love and hate, creation and destruction, instinct and control.

A pool of water dominates the staging, providing ample metaphorical depth as performers wade, swim, and splash within it. This, coupled with the late David R. Slavitt’s excellent translation and Zimmerman’s thoughtful selection and ordering of stories, elevates the production beyond a mere “classics illustrated” version of Ovid. While some moments falter — like Icarus, notably absent from Zimmerman’s selection — the stripped-down Berkshire Theatre Group production remains continually engaging and occasionally deeply moving.

I describe it as “stripped-down” because director Isadora Wolfe has chosen to emphasize acting over elaborate stage imagery. The costumes carry autumnal tones, with few sparkly or striking color contrasts, while the set and lighting are pragmatic and straightforward — nothing ornate or self-consciously cinematic. This feels like a missed opportunity considering the inherent magic realism of these tales and the transformative demands, where characters become sea birds or dissolve into streams. That said, the presence of a hilarious, gold-helmeted sun who belts out songs adds some campy sparkle.

Aside from that visual lack, Wolfe has gathered a strong cast that approaches the tragicomic range of the material — which jumps from the fantastical and the bedeviled to the comically mischievous — with a genial but always dignified ease. A few standouts in the production: Kelli Simpkins makes for a suitably androgynous figure intoning the opening “Cosmology”; Gregg Edelman supplies a maddeningly self-satisfied Midas; Stephanie Jean Lane delivers a poignant Alcyone, transmogrified by mourning into a bird; Tim Liu contributes an amusingly lunkheaded Phaeton; Fedra Ramirez-Olivares’s Myrrha is gut-wrenchingly victimized by lust (propelled by Aphrodite) for her father, King Cinyras, and June Carryl and David Adkin are touching as the aged couple Baucis and Philemon, who earn the gratitude of the gods by simply being decent human beings. Perhaps because it has inspired so many inventive contemporary retellings, the Orpheus and Eurydice segment falls somewhat flat, its pathos coming off as perfunctory.

John William Watkins and Stephanie Jean Lane in BTG’s production of Metamorphoses. Photo: Tucker Bair

Overall, Wolf stages the action with choreographic elegance, mindful of the emotional rhythm of the stories. The performers swab down the steps around the pool after many of the stories — that is not only for the sake of safety, but to cleanse the audience’s theatrical palate. Ovid’s archetypal studies of irrational passion and its transformative power, for good or ill, remain uncomfortably relevant. But, given that our current president is obsessed with the metal, the elemental lesson learned by Midas carries a refreshed satiric jab. Would Trump care about others enough to search for a solution to his “golden” touch? Your call …

For me, the story here that meant the most today is the de-evolution of Erysichthon, an arrogant man who chops down one of Ceres’s sacred trees, despite hearing a warning from his victim that there will be hell to pay. The goddess of agriculture, grain crops, and fertility, Ceres, comes up with a sadistic vengeance — she commands the spirit of raw Hunger to wrap itself around the guy. Erysichthon is cursed with an insatiable appetite; he eats all he can get his hands on, to the point he bankrupts himself. Flat broke, desperate to feed himself, Erysichthon ends up selling his mother to a merchant. Finally, the man ends up having nothing left to eat — except for himself. It would be hard to find a better fable suggesting where our economic assumptions (conscious and unconscious) about the inexhaustibility of nature will lead. As Ovid knew well, nature will strike back — by eating its own.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For over four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.