Prologue from the Artistic Director

Some 25 years ago, I was dispatched to Seattle by then Artistic Director Sharon Ott to check out the work of a young director named Mary Zimmerman. Sharon was always looking for artists whose work might change how we view theatre, visionaries who would bring something unique to Berkeley Rep. I was ecstatic, mostly because I was getting paid to get on a plane and go see a play. I didn’t know much about Mary; I had heard only a few things about her style and the unique process she employed to create her plays. So I entered the theatre not knowing what to expect.

The play turned out to be The Odyssey, and I remember it as if I saw it yesterday. The costumes, the movement, the language…. Mary had taken the traditional tools of the theatre and, through the alchemy of her own imagination, invented her own world on stage. A world I had never seen before. It was marked by visual splendor, razor-sharp storytelling, and, most of all, relentless imagination. Demons and gods, sea nymphs and armies, creatures phantasmagoric and real, all represented in ways that were by turns beautiful, formidable, funny, and always entertaining. All in the service of telling an ancient story as if it were happening right now. Which is Mary’s point: the old stories last because they still speak to us. And in her hands, loud and clear.

Berkeley Rep first produced Metamorphoses in 1999–2000. It was the second of nine shows of Ms. Zimmerman’s that we have produced, an astonishing number by any measure. While it was always one of my favorites, the idea of producing it again did not immediately spring to mind when Mary and I began discussing what she might do for us this season. But the more we spoke, the more it became clear that revisiting the play (which our mutual friend, the late, great Martha Lavey of Steppenwolf, always referred to as “Mary’s masterpiece”) would be hugely exciting. At a time of titanic change in our own culture, when every day seems to bring new challenges—urgent challenges that we must either embrace or resist—what better stories to tell than ones that speak to us about the ancient, human, fundamental principle of transformation?

Because the old stories, well, they don’t get old. They only become renewed, changed through the prism of time and our experience. So without further hesitation, ladies and gentlemen…it’s time to fill up the pool and get in the water.

Nothing feels better than renewal!

As always,

Tony Taccone