Metamorphoses is the third show by Dmitry Krymov and Krymov Lab NYC that I have seen (the first was Three Love Stories Near the Railroad; the second Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” In Our Own Words), and despite the fact that this production mostly fails, I remain a hopeful fan. Mr. Krymov creates absurdist works that look and feel like DIY theater, wholly self-conscious and artificial, yet touching, funny, surprising, and always completely theatrical. Watching his offerings one gets the sense that they did not start with a playwright alone in a room hunched over a keyboard. Rather, they feel like Mr. Krymov began with one or two ideas which he brought to his Lab, and that he and his company fashioned the show through a process of invention and improvisation. There is something beautiful about this kind of freeform approach, and sometimes, as in Onegin, the results are remarkable. Other times they can be remarkably tedious.
Metamorphoses begins in a funeral home. There is a corpse in an open casket. The benches are filled with cutout silhouettes of mourners. A man (John Coyne) plays piano. A woman (Grace Bernardo) sings. Enter a very large man (Amen Igbinosun) holding flowers and leading a skinny little boy holding a big red ball; the boy is played by an adult (Natalie Battistone) in short pants and wearing a giant paper mâché head of a child (towards the end of the evening, Zach Fike Hodges becomes the boy). The father puts the flowers in the coffin and the two sit down on a bench to mourn. But the boy gets restless, starts bouncing the ball, loses control of it, the ball rolls under the coffin, the boy darts after it and everything comes crashing down—the boy, the coffin, the body, all the benches and all the “mourners,” the boy’s father—all of them subsequently shat on by ravens perched up on the lighting trusses.
Then the action freezes and a person in a black suit and cap (Shelby Flannery), who has an office at the home, starts telling us how to keep a child from running around at a funeral: glue the child to the bench. The first scene is repeated, but this time the father puts glue on the bench and sits his son on it. Now when his son bolts after the errant ball he tears the seat of his pants. But this does nothing to prevent the same havoc. All freeze again, and the person in the cap tells us the second way to keep a child from running around. The scene is repeated a third time, now with solution number two. It’s somewhere here that the show loses much of its steam; there are more funny and inventive moments—a man in a dog costume, two guys playing a camel—but these are too few and far between to save the production.
Besides the funeral home shenanigans, much of Metamorphoses rests on the shoulders of Ms. Flannery, who, as the person in the black suit and cap, tells us stories, first of a brother to whom something terrible happened, then of another loved one who met a tragic fate. It’s difficult to say how useful these monologues would have been had they been performed properly. Unfortunately, except for the one or two very dramatic moments, in which Ms. Flannery is able to fall back on powerful emotions to make the words work, most of her delivery amounts to playacting, which quickly becomes grating. She is clearly miscast, and whatever nuance, irony or humor the stories might have had are lost in her telling. Consequently, instead of being riveted, or even interested, in what she is saying, I find myself waiting for the performance to end.
Ordinarily, when a show makes as many missteps as Metamorphoses, I would dismiss it and probably not recommend the company as a whole. But Krymov Lab NYC is different. Their productions feel less like destinations and more like the almost incidental biproducts of journeys—messy, chaotic, and just a little bit unfinished—as though they are, like living beings, continual works in progress. I look forward to their next adventure.
Additional cast: Erich Rausch, Tim Eliot, Nick Lehane, Sean Devare
photos by Marina Levitskaya
Metamorphoses
(or A Few Ways of Keeping a Child from Running Around at His Great Uncle’s Funeral)
Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa, 66 East 4th St
90 minutes, no intermission
Tues-Sat at 7; Sat & Sun at 2
ends on March 23, 2025
for tickets ($10-$45), visit La MaMa
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
One makes of what they see based on what they have to add. The observer finalizes a work of art for themselves. I loved everything in @ShelbyFlannery performance from start to finish. She had a difficult part to play, an emotional roller-coast that will only be justified, explained at the end. Such is absurd theater: it’s theater until it is not.
One makes of what they see based on what they have to add. The play has a Proustian character. A stream of loosely shaped childhood memories that arrive all associated with that one guilt memory of having run around at an uncle’s funeral. A carnival of memories, characters and shaping of self. But who is remembering all of that? Maybe the author, maybe the man in the casket. Maybe the child and the man in the casket are the same person united in the timeless space of memory.
One makes of what they see based on what they have to add. I wish Dmitry Zvonkov would have made the effort of reading Mr. Krymov’s intent. His review would celebrate the play and especially the brilliant performance of Shelby Flannery.
Thank you for this review. I enjoyed so much about the look of the piece (the haze, the mess of white poop, the row of green socks) but could not connect with the monologues. I think the technical information about glue was meant to be funny, but I was restless. (Ditto, the other monologues.) I LOVED Grace’s singing: haunting, jarring (the notes going and staying flat!!), and grounding. I loved the dog and the camel. I think I have a great appetite for absurdity, but wish it came with more gravity.
I enjoyed watching the play, but it took some time to digest what I saw… It is very visual, theatrical, and bright. I got the feeling that you can not get ready for all obstacles that life presents you. Getting the situation under control is an impossible task. There is always an element of unexpected trouble, and nothing is like it appears (the man in a suit is a lady in red dress; the dead man is alive and plays clarinet). And there is this constant presence of black birds above that are always there to shit on people below, and there is no way to escape their messy presence.
I couldn’t disagree more: I guess I have a very different taste from Dmitry Zvonkov. I didn’t like “Eugene Onegin” In Our Own Words” and I was a little bit cautious in my expectations of Metamorphoses. I am happy to be wrong: Metamorphoses is a great show, beautifully written and staged. There is no plot, dramatic turns, or characters – and yet emotional trajectory is felt throughout the show, with no stop or slow-down. A boy plays with the ball and turns a funeral service into havoc: the cardboard benches and mourners fall, the coffin turns over, the body falls out, and gloating ravens croak and poop on all this from the havens. This scene repeats with variations: a child is tried to be stopped by glueing to the bench or distracted by a dog, a snake, a drone, and finally, a camel. In parallel with this “reality” we are hearing the monologues: starting with the advertisement of glue and then “touching” family stories about the beloved brother Jimmy, dog, snake etc. As if a TV is on all the time broadcasting a stream of mass consciousness – formed by mass media and aired by it. The crazier and more absurd the scene is getting – the crazier the monologue, as the mind is trying to absorb the reality, to make a narrative and sense of it. The emotional heat is going up, from comedy, through dark comedy – to the last tragic note, when the mind can’t digest the reality and live with it. This is beautifully played by Shelby Flannery.
I wish I could see this show again – maybe, at a larger venue, e.g., Baryshnikov Center or BAM.