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