2002-03 Season 1
Tales From Ovid
by Ted Hughes
Adapted by Tim Supple & Simon Reade
Directed by Jeremy Skidmore
August 2002
For Hughes, one of the most admired and widely read poets of our day, had translated twenty-four of Ovid’s stories–legends connected by their transformational motifs–with the elegance and passion that distinguished his own poems. His vigorous, fluid poetry is drama itself and demands to be spoken aloud. Tim Supple and Simon Reade take ten of the tales –including the stories of Echo and Narcissus, of Venus and Adonis, of Pyramus and Thisbe, among others–and transform them into elegant works for the stage. Erotic, violent, and magical, this dramatization of Tales from Ovid realizes the immense power of Hughes’s original text.
Cast
Mando Alvarado
Kathleen Coons
Aubrey Deeker
Colby DiSarro
Shannon Dunne
Sam Elmore
Peter Finnegan
Lindsay Harrison
Sarah Anika Nelson
Cleo Pizana
Adele Robey
Production Team
Director Jeremy Skidmore
Choreographers Sam Elmore & Kelly Parsley
Lighting Designer Ayun Fedorcha
Costume Designer Kate Turner-Walker
Sound Designer Peter Finnegan
Properties Designer Anne McCormally
Press
What They Say
“Without a shred of scenery and only the occasional prop, 11 actors transport the audience to that time before recorded time, when gods and goddesses walked the Earth. A translucent blue scarf stretched wide by two actors becomes the stream in which Narcissus sees his reflection and falls in love with himself. A strip of red ribbon is the gory souvenir of a rapist’s conquest as he silences his victim with a knife. A wronged wife escapes her pain by transforming into a bird; as she spreads her arms, other actors lift her, enabling her to “fly” across the stage.”

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