Metamorphoses (play) - Contextual Information

Contextual Information

Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses is based on David R. Slavitt's free-verse translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid. An early version of the play, Six Myths, was produced in 1996 at the Northwestern University Theater and Interpretation Center. Zimmerman's finished work, Metamorphoses, was produced in 1998.
Of the many stories told in Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, only the introductory "Cosmogony" and the tale of Phaeton are from the first half of Ovid's Metamorphoses. The story of Eros and Psyche is not a part of Ovid's Metamorphoses; it is from Lucius Apuleius' novel Metamorphoses—also called The Golden Ass—and was included in Zimmerman's Metamorphoses because, as Zimmerman herself said in an interview with Bill Moyers of NOW, "I love it so much I just had to put it in."
Metamorphoses was written and produced during a period of renewed interest in the life and writings of Ovid. Other Ovid-related works in the same handful of decades include David Malouf's 1978 novel, An Imaginary Life; Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt, 1988 (The Last World, translated to English by John E. Woods in 1990); and Jane Alison's The Love-Artist, 2001. Additionally, Ovid's Metamorphoses were translated by A.D. Melville, Allen Mandelbaum, David R. Slavitt, David Michael Hoffman and James Lasdun, and Ted Hughes—in 1986, 1993, 1994, 1994, and 1997, respectively.