In her Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman trashes Ovid with the same tenacity that Shakespeare in Love does to Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night, turning the ghost of real art into a pretty looking meal for haute bourgeois hicks. But what else would we expect of the Berkeley Rep, a theater that’s been aiming down for at least seven years and possibly a decade. Paying for these tickets is to feel the waste of contemporary capitalism, where everything is pre-packaged, even wild desire.
What you get here is the façade of art, pretty and beguiling on the outside, but as an experience utterly disposable. As it unfolds before you, know that every last moment of it is designed to shock and awe you into not caring, to sitting back in your chair and embracing the willful madness of experiencing nothing. That’s really not something we should be clapping for.
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