Transcript of Mary Zimmerman
Mary Zimmerman: We were in New York rehearsing for Second Stage and our first preview was September 16th, 2001, in New York. And you hear from school on the term “catharsis” as a theoretical construct and you don’t quite know if you've experienced it or if you believe it, but twice in my life I’ve felt it. You know I believe catharsis is defined as the purging of pity and terror through identification with the character, the story. And there were certain lines, certain events that happened in Metamorphoses that were so piercingly immediate that I was sort of shaking in the back row, like here we go what’s going to happen when they say these lines? Because the play starts on a fairly light or neutral sort of note. But the first full story that is told, “Alcyon and Ceyx,” there’s a man and wife who love each other very much and on a perfectly sunny day he goes essentially off to work. He wants to go consult in a far-off oracle, and the wife is a little apprehensive; she doesn’t want him to go. But then he’s sailing along and out of the blue sky, out of nothing, disaster; a storm and within moments he’s killed. But then the really harrowing thing is that as he’s drowning, he prays to the god just one thing: that his wife find his body. And then we cut to her and she’s sleeping on the shore so that she’ll see his boat return as soon as possible. And she doesn’t know what’s happened, of course. So the gods take pity on her because she’s waiting and waiting and send a dream of her husband down to her in his form played by the actor who plays her husband of course, and they have this encounter in the water where he tells her, "I’m dead and you have to let it go." So you know, the difference in being in New York on 9/11 and anywhere else in the world, and I think anyone would tell you this, or if you were there yourself is the presence of the search. It was all around; it was everywhere, the search. And the hope against hope; the hope against knowing the truth that someone was going to walk back in the door. And everywhere, everywhere “have you seen, have you seen, have you seen,” and overhearing conversations on the street, and being asked on the street and the little memorials and soon the search posters turned to memorials and all of that, so that was so in the air.
But I think the reason that the play works towards being comforting even though it presents tragedy -- and this is what the philosophers and Aristotle are trying to explain -- there's something -- I don’t know how to say this. When you watch a show, you're both inside it and outside it. Inside it, you're feeling it, you're with it, you're experiencing that pity and terror. But there's this outside part that knows that this is a repetitive act and that it is going to happen again and again. And then I think that's triply enforced when it’s an ancient text, and you know that this story has been told for 5,000 years and it makes you back up the lens of your life. It pulls you back from the tumult of the wave that you're in, of the surf that you're in in your life, to see that there’s the whole ocean carrying every wave to shore. And then I think for me, to stretch that idea even a little bit more, the curtain call is a symbol of the resurrection. The reappearance of everyone after the trauma, after the fiction, to show that the trauma was passing, was a fiction and the greeting and acknowledging of the audience is such a kind of reunion, a kind of ecstatic reunion and I think that works on a very deep level with audiences. I also think that that pity and terror and all that, it’s a communal experience. You are in a group of people who without words -- because audiences are very polite and very silent and sit in the dark and face one direction and sort of do as they're told a little bit. And in exchange for that, they're offered an experience that's very immediate and vivid and hopefully very funny, and entertaining, and important in some way or provides ideas, moves them. But then there’s a release of that at the end where we’re suddenly in the same room together. But aside from all of that kind of fancy talk about that, I really think that the power of the myths is that they tell us over and over and over, it was ever thus, it was ever thus. People have always gone through unwanted radical change; you can't be a human being and go through your whole life without it. It’s not possible. But the change produces and creates things; it’s how the world is made; that death is necessary to life. That's over and over and over, the statement of these myths. But I also feel that every single play you go and see, or acts of representation, always affirm life because someone or some group of people has studied it and practiced and rehearsed for you to give you this little simulacrum of life, of nature, and that's an act of devotion. That's a worshipful act.
