Metamorphoses is a play by the American playwright and director Mary Zimmerman, adapted from the classic Ovid poem Metamorphoses. The play premiered in 1996 as Six Myths at Northwestern University and later the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago. The play opened off-Broadway in October 2001 at the Second Stage Theatre. It transferred to Broadway on 21 February 2002 at the Circle in the Square Theatre produced by Roy Gabay and Robyn Goodman. That year it won several Tony Awards.
It was revived at the Lookingglass Theatre Company in Chicago on 19 September 2012 and was produced in Washington, DC at the Arena Stage in 2013.
Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses is based on David R. Slavitt's free-verse translation of The Metamorphoses of Ovid. She directed an early version of the play, Six Myths, 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 said in an interview with Bill Moyers of Now on PBS, "I love it so much I just had to put it in." She wrote and directed Metamorphoses during a period of renewed interest in the life and writings of Ovid.
Other Ovid-related works published in the same decades include David Malouf's 1978 novel, An Imaginary Life; Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988) (The Last World, translated into 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.
The play is staged as a series of vignettes.