Last night, members from all years of the Scholars program attended The Metamorphoses, a play based on Ovid’s work at the O’Reilly theater in Downtown Pittsburgh.  We met at the Chapel at 5:45, an early start to bypass traffic.  Four Scholars with cars drove the fifteen of us Downtown for the exciting play.

One of the highlights and most publicized aspects of the show was the central pool and its use.  Throughout the show, characters would fall, walk, or even dive into the pool of water.  An interesting point for me was not only the fact that the actors played multiple characters but also that they served as their own stage hands and technicians.  As water was so central to the show and splashes and spills are inevitable, the actors literally mopped up their messes as part of the show.  This was an interesting directorial choice, because usually techies dressed in black would have done such work.  The first time this happened the actors on stage sung which made for an interesting juxtaposition of typical theater roles, the strict actor or the strict technician.

I, and most of my classmates, especially enjoyed the actor Bhavesh Patel who portrayed hilarious dexterity throughout the show, and portrayed such famous characters as Poseidon, Hermes, and Bacchus.  His use of accents and comedic timing won the audience over.

Overall, I think the night was a success.  We were able to enjoy Pittsburgh, theater, and the company of each other, and learn more about the modern, or perhaps not so modern, theme of identity, a prevalent trope in Dr. Lenz’s first year scholars course on Literary Modernism.