The Meander / Events

Transforming Tech: Extracurricular Players Perform Metamorphoses

by Meg Rosenburg

What do you get when you round up about 25 scientists and engineers from the Caltech community, allow them build a 2,000-gallon pool in a campus courtyard, and let them loose on a Tony-Award-winning play? Metamorphoses, that’s what. For the first two weeks of August, a makeshift theater occupied Lloyd Courtyard, complete with lighting towers, a sound system, seating, and, of course, a pool—around and within which all the action of the play took place.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to mention that I was in this play, so rather than telling you whether it was good or bad (though I’d like to think it went well!), I’d just like to say that participating in this production was a very special experience, and a great example of how the Caltech community can pull together to make anything happen. Rehearsals took place in a dining hall with tape marking the pool dimensions on the floor. Weeks were devoted to obtaining permission to build a pool on campus and deciding on the location, and then more weeks on building and setting up the equipment. Crises were averted, characters explored, leadership tested, and friends made—in short, it was an intense but worthwhile endeavor for all of us involved.

The play, written by American playwright Mary Zimmerman, took us and our audience through a series of Greek myths, most based on the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Director Miranda Stewart, a former Caltech undergrad and recent graduate of Occidental College with a degree in theater, was drawn to the work by its mythic elements and potential for stunning movement. “You need to be larger than life,” she told us before one of our dress rehearsals, and her uncompromising commitment to bringing out the best in us is responsible for the most compelling moments of the play. At a technical school like Caltech, it’s easy sometimes to overlook the arts, or to write them off as second-rate, but Miranda was resolute in her goal: “We don’t want people to say, ‘That was pretty good—for Caltech.’ We want them to say it was good.”

Did we pull off ‘good’? I don’t know, but striving for it was the highlight of the summer for those of us involved.

For anyone interested in participating in theater at Caltech, the Extracurricular Players (EXPLiCIT) will be voting on their Spring 2012 play during the Fall quarter, and TACIT (Theater Arts at Caltech) will soon be announcing auditions for The Memorandum, to be performed November 11-20. For more information: http://tacit.caltech.edu and http://explicit.caltech.edu.

Pictures from The Metamorphoses