On today's episode, the playwright and director Mary Zimmerman explores the fantastical and the funny in Ovid's metamorphoses.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger director.

Mary Zimmerman's play, Metamorphoses, retells stories from Ovid, like King Midas,

Orpheus and Eurydice, Eros and Psyche, in vibrant contemporary language and settings.

The result is an evening of theater that reminds us of the timelessness of myth and its emphasis on universal themes like love, grief, and desire.

In its 2002 Broadway production, the play won a host of awards, including the Drama Desk, Drama League, and Lucille Lortel Awards for Best Play.

Zimmerman took home the Tony Award for Best Director.

Since first staging it in the mid-1990s,

Zimmerman used a pool of water as a central feature of the set.

Characters wash, play, drown, enter and exit the action through the water.

A new production of Metamorphoses at the Folger Theatre, opening May 7th, reimagines the play's staging,

this time without the pool.

Director Psalm 24 will lead an all-black cast in interpreting the play through the lens of the African Diaspora.

Beyond Metamorphoses, Zimmerman has adapted other ancient texts for the stage,

like The Odyssey and Jason and the Argonauts, and has directed numerous productions of Shakespeare's plays,

as well as operas at the Metropolitan Opera and co-wrote the libretto for the Philip Glass Opera, Galileo Galilei.

Here is Mary Zimmerman in conversation with Barbara Bogueve.

You've often talked about your approach as a kind of archaeology in rehearsals.

What do you mean by that?

Where that term comes from for me is that I feel like creative processes sometimes described in kind of architectural terms.

Like we're building something as though we're starting from like a flat line on the ground and then we're like pulling something up into a shape.

We're building something.

...