The Brooklyn Rail

The new production by Krymov Lab NYC, Metamorphoses (or A Few Ways of Keeping a Child from Running Around at His Great Uncle’s Funeral) is a shit show—literally. It includes a dozen raven puppets repeatedly pooping what looked like globs of sunscreen on the heads of the poor cast. At one point, a character pins a poster to the wall with a quote comically attributed to Konstantin Stanislavski: “When you see that someone is going to poop on your head, jump out of the way.”

This production was directed and written by Dmitry Krymov, a celebrated Russian director who happened to be guest directing a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia when Putin invaded Ukraine. Krymov spoke out against the war, and the reaction inside Russia was swift; seven of his nine shows were shuttered in Moscow, his name scrubbed from the posters and programs of the remaining two. Unable to return to his homeland, Krymov moved to New York and created Krymov Lab NYC. The company, despite his limited English (his producer Tatyana Khaikin is his interpreter) and lack of Russia’s stable state funding (one of the ways the company is raising money is by selling puppets from a previous production), has already made a mark in the experimental theater world with their 2022 productions at La Mama of Pushkin “Eugene Onegin” in Our Own Words and Americans: 2 Hems & 1/8 O’Neill. An impressive feat for Krymov despite a situation only describable as, well, a shit show.

The beginning of Metamorphoses looks like a normal funeral. The set (designed with childlike wonder by Emona Stoykova) contains a circular stained-glass window that casts multicolored light down onto a row of benches arranged before a coffin. A man (John Coyne) plays the piano, as a woman (Grace Bernardo) sings a Latin funeral dirge.

But this is no normal funeral. The lighting (by Krista Smith) casts the scene in a dream-like semi-darkness. A white haze floats in the air. Four actors carry in the mourners, a dozen silhouettes made of cardboard, and place them on the benches, which, upon closer look, are also made of cardboard. In fact, it’s all made of cardboard: the coffin, the window, even the outline of the church in the background. And in the rafters, hovering above it all, are rows after rows of ravens made of wire and scraps of cloth (stunningly designed by Leah Ogawa; her puppets are the stars of this show) with small wires running from them. The new Chekhov’s gun: Krymov’s bird shit.

A person in a black suit and cap (Shelby Flannery), who appears to be the funeral director, munches Whole Foods popcorn and sets up a little shrine of candles and Russian Orthodox icons on their desk tucked in the stage’s corner. Following close behind is a father (Amen Igbinosun) with a rose in one hand and his son (Natalie Battistone, and, later in the show, Zach Fike Hodges) in the other. The boy, holding an orange ball, is dressed in a tie, knee-length shorts, and a giant papier-mâché mask.

The father and son sit together at the bench closest to the coffin. The bored child bounces the ball to himself over and over until he eventually loses control. The boy dives after it and inadvertently flips the coffin. The body—a dummy, don’t worry—sprawls on the floor. The four men who carried the silhouetted mourners yank on the black wires, and heaps of white bird shit fall from the ravens. Everything is drenched: the corpse, the cardboard mourners, and even the glistening bald head of the poor father. The costumes, too, are unspared (sending thoughts and prayers to designer Luna Gomberg, or whoever is in charge of making sure those costumes get their stains out before the next show).

The trusty old funeral director rises from his desk to explain to the audience a tried-and-true solution to keeping a child in their seat during a funeral: glue. The scene then repeats itself exactly, except the father brings a larger bouquet of flowers and secretly glues his child to the bench. It does not help: the boy leaps after the ball, ripping his pants, flipping the coffin, and the bird shit falls on cue. Tableaus of greater shock and horror. The director offers a new solution: even stronger industrial glue and nails. The scene repeats, and repeats, and repeats. The bouquets grow comically larger, and the coffin keeps getting flipped. The director continues to offer advice with complete assurance, reading from a series of jargon-filled manuals, but, for the most part, it proves useless—the bird shit falls again and again.

This opening section in its absurd physicality was the strongest part of the production. Igbinosun, despite never speaking a word, brought life to the beleaguered father with a Charlie Chaplin-esque mix of clownery and pathos. I couldn’t take my eyes off him as he desperately pressed his child down onto the glue-covered bench or watched in horror as the corpse again plopped on the now completely stained floor. However, once this initial funeral section came to a close and the poor child was (spoiler alert) firmly stuck in his bench, the show abandoned any semblance of a narrative and veered from its contained and intentional messiness to just a plain mess.

Metamorphoses, like all the Krymov Lab shows, is not based on a polished script, but rather it is a devised work where Krymov and his actors experimented in the rehearsal space to create the show together as it went. The lack of polishing worked in the moments of physicality which felt refreshingly unpretentious and unhinged, such as a scene where a man (Nick Lehane) in a dog mascot costume (we need more people in mascot costumes in theater, it’s eerie in just the right way) tangles everyone on the stage with his bright red leash or when a condom is placed on the end of an clarinet until it fills with air and becomes an oblong balloon. However, the production’s roughness around the edges was felt most acutely in the dialogue, which was consistently clumsy, such as a series of bizarre family stories from the funeral director and a lame Elon Musk joke. (Can we agree to banning his name from contemporary theater? It’s the “orange man” from 2016 all over again.)

The conclusion rests on a series of soliloquies from Flannery’s funeral director, who seemed self-conscious about how absurd her stories must sound to the audience (they involve a drone accident, butt wiping, and snake death). Flannery is unable to infuse them with the emotion necessary to elevate them above the show’s unrelenting clownery. Instead they read as distasteful jokes rather than the genuine expression of grief that they could have been. And while Flannery’s mania was captivating in physical moments, such as when she sliced a snake puppet to pieces until she was covered and convulsing in blood and, you guessed it, lots of bird shit, it generally left the second half of the production emotionally vacant and tonally unmoored.

But while Metamorphoses is hardly perfect, I still left the space excited by the production’s, and by extension Krymov’s, belief in the stage as a site of experimentation and imagination. They brought on a gorgeous camel puppet manned by two actors for god knows what reason. (The poor funeral director even asks the audience at this point in desperation, “Why a camel?!”) They brought audience members to the stage and together danced in circles a la the ending of Fellini’s 8 ½. They tossed all the poop-covered and broken benches and silhouettes in a massive pile at the center of the stage that I was waiting for them to light into a funeral pyre.

This is a show and a director unafraid to make a mess, and to point up, with a smile, at those ravens that hover just above us all.