Better Living Through Chlorophyll in The Trees
From The Trees, at Playwrights Horizons. In Greek and Roman myth, and especially in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, humans transform into other beings at climaxes of ambition, emotion and violence. Arachne, after besting Athena in weaving, becomes a spider; Procne and Philomena, getting revenge for rape, become birds; Daphne, trying to escape Apollo, becomes a tree. Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees takes the opposite approach. In her lovely inverted pyramid of a play, a brother and a sister take root in a public park right at the start, for no obvious reason other than they got a little drunk and wistful and fell asleep.
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