Grade 6 students traveled to the McCarter Theatre in Princeton on Wednesday, April 2, 2008, to see a matinée of Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of Argonautika: The Voyage of Jason and the Argonauts. The field trip complemented their studies of heroic myths.

Zimmerman, an award-winning theater director, is also known for adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She recently made headlines by directing a new production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at The Metropolitan Opera in New York.

“We were very happy to take them to this [play] because our first unit was heroic myths, and we dealt with a lot of Joseph Campbell’s ideas about what constituted a heroic myth. Campbell broke down the heroic quest into different stages and elements, which we studied in terms of multi-cultural myths—one each from Mali, India, and Japan. Argonautika enabled us to see the similar components of Greek myths [as] the Eastern and African ones we had studied,” said Middle School English teacher Dennis Pearlstein.

After seeing the play, the students wrote their own reviews. Because the staging relies on a simple set without elaborate scenery, the students were impressed when the actors used the power of suggestion to create a large sea monster, a windstorm, and other details that help tell the story.

“The director, Mary Zimmerman, did an excellent job of getting her themes and ideas across and showing them in a clever and hilarious way for the modern audience. The play’s characters . . . were so skilled in using their props that I could almost see the cliffs of Troy, the land of Colchis, and all the other mythical landscapes,” student Liam Mullett said.

According to student Joshua Fishman, Argonautika is an amazing play. “Its creativity is what makes it shine. Mary Zimmerman uses a symbiotic mix of drama and humor that creates a perfect balance. It seems that every time a dramatic scene appears, there is a funny one to counterbalance it,” he said.

Fellow student Tracey Lin commented on Zimmerman’s faithfulness to the original plot. “The director successfully follows the myth, even the unhappy events and ending. It seems as if she were only trying to make a usually normal Greek myth into a comedy, which she achieved successfully after tweaking a few areas,” she said.

Pearlstein was very happy to see Argonautika on the theater’s schedule this spring, and he is hoping to plan more field trips to expose the students to as many cultural opportunities as possible.



© 2008 The Pingry School