´Metamorphoses (or A Few Ways of Keeping a Child from Running Around at His Great Uncle’s Funeral)´ is a new production by Dmitry Krymov which has just premiered at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York.

In just under eighty minutes ´Metamorphoses´ feels like a breath of fresh air. An original play, it consists of a series of sketches that gradually coalesce into something more coherent. The work is a collaboration between Dmitry Krymov (b. 1954) and his dramaturg and translator Shari Perkins. Krymov, known for his boundary-pushing approach to theatre, delivers a piece that is both playful and unsettling in equal measure.

The theme is sombre, as the title makes clear. The performance starts with a group of men dressed in black suits and green socks carefully seating cardboard cutouts of people on the pews in a church which is represented on stage by a stained-glass window. At the front there sits an open coffin. The set design by Emona Stoykova is minimalist, and it works well with the play. The puppets and masks by Leah Ogawa are also worth a special mention.

One of the instances of Russian reality seeping into an otherwise perfectly American play happens when we are introduced to the main character. There is a church shop assistant who sits at a stall with icons and candles, a job which must seem perplexing to an American audience but which is immediately recognizable to Russians: in Russian churches there are always shop assistants.

A man in funeral attire, hand in hand with another actor, wearing the oversized mask of a cartoonish young boy sits down on a bench. The boy starts playing with a ball, overturning the coffin, and mechanical birds positioned above the stage begin spraying white paint representing bird droppings, a symbol of nature’s indifference to human grief. The main character played by Shelby Flannery (b. 1995) then proceeds to talk about various situations when a child can ruin a funeral and how to prevent it.

In the best traditions of avant-garde absurdist theatre, the performance feels circus-like, carnivalesque, or even like an adult adaptation of one of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. The audience’s reactions range from roaring laughter to eerie silence when the performance takes a tragic turn. It is a play about funerals, after all, and Shelby Flannery’s character is evidently experiencing profound grief over the loss of loved ones.

´Metamorphoses´ is already the third original New York production by Krymov since he relocated to the USA in 2022 after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and established his new company there called Krymov Lab NYC.

With American actors and English texts, these new productions mark the director’s first foray into unknown territory. Krymov was one of the most celebrated and innovative directors in pre-2022 Russia where he had won five Golden Masks, the most prestigious Russian theatre award. For fourteen years (2004-2018) his name was practically synonymous with one of the leading Moscow theatres, the School of Dramatic Art.

In Moscow, Krymov was known for his unique approach to classics, mostly Russian ones. Deconstructing classical texts, combining them with other, equally important texts, as well as adding new elements while working on the production has always been part of Krymov’s idiosyncratic approach.

One of his famous Moscow productions is ´Seryozha´, based on both Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. The title character, Anna Karenina’s son, half-forgotten in the midst of her affair, is represented by a life-size doll rather than an actor. This is similar to how the boy in ´Metamorphoses´ is represented by a man in an oversized mask.

Even though ´Metamorphoses´ is an original play, Krymov used his traditional approach of mixing various elements and reinterpreting it once more during rehearsals. “The development process for each play with Krymov has been different because each show had slightly different sources and needs. For Metamorphoses, Dima [Krymov] came up with a collection of scenes that he wanted to stage centred around the boy, the father, and inevitable funeral chaos involving various props, animals, and puppets,” Perkins said in an interview with Art Focus Now.

“Eventually, he [Krymov] gave me a list of topics to research related to the various objects that would be in the show. After I sent him the research, in both English and Russian, he assembled a script. Dima's rehearsals always include a great deal of improvisation, which I record live in my master script. The piece is a true collaboration — some sections he asked me to write according to what he needed, some parts were improvised by Shelby [Flannery] and other members of the cast, and other sections were written by him in Russian and translated into English by me,” added Perkins.

The collaborative nature of the play results in a fascinating mixture of American and Russian experiences. For instance, the main character suddenly talks about swapping postage stamps as a child, a hobby shared by most who grew up in the Soviet Union but not in the USA. An experience of being spat on by a camel is also an anecdote often cited in the Soviet era.

The fact that my ticket actually had a different title - ´Metamorphoses (or How to Stop Your Child from Ruining Your Great Uncle’s Funeral)´ - is a testament to the production still being a work in progress. According to Shari Perkins, “The show went through a couple of title changes, and it looks like there are some ghosts of past titles online now.”

There are several interactive elements in the play: in one dancing scene, members of the audience are invited to take part. There is also a meta-twist at the very end: the actor who plays the boy sheds his mask and talks to the audience about his own experiences at funerals, starting with his parents and ending with various distant relatives.

By the time the actor removes his mask to address the audience directly, the boundaries between performance and personal confession have already become blurred. What begins as theatrical playfulness evolves into something raw and deeply human — an intimate reckoning with memory, grief, and the strange absurdity of loss.