The Last One Into the Pool Is an Actor

The Mark Taper Forum is all wet these days, as the acclaimed production of “Metamorphoses” is set almost entirely in and around a swimming pool that takes up most of the stage.

Actually, call it a wading pool. It’s about 3 inches deep at the back, but it slopes down to a depth of about 18 inches at the side closest to the audience. Measuring about 22 feet by 19 feet, it holds about 2,000 gallons that are changed every two weeks.

Even if it’s not Olympic-sized, it’s Olympian on a higher plane--the characters who hang out in this pool either tend to be from Mt. Olympus or are passionately connected with the ancient Greco-Roman gods who live there. Just as the gods can transform themselves and others, so is this pool transformed into an ocean and then into a bedroom where illicit couplings take place.

Doing a play with a pool is not exactly a day at the beach for the production crew. Even though “Metamorphoses” had been on tour in Berkeley and Seattle just before the Taper, the Taper had to install its own, new pool. There wasn’t enough time to transport the previous pool from Seattle to L.A., and it wouldn’t have fit comfortably into the Taper’s slightly smaller stage.

The first, form-fitted liner that was installed in the Taper pool didn’t work well. Leaks that created little pools around the big one appeared on a Sunday, just before the actors were supposed to arrive and begin rehearsing on the following Tuesday. On Monday, Ed Haynes, the Taper’s resident scenic design associate, found a different rubbery liner material, Pondguard, on the Internet. It was installed by the time the actors started treading the boards--or rather, the water. The bottom of the pool also is lined with a foam material that helps mortals absorb the shock when Poseidon roughs them up.

“The actors have to be so focused,” said stage manager Anjali Bidani, who has been with the production since its early days in Chicago. “The minute you stop focusing, you slip”--physically, that is. There have been no major slips in L.A. so far, but incidents did create bruises in the three previous cities.

To lessen the likelihood of such accidents, the deck and backstage passages are covered with an absorbent material, and the deck is mopped twice during the 95-minute production. Furthermore, as soon as actors enter the backstage area, they enter one of two small “hot booths,” in Bidani’s words, each of which is equipped with two heaters and 20 towels to help the actors dry off and change clothes--before they take the plunge again in their next scene.

“You never get completely dry,” Bidani said. And falls aren’t the only danger--actress Anjali Bhimani came down with a “swimmer’s ear” infection, which she managed to shake off with the help of medication. By the way, it’s Bhimani who appears to melt into the water at the end of one memorable scene. What the audience can’t see is that she avails herself of a little breathing space that’s concealed under the deck. At least her nose is above water during the minute or so that’s left in that scene.

As pool owners everywhere probably would appreciate, the water requires a lot of maintenance. Even though a critic wrote about how the theater smelled like chlorine, the chemical that’s used to keep the water clean is sodium bromide, not chlorine, because it’s gentler on the costumes. In between performances, the water is rigorously skimmed for hair, cotton, cigarette butts and candle drippings (one character smokes and candles float in the play’s last scene).

The water is covered and heated to a temperature of more than 100 degrees before the show begins. Uncovered and with the heaters turned off to eliminate noise, the water temperature still stays in the 90s. The air-conditioning is turned off an hour before curtain time, not only to prevent the actors from being chilled but because the water looks more glassy without drafts of air striking it.

Like looky-loos at a motel, audience members often come up to touch the water after the show to see how warm it is. That’s OK, Bidani said, as long as they don’t climb on the deck or jump in.

“We always talk about having a pool party on closing night, but we never do,” Bidani said. Understandable, perhaps--if you were in and out of the water for 95 minutes every night, you might prefer your parties to be on dry land.

*

COLONIZING BURBANK: The Colony Studio Theatre, 25 years old this month, will officially receive the keys to the Burbank Center Stage at a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday. The first production in the new theater will revive a previous Colony hit, Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine,” staged by the group’s founding artistic director Terrence Shank and opening Aug. 26. Until 2001, only 99 out of the venue’s 276 seats will be used by the Colony, providing a smoother transition to the budgets required in a mid-size theater. In its current home in Silver Lake, the Colony has more than 4,000 subscribers--more than any other sub-100-seat theater in L.A. *