Shortly after Courtney Smith joined �ֲ���ý in the fall of 2024 as an associate professor of theater, he floated an idea for a production that was both over-the-top ambitious and absolute catnip to his colleague Sally Wood, a visiting lecturer in theater who was trying to decide what play to direct in the fall of 2025.

His suggestion would require help from an unprecedented number of campus partners and doing due diligence to be compliant with local, state and federal regulations — and test Schaeffer Theatre like nothing else in its 65-year history.  What Smith had said to Wood was: “You know what would be really awesome? Metamorphoses.”

Wood is used to pulling things off. When she’s not in the classroom or in one of �ֲ���ý performance spaces, she’s working with professional theaters and actors all over the region, including Portland Stage Company and the Theater at Monmouth. But the 1998 play, an omnibus interpretation of Ovid’s Greek mythology written by MacArthur Award winner Mary Zimmerman, has one foundational issue that makes it seriously complex to pull off. There’s just one set. But it’s a swimming pool. As much as Wood was thrilled that Smith was game for this project,  she said would not have suggested it. 

“Just because it’s too much to ask,” she said, sitting on the stage this fall as the dress rehearsal was about to get started for what would be a sold-out run of Metamorphoses encompassing Halloween weekend. “It’s so big.”

To do it right, you need to build a pool on a stage that can handle, say, 22,000 extra pounds in the form of water, as well as performers who don’t mind getting wet. That means lots of laundry. Major technical challenges. Because of all Metamorphoses requires to bring it to life, Wood said the play is rarely produced except in academic settings. It can be done without the full soaking experience, say with kiddie pools or some sort of reflective surface, she said. 

“And I think it still works. But there’s magic in the water. Real magic. When people see it, it’s like, they always remember it. And I don’t know of any other play that has that kind of stamp.”

+Click here to learn more about what Graham Austin was thinking during this scene

The actors are in and out of the pool throughout the play, with one character drowning in a shipwreck, along with his crew (�ֲ���ý dancers in this case), another conducting a seduction in the water, King Midas hanging out poolside with a drunken Bacchus, and even a god’s offspring undergoing modern therapy while spinning across its surface in a round pool toy. 

The first time Wood saw Metamorphoses was in New York at the Circle in the Square, with Zimmerman directing (the writer/director would go on to win a Tony for that production in 2002). “I remember just not breathing,” Wood said. “I’ll never forget just not breathing, for like an hour and a half, and being so sad when it was over.”

“I’m convinced it’s the water,” Wood added. “The play on the page is beautiful and really good, but there’s a trance. It’s crazy. There’s a literal transformation that happens once you get in there.”

And it happens for the actors. “I loved getting in that swimming pool,” said Graham Austin ’28 of Basalt, Colo., a likely theater major, who like the more than a dozen student cast members played multiple roles.  As Phaeton, son of Apollo, he is the character getting therapy in the pool, and Austin played the part with the gusto of Sean Penn as the iconic Spicoli of 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “It was a highlight of every time I did that play. Just overall, fantastic time in that thing.”

Engineering the pool into being was a major feat that started in August, about a week after another theater and production veteran, Mike Quinn, started his new role at �ֲ���ý as technical director. He and Smith, who served as production manager, lighting and projections designer, and faculty advisor for students on the technical side of the production, are splitting some of the duties formerly performed by longtime �ֲ���ý theater leader Michael Reidy before his recent retirement from his position as senior lecturer in theater and managing director of Theater and Dance.

A Maine native who spent 14 years in scenery construction and technical design in New York, Quinn had been working in Portland since 2023 with various venues and organizations.  At the dress rehearsal, Wood joked that Quinn might not have taken the job if he’d known what his first month would be like, but Quinn said he’d been warned. “He [Smith] said, you’re going to have to build a pool if you take the job.”  

Getting the specifications right  — no one wanted to capsize the Schaeffer stage — was key. In the end, the depth of the empty pool was 24 inches, but the water itself couldn’t be that deep. 

“It is not a 16th over 16 inches,” Quinn said. “As prescribed by the structural engineer.” 

“We had to task a fairly wide group of people to make sure that as an institution we were checking boxes and crossing our ‘t’s and dotting our ‘i’ s,” said Chris Streifel, �ֲ���ý’ director of capital planning and construction. “There were all kinds of different codes and building ramifications that we had to work through structurally.” 

Because the audience needed to be able to see into the pool, Schaeffer also had to be reimagined as a venue. Risers were constructed in the wings of the stage in lieu of the regular seating . This limited the audience size somewhat, but made for an intimate experience; during particularly splashy scenes, audience members in the front row might have gotten a little damp (although crew members whisked through between scenes, wielding mops to put the water back into the pool). 

Getting the chemistry of the water just right kept Quinn busy as well. At first the team hoped to keep it fresh with herbal and natural remedies, but after draining it over October break, they opted to add chlorine, since there were many bodies moving in and out of it during rehearsals. But not too much. “We did not want it smelling like the Y,” Wood said. At ABC Pool and Spa Center on Lisbon St., one of the workers groaned when Quinn stopped by; queries from �ֲ���ý had apparently become that much of a regular thing. “I think they were like, ‘Oh my God, why don’t you guys just get it together?’” said Wood.

+Click here to learn more about what was going through Eirene Furr’s mind as she acted in this scene

The pool was both a weird quirk and an inspiration for Eirene Furr ’28, a rhetoric, film, and screen studies major from Washington, D.C., who plans to focus on playwriting. She came to �ֲ���ý after four years at the Chicago Academy of the Arts and has been in many productions, but none like this. “It’s not like an August Wilson play where it’s very much grounded in reality,” Furr said. “You have to live in this world where there’s gods and there’s love, and there’s betrayal, and there’s curses, and it makes for a very challenging experience.”

Like most of the cast, she played multiple roles, most prominently the role of Alcyone, whose husband, King Ceyx, is lost at sea. “I’m lucky because I only had to go about knee deep in the pool,” Furr said. “But I know people who fully dived in and in each scene had to be completely wet.” 

Included among them was Jenny Liu ’29 of Suzhou, China, who plays Myrrha, daughter of King Cinyras, cursed by Aphrodite into falling in love with her own father. She’s tossed around the pool in a particularly intense scene. “I was so excited when I heard that we were actually going to be in the water,” Liu said. “And I actually enjoyed it. It was warm.” 

The everybody-in-the-pool experience brought the cast closer together, Furr said. “Because when 15 people are running around the stage with towels and having to dry off and change, and there’s a whole laundry system going on, it makes it chaotic but it also makes it really, really fun.”

+Click here to learn more about what was happening for Jenny Liu in this scene

For Smith, seeing this kind of student experience is a large part of what drew him to �ֲ���ý during the hiring process. “What I think that the department really does well is creating the space for students to learn the craft and do their thing.” That might be a common enough sounding goal in the liberal arts, but at �ֲ���ý it felt like a reality. “I really felt it. It was really obvious to me,” Smith said.

Though when Smith arrived at �ֲ���ý last fall, he did develop a wish list of things he wanted to improve. Reidy had been a master of keeping old resources and materials going but it was time for upgrades. “Some instrumentation was dated back as early as the ’70s,” Smith said.  It was held together by tape, or worse. “It had, oh gosh, it had asbestos wiring. I think most of it was probably from the ’80s, and that’s just not equipment that we use anymore.”

Rachel Wray, senior director of corporate and foundation relations at �ֲ���ý, worked with the George I. Alden Trust, based in Worcester, Mass., which generously provided a $175,000 grant for the necessary theater tech upgrades. �ֲ���ý contributed more funds, and now all three theaters — Schaeffer, Gannett Theater, and the Martin Andrucki Black Box Theatre — have new and improved equipment, including four big moving lights that were vital to making Metamorphoses glow, and a central control board (an ETC Ion Xe lighting control console) that can function as a true teaching tool. Some describe it as the guts of the whole operation.

For Smith, it was essential that �ֲ���ý graduates who want to work as professionals in the world of stage, lighting, and theater, be trained on current equipment. “Students in my classes, including Introduction to Digital Media, and in lighting projection design related courses, are learning on the tools they’ll see in the real world,” Smith said. “That was a huge lift to the program to be able to do that, and it was all because of that award.”

Furr’s first �ֲ���ý production left her with a deep appreciation for her new community. That includes the responsive audience. 

“It’s easy to kind of compartmentalize your work as an actor, and kind of separate it from yourself,” Furr said. “Part of that is healthy and it’s good, but it can sometimes make you unaware of the amount of work that you put in. So it is definitely very rewarding to hear people come up and say how much they liked the show. It makes me very proud of all the work that the entire ensemble put in and the directors and then each and every stage hand and the theater directors and the sound designers. Really, everybody put their maximum amount of effort in.”

Jennifer (Sukanya Shukla '20), who is having an affair with Simon (Brennen Malone '17), are at a pivotal moment in Tomorrow in the Battle. (Phyllis Graber Jensen)

Tomorrow in the Battle uses the standard-issue plot engine, the love triangle, in surprising ways to explore decision, power, and desire. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The cast of the �ֲ���ý mainstage play Tomorrow in the Battle comprises Brennen Malone '17 of Philadelphia, Sukanya Shukla '20 of Gwalior, India, and Christina Felonis '17 of Athens, Greece. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The character of Simon, played by Brennen Malone '17, is a world-famous heart surgeon in the play Tomorrow in the Battle. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In Tomorrow in the Battle, Anna (Christina Felonis '17) has an important job in the Ministry of Defense and is married to Simon (Brennen Malone '17). (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

An acclaimed and unusual play based on a standard-issue plot engine, the love triangle, opens the mainstage theater season at �ֲ���ý on Oct. 6.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Sally Wood directs a cast of three in Kieron Barry’s Tomorrow in the Battle — a play that uses surprising dramatic means to explore decision, power, and desire, and how those human energies break the walls between what’s public and what’s private.

In the , the character of Anna is played by Christina Felonis ’17 of Athens, Greece; Simon is played by Brennen Malone ’17 of Philadelphia; and Sukanya Shukla ’20 of Gwalior, India, is Jennifer.

Here’s what Wood has to say about Tomorrow in the Battle.

Who’s the threesome in this love triangle?

It’s your typical triangle — a husband, a wife, and a mistress. Simon, the husband, is a world-famous heart surgeon. So he’s got this incredible career going for him. His wife, Anna, works for the Ministry of Defence in England in a very important, quite consequential job. And Jennifer, who becomes the mistress, is basically the public face of a financial firm.

Where does the playwright take the standard love triangle setup?

I’ve never been around a play like this: The characters speak almost exclusively in monologue to the audience. So it’s like you have these three projectiles that cross paths. On paper, you’d think it would never work. But their stories are so compelling that it draws you in.

On a deeper level, what’s the play about?

Chance. There are a lot of chance meetings — “Anna was delayed, which is why I went to the opera alone, that’s where I met Jennifer.” And through those, people make choices.

At different points in the play each character makes a simple decision that escalates into something much, much, much larger. Those choices balloon up — you know, not just impacting their own lives but impacting the lives of 30,000 people or perhaps the world at large.

What makes the play and this production a good learning experience for the student actors?

For one thing, it’s such a tight production schedule, I’m asking so much of them so quickly. The beauty of that is that you have to jump on your first instinct. That forces them to be bold, forces them to just trust that whatever they’ve got is enough. Sometimes, if we wait for the perfect moment we’ll spend our whole lives trying to get there.

Director Sally Wood (right) discusses a creative point with costume designer Carol Farrell and set and lighting designer Michael Reidy. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Two of the students knew this summer that they would be doing this play. For Brennen, this play is a thesis project, and for Christina it’s preparation for thesis next semester. They had about five of their monologues memorized coming in.

But Sukanya, who is amazing, is a first-year who got cast the first day of classes. For her it was like, “Welcome to �ֲ���ý, here’s your script and let’s get going.” And it’s been wonderful seeing her just jump in.

The play is intended for an adult audience. How do you guide young actors in conveying these themes?

I feel that we all have the capacity to understand pretty much any situation. True, the freshman coming in may not have had an extramarital affair, you know. But we’ve all had questionable moments in our lives when we didn’t do the right thing or we would have made a different decision.

Monologues, I tell my students all the time, are the hardest thing to do in theater.

It’s just telling the students, “Look, things don’t actually change all that much as we get older. Maybe the consequences get larger, so we become more responsible for those initial choices that we make.”

And they’re very much into the politics of the play itself. It’s really fun watching them have to advocate for their characters.

What are the challenges and gratifications of directing Tomorrow in the Battle?

The biggest challenge is that it’s three monologues, basically, and that’s really difficult. Monologues, I tell my students all the time, are the hardest thing to do in theater, because it’s just you out there. You have to form a relationship with the audience.

As for gratifications: We had a great rehearsal last night where things really started to pop. And I could see the light bulbs going off, including in my own head — I was like, “Oh, yes, yes, yes. Okay, now I see the path.” Which is always an exciting moment — because you don’t know if the light bulbs are actually going to go off sometimes. So it’s comforting when they do.

Why should someone come see this play?

People should come and see all theater. But I think that this play will surprise them — it will absolutely get them to think about life and their own lives in a different way. I find myself implicated in this play, because I go back and think about choices that I’ve made or I’m going to make. And if a play can do that, that’s remarkable.

Hope French ’18 of London plays convict Dabby Bryant in a scene from Our Country’s Good. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Colette Girardin ‘16 as 2nd Lt. William Faddy.

Ceria Kurtz ’19 of Jakarta, Indonesia, as convict Meg Long and Sam Myers ’16 as 2nd Lt. Ralph Clark.

Colette Girardin ‘16 of East Moriches, N.Y., as convict Duckling Smith and Nick Muccio ‘16 of Concord, N.H., as midshipman Harry Brewer.

At left, Sam Myers ’16 of Riverton, Wyo., plays 2nd Lt. Ralph Clark, and Johan Mohtarudin '16 of Bukit Damansara, Malaysia, is convict Black Caesar.

Gavin Schuerch ‘18 as the Spirit of the Aborigine and Michael Driscal '19 as an Aboriginal Australian.

Sally Wood, visiting assistant professor of theater at �ֲ���ý and director of the mainstage production “Our Country’s Good,” introduces the play to a dress rehearsal audience on March 9, 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

• seniors Allie Freed of Magnolia, Mass., Colette Girardin of East Moriches, N.Y., Colin McIntire of Darien, Conn., Johan Mohtarudin of Bukit Damansara, Malaysia, Nick Muccio of Concord, N.H., and Mara Woollard of Portsmouth, Va.;
• one junior, Dan Peeples of Piermont, N.Y., and three sophomores, Hope French of London, Gavin Schuerch of Norwalk, Conn., and Nate Stephenson of Ellsworth, Maine;
• and first-year student Ceri Kurtz ’19 of Jakarta, Indonesia.

“We keep talking about having to advocate for your character,” Wood says

“If we do our job right, there are no villains.”