A POEM AND A MISTAKE at Resident Ensemble Players

A Poem and a Mistake follows the story of Myrrha, a grad student in the classics, who is grappling with how to handle the 50 sexual assaults in Ovid's Metamorphoses. When one of her male professors refers to the poem as “being about love," Myrrha becomes so distraught that she inadvertently pushes him, and suddenly, like the characters in Metamorphoses itself, the professor is transformed into a young woman who looks exactly like Myrrha. Both characters, Myrrha and Not-Myrrha, find themselves in an Ovid-like landscape where transformation is a magical and terrifying confrontation with their own gender, sexuality, and relationship to desire.