by Beth Riner, Messenger Staff Writer

A Sewanee classics professor’s work translating Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” inspired the play “A Poem and A Mistake,” which will be performed at 7:30 p.m., April 19 and 20, in the Studio Theater at the Tennessee Williams Center.

The one-woman show, written by New York University Professor Cheri Magid, a former Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-Residence, is about Myrrha, a grad student in the classics, who struggles to make sense of the 50 sexual assaults in Ovid’s epic poem. When her male professor claims the poem is about love, she angrily pushes him, and he is transformed into a woman who looks exactly like her. These two characters, Myrrha and Not Myrrha, find themselves in an Ovidian landscape, where they must confront their own gender, sexuality, and desire.

During a 2018 summer residency at Sewanee to work on the libretto for her opera “Penelope and the Geese,” a feminist retelling of the Penelope story from “The Odyssey,” Magid first consulted with Professor of Classical Languages Stephanie McCarter, who teaches classics and gender studies.

“I just loved working with her, so I started reading stuff that she was writing about,” Magid said. “I found it super compelling — just the notion that there’s all these rapes in Ovid that have been translated out and made consensual. It’s horrific and representative of a lot of texts in the classic canon.”

Inspired by McCarter’s lecture on how sexual violence was often euphemistically translated in Ovid’s work (translating a passage as “he ravished her” instead of “he raped her) as well as the fallout from a 2015 op-ed written by four undergraduate Columbia University students asking for a trigger warning on the university’s required reading of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” because of the numerous sexual assaults, Magid used this information as a springboard to craft her play.

Interestingly, McCarter would go on to become the first female translator of the epic in more than 60 years when her 567-page book was published in 2022 by Penguin Classics.

Sewanee Theater Department Chair Jim Crawford praised McCarter’s groundbreaking translation of “Metamorphoses.”

“It’s gotten a lot of acclaim this year, particularly with respect to the frank language it uses about sexual assault, something that’s been downplayed in earlier translations,” Crawford said.

Playwright Magid worked closely with lead actor Sarah Baskin, whom she had known since 2016, to create the show.

“We were very drawn to each other and were meant to work together,” Magid said. “I’d never written a one-person show before and thought it would be challenging to write one for her. I told her I’d been working with this incredible classicist Stephanie McCarter and was really compelled by her work.”

The two got a residency to develop the idea and begin reading two different translations of Ovid by male scholars recommended by McCarter. Magid read one version, while Baskin tackled the other. It quickly became obvious they were reading wildly different translations.

“We could see the liberties the second person had taken, and the plot flaws where rape was completely obscured in one or both of them, and that was very, very informative,” Magid said. As they made their way through the epic’s 15 books, they noted stories that resonated with the theme.

“At a certain point, when things just clicked in my head, I started writing,” she explained. “I wrote the beginning and the end, and Sarah performed it for her then-partner and my husband, and we got some feedback. Then the pandemic hit.” Both women saw one job after another go away as the lockdowns began.

Magid returned to her Hudson Valley cottage in Saugerties, New York, and in mid-April of 2020 a producer at ShoutOut Saugerties asked her if she might have anything for an outdoor-reading series.

“That reading ended up being done in August outside, and basically, I finished the play 36 hours before I gave it to Sarah. She jumped on a train for the first time since March. My husband did the part of the professor, and we rehearsed it in my yard,” Magid said. The actual performance was a success.

“It was amazing,” Magid said. “There were like 50 people there because everybody was just starved for art. Sarah was brilliant.”

They livestreamed the production, which resulted in Magid and McCarter getting booked for a BBC4 podcast on “Metamorphoses,” which aired in early 2021. A curator at a contemporary art museum in Melbourne, Australia, heard the podcast, read the play, and then commissioned Magid to make a film of it as part of international art exhibit.

“We ended up making the film during lockdown in the summer of 2021,” Magid said. “We shot it in two days.” They got the film to the art museum in August of 2021, and “The Sydney Morning Herald” gave it a rave review.

“That was all great, but, meanwhile, we’d never seen it done as a play,” Magid said. It was not until February of 2023 that the play was presented live by the Delaware Rep Company, which is affiliated with the University of Delaware, where Magid is the inaugural Susan P. Stroman Visiting Playwright.

Magid, who has not been back to Sewanee since 2019 because of the pandemic, was thrilled when they got the invitation to perform April 19 and 20 at Sewanee. “It feels like a nice homecoming.”

Magid, Baskin, and director Michelle Bossy will be available for a talk-back with the audience immediately following each production of the show.

Seating is limited for the free production. To reserve tickets, go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-poem-and-a-mistake-tickets-615104683667.;.