NOT JUST A FOOTNOTE ANY MORE PLAYWRIGHT TAKES OVID OFF THE PAGE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

Before she could make the plunge into the Western literary classics, Mary Zimmerman first had to master '70s easy-listening pop.

Frankly, it wasn't a pretty picture.

Growing up in the remote college town of Lincoln, Neb., the daughter of two career academics, Zimmerman spent most of her formative years with her head buried in books.

But when she wasn't devouring Dickens and Balzac, the future MacArthur ``genius'' grant winner often could be found staging plays in the family basement or else, um, interpretive dance numbers.

``I used to choreograph my friends in really bad dance pieces to (Cat Stevens') 'Morning Has Broken' and also 'I found your diary underneath a tree,' '' says Zimmerman, giggling at the memory of Bread's 1972 pop ditty ``Diary.'' ``I had a very illustrative, representational dance to that.''

Alas, Zimmerman, now 39, never made it as the next Martha Graham. But the distance she has traveled from those gawky basement epics will be on view this month at the Mark Taper Forum.

That's where the lights will come up for tonight's opening performance of ``Metamorphoses,'' Zimmerman's modernized adaptation of the ancient Roman masterpiece by the poet Publius Ovidius Naso - better-known to legions of college freshmen as Ovid.

Essentially a collection of mythical short stories that grow from one into another like buds on a sapling, Ovid's 2,000-year-old poem is full of such legendary characters as Eros, Narcissus, Apollo (the Roman sun god), Phaeton (Apollo's fatally impulsive offspring) and the golden- fingered King Midas.

The transformative power of emotion is Ovid's great theme, as reluctant lovers morph into trees, gods turn into animals and reality melts into surreality through the poet's facile meter. Along the way, seductions are plotted and executed, just deserts are meted out, and various Greco-Roman life lessons get learned.

``Metamorphoses'' is Zimmerman's second stage adaptation of a hallowed literary work to reach Los Angeles; 2 1/2 years ago, her rambunctious reimagining of ``The Arabian Nights'' played at the Actors Gang in Hollywood.

The Chicago-based artist also has staged Homer's ``The Odyssey'' and, in perhaps her most ambitious and startling piece to date, has distilled 5,000 pages of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks into a living, breathing portrait of the quintessential Renaissance man (``The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci'').

Gordon Davidson, the Mark Taper Forum's artistic director, says he was pleased to be able to bring ``Metamorphoses'' to Los Angeles after a previously scheduled new play by Peter Parnell, starring Alan Alda as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, had to be postponed. ``Metamorphoses'' previously has been seen in Chicago, Berkeley and Seattle.

``When you have Alan Alda in a play, you don't want to just put anything there'' to replace it, Davidson says.

Despite her frequent use of highbrow source material, Zimmerman's attitude toward these leather-bound legends is decidedly unfussy. If nothing else, Cat Stevens and Bread apparently taught her that theater should be accessible and, whenever possible, fun.

In keeping with that approach, the design centerpiece of ``Metamorphoses'' is a rectangular reflective pool in which the characters wade, float on plastic rafts, fight and even make love. Zimmerman thinks the pool adds an element of mystery and surprise to the play that also enhances the fluidity (pun intended) of the storytelling.

``It's not only just sort of ornamental and beautiful,'' she explains. ``Water is the transformational element, both symbolically and in culture: crossing a river, baptism, but also just chemically or materially. Water is a very corrosive or changing element, and you undergo a sea change. It seems symbolically to stand in for all kinds of different things in the play.''

Davidson cites the pool in ``Metamorphoses'' as an example of Zimmerman's strong pictorial instincts. Her lyrical but relatively low-tech stagecraft uses elemental props, sets and gestures to conjure up resolutely theatrical worlds whose imagery seeps into an audience's subconscious.

``She (Zimmerman) is not a designer, but she is clearly a visual person,'' Davidson says. ``(She creates) the right kind of theatrical legerdemain.''

Making big, weighty tomes sit up and talk seems a natural progression from Zimmerman's pointy-headed Midwestern upbringing.

Despite those previously mentioned outbursts of Top 40 zaniness, Zimmerman spent a relatively insular childhood among parents who were mentally stimulating but emotionally distant. (Her father, a physics teacher, has never attended his daughter's professional work.) Zimmerman says that the basis of her relationship with her mother consisted largely in analyzing Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw plays.

Books were Zimmerman's salvation, especially fat Victorian novels stuffed with colorful characters and extravagant plotlines. Her mother, who taught European literature, also exposed her to foreign movies and, during summers, took Zimmerman and her sister on cultural excursions to Paris.

Around ninth grade, Zimmerman developed an ``enormous, enormous crush'' on her male English teacher, who urged her to embrace the classics. Zimmerman took that advice almost literally to heart.

``I had a kind of passionate crush on various Dostoevski characters and on the man (Dostoevski) himself. Like, I was actually sort of in love with him to the point of sexual fantasy and stuff! It was more like on Ivan Karamazov - but no, it was on him! His passions got to me.''

In high school, Zimmerman also began acquiring a passion for the theater but didn't think that her ``brown-haired, bespectacled looks'' qualified her to become an actress.

Her theatrical baptism occurred at Northwestern University, in Chicago, where as a student she hooked up with the theater department (where Zimmerman now teaches). Among her instructors was Frank Galati, a Chicago theatrical legend who in recent years has added productions of the Broadway musical ``Ragtime'' to his long list of credits with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company and the Goodman Theatre, Chicago's two leading nonprofits.

``Frank was a mentor to me, not so much aesthetically and technically, because we have different tastes in literature, but in how to behave as a human being and as a director,'' Zimmerman says. ``He's one of the two or three people I'm (always) working for - whether he sees the show or not.''

Zimmerman's fledgling explorations of myth-as-theater got a boost from another Northwestern teacher, Dr. Leland Roloff, an internationally known Jungian psychoanalyst and performance scholar. Carl Jung (1875-1961), the Swiss psychologist and theorist, has influenced many artists with his writings on shared cultural memory and the power of mythical signs and archetypes.

But while ``Metamorphoses'' attempts to channel this Jungian world of images and symbols, its emphasis, like most of Zimmerman's works, is on narrative storytelling, on the primal power of words.

``A lot of what I do is from oral culture, and that's why they're well-suited to the theater, in my opinion,'' she says.

Several of Zimmerman's friends have noted that her production of ``Metamorphoses'' revolves around themes of love: the price to be paid for not recognizing true love, the way sexual taboos can affect relationships, the difference between love and lustful predation.

Having lately ended her 17-year relationship with the actor Bruce Harris ( the title character in the 1980s' CBS' series ``The Popcorn Kid''), Zimmerman seems to derive much of her emotional sustenance from the experience of putting on plays. She speaks earnestly of theater as ``a way of triangulating love through a task.''

And while Hollywood has come sniffing around several of her shows, Zimmerman is wary of ceding creative control to a team of strangers. She prefers to work repeatedly with many of the same actors and designers, a surrogate family that exists in, well, a constant state of metamorphosis.

``That is very much the process of making a play,'' she summarizes. ``It constitutes this tribe that is ever-dissolving, ever-disappearing. And the theater is ever-dissolving and ever-disappearing. And every moment it's leaving.''

THE FACTS

--What: ``Metamorphoses.''

--Where: Mark Taper Forum, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave.

--When: Performances at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays; tonight through May 21.

--Tickets: $29 to$42. Call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 photos, box

Photo:

(1) Raymond Fox, left, Doug Hara and Anjali Bhimani appear in ``Metamorphoses,'' based on the poems of Ovid, at the Mark Taper Forum.

(2) `A lot of what I do is from oral culture, and that's why they're well- suited to the theater.'

playwright Mary Zimmerman

Box: THE FACTS (see text)