This weekend, my friend Alex and I watched a modern rendition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses at [a modern rendition of] Shakespeare’s Globe. The ancient text is comprised of a series of stories, each of which renders the creation of something: how a Thracean king turned into a hawk after assaulting his wife’s sister and eating his son, how wildfires spawned because a teen-angsty boy demanded the Sun’s chariot, etc. etc.
There were just four cast members, each cycling through ancient figures, smashing the fourth wall and resuming character with ease. Just as giggles erupted when Orpheus’ lyre-song was replaced by a crowd-led rendition of American Pie (this was insane), you could hear your breath as Actaeon’s death was recounted to perfect detail: he catches the goddess Diana bathing, and she turns him into a stag, just like the ones he’d been killing his whole life; then, his hunting dogs find him, mutilate him, and he screams, not like a man but like an abused deer, groaning and crying and trapped, and his men call for him to watch his own, gory, full-circular death.
The stories were breathtakingly sad. So at the end of the show, when one of the cast members lit a candle and said “Do you want one more story?”, I expected another death, at best just an injury, pitiful and scream-filled.
The cast member told us about their niece. Her name is Tillie. The other day, while they were babysitting Tillie, playing and sitting and passing time, it started to rain. Tillie let out a small smile but continued to play and sit.
“I asked her why she was so smiley,” they said. “She told me she loved the rain. She told me it’s because the trees must like it.” They flashed a smile and stared at us, all of us, seemingly at once. “I asked her what she meant. She said it was because of the way the rain tickles the trees.”
Because in a world where we play and sit and pass time, the trees don’t get enough of us. And the rain is a little touch, a gentle love blown over the nature we overlook, and surely it tickles a bit.
“So whenever it rains,” the cast member said, “think of how the rain must tickle the trees, and how much they must love it.”