METAMORPHOSES (2001 - 2001)

In many ways, it's all about the pool. Culled from poet Ovid's Metamorphoses, this enticing gloss of the Greek myths is dominated by a smooth pit of water in which the characters splash, play -- and drown. The pool serves, yes, as a fluid symbol (ocean, mirror, common ground). It's the element in which the fresh, funny, sensual cast demonstrates that these 2,000-year-old tales connect directly to our lives, that ''the myth is a public dream.'' Writer-director Mary Zimmerman slyly interleaves the classic and the vernacular (gods in leather jackets) -- and her work provides us with a moving sense of continuity in a time of rupture. Off Broadway, the play was produced on a standard stage. In its bump up to Broadway, it's set more in the round, where it loses some of its tableaulike beauty but gains in immediacy -- especially for those in the front rows literally doused by the drama.