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FOR YEARS, there have been people who've complained about Circle in the Square's horseshoe-shaped thrust stage, but Gregory Mosher, the theater's new producing director, says he loves it.
"I know people have thought of it as an albatross, but I think it's very conducive to theatrical life. What better way to watch a play than to watch it all together?" he says about the space in Manhattan, which reopens this week with Pam Gems' new drama, "Stanley," starring Antony Sher.
The effusive Mosher, who has been engrossed in reading scripts and having meetings with writers and directors since he assumed the helm of the theater with M. Edgar Rosenblum, the executive producer, says he has just committed to a production that will turn the theater into the "wine dark sea" of Homer's "The Odyssey" next January. "We're going to transform the Circle into the Ionian and Aegean seas, we're literally going to flood the place and when we need land, we'll throw some boards down," Mosher says enthusiastically.
This project is the brainchild of 32-year-old Chicago-based playwright-director Mary Zimmerman whose "Notebooks of Leonardo" was one of the hits of Lincoln Center's "Serious Fun" festival last summer. "I saw her `Journey to the West' and was completely knocked off my butt," says Mosher about one of Zimmerman's earlier adaptations. "I asked her what she wanted to do next and she said, `The Odyssey.' "
The production coincides with Robert Fagles' much touted new translation of the work and an upcoming NBC-TV special based on the epic poem. "I'm sure this renewed interest has something to do with the millennium," says Mosher. "The Odyssey taps something deep and primal in us."
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