This production is a thorough reimagining of the work that still keeps the overarching framework of the myth.  Composed between 1936 and 1937 in Dresden, Strauss’s work opens on a paean to nature sung by the young nymph Daphne. Unbeknownst to her, the god Apollo (played brilliantly by Pavel Černoch) is listening, mad with desire—but she escapes his clutches through flattery and the intervention of Zeus, who transforms her into a laurel tree, making her one with nature itself. In a final creative exclamation point, Castellucci closes the action with the epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, perhaps in a nod to our own ecological crisis: “‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ She answered, ‘I want to die.'”