MARY ZIMMERMAN is the director who turned Ovid's Metamorphoses--a series of smart little investigations into man's moral nature--into a meditation on how different kinds of wet cloth look when draped over young, firm bodies. The production was reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of English artists from the mid-1800s who painted scenes from classical mythology and literature, usually featuring long-haired women in endlessly flowing gowns, creating a body of florid highbrow erotica. Zimmerman brings this sensibility to bear on Homer's epic poem The Odyssey with similarly eye-pleasing but empty results.

The plot is competently told: The Greek hero Odysseus, following the end of the 10-year-long Trojan War, only wants to return home. But after offending the god Poseidon, Odysseus is driven into a series of sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying misadventures for another 10 years. Only through the aid of the warrior goddess Athena, who adores Odysseus' mixture of cunning and prowess, does Odysseus finally reach his homeland, where he discovers that neighboring princes have taken up residence in his house until Odysseus' wife, Penelope, agrees to marry one of them.

There's no denying it's a pretty production. The bare expanse of the stage, flanked on the sides by an array of lighting instruments as thick as quills on a hedgehog, is gorgeous in that spare, modern, IKEA kind of way. Images like a silk curtain rippling in the breeze of a standing fan, evoking the realm of the gods, or Odysseus' sailors sitting in plain chairs and rowing with slender rods, serve the setting concisely and beautifully. And who can argue with lots of bare-chested, muscular men and lithe young women in sports bras? On the other hand, the gigantic video projections used to create the underworld are impressive in a more expensive way, not only because one's first thought is "Wow, how much does that cost?" but because they completely distract you from the scene itself.

But Zimmerman's apparent disinterest in the subject matter is staggering--I mean, she won a MacArthur "genius grant." Odysseus, a Machiavellian schemer responsible for the sack of one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, a reluctant soldier who nonetheless kills dozens, is portrayed as a mild, affable soccer dad with a knack for tall tales. His son Telemachus, a young man who's never known his father and has grown up in a household of abusive men vying for the bed of his mother, is well mannered if a little timid; at first his bashfulness seemed to be some guise that would eventually fall away and reveal some depth of anger, grief, or anything, but as the show went on it became clear that he's just a nice kid who needs to get some gumption. The women were similarly one-dimensional: Penelope is a noble, faithless wife; the beautiful Helen is a tall, alarmingly skinny supermodel; the witch Circe, who turns Odysseus' sailors into pigs, is a stock cigarette-smoking vamp; the sea nymph Calypso is a lovelorn mope. There's some postmodern, ironic feminist commentary with the Sirens, who dress in bright red versions of male fantasies (nurse, Girl Scout, secretary) and spout ego-stroking phrases, repeating each one several times to make sure the audience gets the point. This sequence, unsupported by anything else in the production, comes off as little more than a heavy-handed joke. No comparisons are made between Odysseus' behavior with one woman or another; Everyone just likes Odysseus because he's such a nice guy. In stark contrast with the source material, Odysseus is never depicted as duplicitous. Though he tells some wild yarns, it's never to manipulate or achieve anything that isn't well intentioned. The cast is consistently bland, which suggests that the director clearly wanted it that way. Only an energetic performance from Mariann Mayberry as Athena had any zest; fortunately, she's in almost every scene, and gives the three-and-a-half-hour production some much-needed drive.

Most curious of all is the end. In Homer's account, when Odysseus discovers the loutish suitors in his home, he slaughters them all with some swift archery. In Zimmerman's version, Athena enacts a sort of divine massacre, expressed symbolically with falling sand, so that Odysseus doesn't have to dirty his hands. Apparently we're no longer comfortable with making a killer a romantic hero, so Odysseus--one of the most complicated and contradictory characters in all of Western literature--gets whitewashed.