Mary Zimmerman's THE NOTEBOOKS OF Leonardo da Vinci

     This is a season of revivals for the Goodman Theatre. First, an excellent production of August Wilson's GEM OF THE OCEAN; now THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEONARDO, which was first produced at the Goodman in 1993. NOTEBOOKS established the young director Mary Zimmerman as a creator of non-linear theatre pieces based on literary classics. Zimmerman is now a Chicago institution. 

     By 1993, companies all over the world had been performing director-inspired theatre pieces using all the vocal and physical skills of their actors. One thinks of groundbreaking work like the Living Theatre's FRANKENSTEIN and PARADISE NOW or Peter Brook's MAHABHARATA from the 1970s. Closer to home, Chicagoan Paul Sills' Story Theatre, using improvisational techniques taught by his mother, Viola Spolin, to perform fairy tales had morphed into Second City. Mary Zimmerman would build on these forbears to create ingenious, visually inventive ensemble pieces. Many of us directors who began working in the 1970s would build from the same influences.

    At its best, pieces like THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI celebrate the possibilities of all elements of theatre. Unfortunately, cleverness can supersede complex emotion. We in the audience can marvel at the array of visual images, but might not feel much beyond amusement.

    THE NOTEBOOKS OF Leonardo da Vinci offers ninety minutes of quotes from the master's ruminations illustrated by actors' movement and an ingenious, ever changing set. It's file cabinets are filled with props and scenic pieces. The eight actors are required to be acrobats as they illustrate Da Vinci's concepts.

    What do we learn about Leonardo da Vinci? Well, that his curiosity on a variety of subjects--physics, astronomy, anatomy, the possibilities of flight, the human spirit--was boundless. He was passionately interested in everything. The only hint of a personal life comes with the mention of his servant, lifelong companion, and adopted son, Gian Giacomo Copotti. Though Leonardo provided the boy with wardrobes of clothing and an allowance, the boy constantly stole from his master. Nonetheless, Copotti stayed with Leonardo until the artist's death twenty-three years later. The show turns Copotti's stealing into a comic interlude, begging the question of why Leonardo allowed it--why he didn't fire the boy. A real playwright would want to develop that relationship. Her it is merely fodder for laughs. Moreover, Gian Giacomo is played by a grown woman, covering the possibility of pederasty, which was not unknown in early modern Italy. No one knows what Leonardo's long term relationship with Copotti was. Why bring it up in such a glib way? 

    Here we come to Zimmerman's weakness. There isn't much heart in her work. I remember seeing her much-derided production of Bellini's LA SONNAMBULA at the Met. The opera's plot about an innocent maid who sleepwalks into men's beds is silly by modern standards, but the music expresses depths of emotion well beyond the libretto's inanity. Zimmerman stuck to the superficiality. She set the production in a rehearsal studio and gutted it of any feeling. At the end of her big aria, she had the heroine turn a cartwheel. A neat piece of physical theatre and we in the audience could marvel that the soprano could turn a cartwheel, but it was a theatrical trick, not a moment that sprung from any emotion. Moreover the soprano had just performed vocal cartwheels. The musical acrobatics didn't need a literal physical corollary. Her revival of THE MUSIC MAN, a show that is filled with cornball sentiment, was cold and dull.

    I enjoyed the ingenuity of NOTEBOOKS. The eight performers were game at the physical challenges the production threw at them, though audibility was sometimes a problem. It did make me want to read a good biography of Leonardo. 

 August Wilson's GEM OF THE OCEAN at the Goodman Theatre

    GEM OF THE OCEAN, which had its premiere at the Goodman in 1903 and has returned for a powerful revival, is the last play August Wilson wrote for his series depicting twentieth-century African-American life decade by decade. Chronologically, it is the first play in the series. Set in 1904, this masterpiece of poetic realism explores the difference between law and justice. 

    The title comes from the 19th century patriotic song: "Oh Columbia, the gem of the ocean,/Home of the brave and the free." For Aunt Esther, who was ripped from her African home and sold as a child, the Gem of the Ocean is the ship that brought her to the United States, and now can transport her and her comrades to the City of Bones, an eerily beautiful place of death and spiritual rebirth. In a beautiful ritual, Esther takes young Citizen Barlow, on a symbolic journey to this symbolic place. Named Citizen by his parents because he was born free, Barlow is burdened by guilt. He escaped from Alabama to find work in the North, but he and many other African-Americans traded one form of slavery for another. The mill where he works keeps its employees in constant debt by forcing them to live in mill-owned housing and eating in mill-owned establishments. Frustrated, Citizen steals a bucket of nails. The law, personified by Caesar, a Black man who has profited by becoming an agent of white man's law, blamed another man who drowned himself rather than be punished for a crime he didn't commit. Citizen watched the man die for a crime he committed. He comes to Aunt Esther to be spiritually cleansed. There he finds a new sense of self and a mission. 

    Aunt Esther's house is filled with fascinating characters who exist on a real and a symbolic level. Old Solly Two Kings, who visits regularly, was a runner on the Underground Railroad. Now he is intent on battling the insidious new form of economic slavery. Solly makes a living selling "Pure," an odd name for dog shit, a fitting metaphor for the economic position of Black men in a Northern city. Eli, devoted to caring for Esther, is intent on building a protective wall outside her house,. Eli proclaims, "this is a house of peace,' but it is impossible to keep out the turbulence outside. Black Mary, Esther's servant, finds refuge in Esther's home from the demands of being a Black woman. Then there is the aptly named Caesar, the violent preacher of law and order who has replaced the Bible with a copy of Pennsylvania law. In a powerful scene, Esther challenges Caesar's law book with another legal piece of paper, her bill of sale, which valued her at $637. That was a legal document, but not a just one. Caesar's job is to protect the mill at all costs, but the mill is a symbol of economic injustice. His means of upholding the law is harsh violence.

    Operating on realistic and symbolic levels, GEM OF THE OCEAN is a challenge to produce. Chuck Smith's revival at the Goodman manages to capture most of the play's richness. Linda Buchanan's massive set, composed of sea blue wooden slats, nicely balances the real and the poetic. The cast couldn't be better.  Lisa Gaye Dixon captures Esther's quiet authority and the decades of pain below the surface. The play begins with Citizen Barlow's appearance at Esther's house and ends with his exit. Sharif Atkins captures Citizen's complexity. Kelvin Roston, Jr., manages to humanize Caesar, the villain of the piece. Everyone else in this ensemble is equally fine. Wilson has created here a group portrait of complex individuals. The cast vividly brings them to life.

     GEM OF THE OCEAN is itself a dramatic gem, one of August Wilson's strongest plays and one of the masterpieces of American Theatre. The play offers some of the richest language in our dramatic canon and an urgent message that still powerfully resonates. This revival is a must see event.