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.