THE NOTEBOOKS OF LEONARDO DA VINCI
Adapting such a text for the stage obviously presents enormous challenges. The notebook entries are not unified, and their inherent unevenness means that some fragments will enlighten and others will fail to engage. The same is true of Mary Zimmerman’s original theater piece, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, an intelligent, ingeniously staged, and carefully styled work. Although at times aloof and nearly impenetrable, it has moments of serene beauty and powerful insight.
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The piece begins with a hypnotic image: a woman wearing a golden bird’s beak (Walsh) sits atop a ladder staring at an opaque window. She slowly descends the ladder and crosses to two men sleeping side by side on the floor (Brodie and Smith). As the woman delicately brushes them with a long feather, a man stationed at one of the microphones (Ereneta) quietly announces, “This is to be an assortment”–a collection brought together by a single sensibility rather than by a single theme or story. This calm, measured opening not only establishes a lovely warmth but also encourages the viewer to surrender certain expectations of the theater–plot, character, conflict–and to apprehend the performance instead as the slow accumulation of images, very much like a dream.
This almost inhuman reserve seems the perfect reversal of da Vinci’s quest to understand the human body. Here were human bodies, doing things that I thought I recognized but that elicited no response from the participants. Were they angry? Desperate? Indifferent? Did anyone understand anyone else’s point of view? Were these performers the same characters throughout the piece, or was personality fluid? This captivating and elusive style of acting, which the performers had thoroughly taken to heart, made it impossible to draw conclusions from the empirical evidence before us. Discovering a truth through observation of the body was hopeless, because the performers refused to reveal themselves to us.
Certainly Zimmerman has given herself an enormously difficult task, both in terms of the text she chose to adapt for the stage and in the kind of theatrical vocabulary she’s used to explore it. The demands placed on her actors are also formidable, and the performances were generally controlled, intelligent, and committed. Sometimes, however, I felt that the performers were unable to fulfill the expressive needs of Zimmerman’s direction, with its focus on the body. At other times, I felt that more mature performers (all were in their early 20s) would have stretched Zimmerman’s ideas into more provocative realms.
