“I had this moment onstage a few years ago when I was supposed to be witnessing someone’s death,” says Mary Zimmerman. “There we were, all laced up in our corsets, our hair sprayed back, all that. We were trying so hard to be upset about this man’s death. And I suddenly realized that it was just so fake. Without being art, without being artificial. It was nothing but effort. At that moment I thought to myself, ‘I will never be in another play again.’ And I haven’t.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Zimmerman may have given up on acting, but she has not given up on the theater. In the three years since her moment of “supreme self-consciousness” onstage, she has created five original and highly personal theater pieces, all of which communicate through, in her words, “behavior and composition” rather than the traditional character and plot. Her first piece was Godiva, which was based on the various legends about Lady Godiva and premiered at Northwestern University in 1987. Later she did a quasi-mystery adventure, The Mystery of the Fourth Wall, that was presented at San Francisco’s EXITheater last summer. Her latest, mammoth project, now in rehearsal at Lookingglass Theatre, is a multimedia adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. In all her pieces Zimmerman’s theatrical language is refreshingly honest, albeit highly poetic and elusive.
But why spend so much time and energy and money staging a text that was written more than three millennia ago and that most people learned to hate in high school? “My first encounter with The Odyssey was when I was five,” Zimmerman says. “I was living in England, because my dad was on some kind of fellowship. And every afternoon the teacher would read The Odyssey to us. I think I must have felt, without consciously articulating it, that like Odysseus, I was a stranger in a strange land.”
White plays Telemachus in the production. “Sometimes in rehearsal I feel like I’m simply being moved around the stage. I’m used to being allowed to discover where I should be standing. But paradoxically her method is in a way liberating, because her sense of composition takes some of the pressure off of the actor. She’s working on juxtaposing images and gestures which convey meaning in and of themselves, so that the actor no longer has to bear that burden solely. He is part of something larger.”
