Mary Zimmerman Bio

Mary Zimmerman is the recipient of a 1998 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2002 Tony Award for Best Director and ten Joseph Jefferson Awards, including Best Production and Best Direction. She is a member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company of Chicago, an Artistic Associate of the Goodman Theatre and a Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Works which she has adapted and directed include The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Berkeley Rep, Second Stage, Goodman, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Seattle Rep), The Odyssey (Lookingglass, Goodman, McCarter, Seattle Rep), Arabian Nights (Lookingglass, Manhattan Theatre Club, Brooklyn Academy of Music), Journey To The West (Goodman, Huntington, Berkeley Rep), Metamorphoses (Lookingglass, Seattle Rep, Berkeley Rep, Mark Taper Forum, Second Stage, Broadway), The Secret in the Wings (Lookingglass, Berkeley Rep, McCarter), Eleven Rooms of Proust (Lookingglass, About Face), S/M, and Silk. Other regional theater productions include: All’s Well That Ends Well, Pericles (Goodman); Henry VIII, Measure for Measure (NYSF); and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Huntington). In 2002 she created a new opera with Philip Glass, Galileo Galilei, which played at the Goodman Theatre, the Barbican in London and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This fall, she debuted at the Metropolitan Opera with Lucia di Lammermoor.

Zimmerman’s career as a director spans fifteen years and her works have been staged from Broadway to Berkeley, but she still has a hard time saying she has a “life in the theater.” Truth told, though, she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t interested in the art form. The daughter of two university professors, she spent her childhood in Lincoln, Nebraska, dreaming of being an actress. When she went to Northwestern University as an undergraduate she began as a composition and literature major but—two weeks later—switched to the Department of Performance Studies.

It wasn’t until her graduate work at Northwestern that she discovered “the act of directing, creating and making theater—without being in it.”

Northwestern proved to be fertile ground for Zimmerman. Her studies focused on how to use the elements of staging—light, sound, disguise, gesture, movement—and she collaborated on adaptations of everything from Dickens novels to contemporary parodies. She cites her thesis performance, a 45-minute solo based on Proust’s housekeeper, Celeste Albaret, as the most critical step in this development.

After receiving her BA, MA and PhD at Northwestern, Zimmerman joined the Performance Studies faculty, where her mentors are now her colleagues. The environment has continued to be fruitful. Her production of Metamorphoses, which went on to Broadway and was nominated for a Tony for Best Play, began as a student production. So did Eleven Rooms of Proust, a site-specific performance that she holds dear to her heart. The performance, first set in an old mansion and later staged in a factory, took eleven episodes from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and staged them throughout the space.

“It was this surreal, incredibly moving, very, very strange experience,” Zimmerman recalls. “A friend said it was like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney, except you’re sobbing the whole time.”

During her time at Northwestern, Zimmerman also has developed a close working relationship with Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and was instrumental in the development of her home company, Lookingglass. These companies staged such seminal works as The Arabian Nights, The Odyssey, Journey to the West and, of course, Metamorphoses. In 1998, she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, and in 2002 she won the Tony for Best Director for Metamorphoses.

In her work, she continues to be drawn to ancient literature and stories based in oral tradition. Her rehearsal process is open and organic, especially when she serves as both adapter and director. She allows time for a production’s imagery to develop, often working off the physical improvisations of her ensemble of actors. When directing Shakespeare, her engagement is primarily with the text.

“I’m not a big one for seeing what other people have to say about it, how it was done elsewhere,” Zimmerman says. “I try to be very open in my reception to what the story wants to be and how I can make it as absolutely clear and visually clear as possible. My goal is to express the play in a way that feels as right as possible. I’m not ever trying to force something on these stories.”

Her hope is to have a child’s openness and imagination, for—to paraphrase one of her favorite quotes by Willa Cather—“I’ll never be the artist I was as a child.”

“I love that quote,” Zimmerman says. “It is a statement of my own belief that I’m at my best when I’m unselfconscious and using what’s in the room. They don’t call it a play for nothing. We think of ‘play’ as a noun. ‘I’m going to see a play.’ We forget that it’s also a verb. Children play in order to survive. They’re practicing at life in order to cope and survive later in life. Plays do the same thing. They’re teaching us how to cope with situations, like the advent of our death. And we can sit back and observe.”