Theater: Gods in the Wading Pool

• Share

(2 of 2)

Zimmerman, who was born in Nebraska to college-professor parents, says she had her formative encounter with the theater at age five or six, when the family was living in London. One day, in the woods near their house where she used to play, she stumbled on a local summer-theater troupe rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream. "I knew they were pretending. I wasn't fooled," she says. "But it was the act of pretending and the fact that adults were pretending that was stunning to me. I call that my primal scene."

Like Taymor's theater work, Zimmerman's harks back to these innocent, childlike reactions. "I'm from Nebraska, and Willa Cather is the great Nebraska author whom I've ignored until this age," she says. "But in [Cather's] Song of the Lark, there's a character who says she will never be the artist she was as a child. I have very much that same feeling: that the ability to take something banal or simple and make it into something else is a skill that is in the realm of childhood."

The ability to transform an audience into willing (and often weeping) children is the essence of Metamorphoses, and of Mary Zimmerman's original and warming art.

--With reporting by Amy Lennard Goehner/New York