Mary Zimmerman brings 'Candide' and 'Arabian Nights' to Washington

Caution and Mary Zimmerman do not go hand in hand. The acclaimed Chicago-based director and adaptor is known for daring undertakings: dramatizations of epics and mythology; a lyrical, gymnastic play based on Leonardo da Vinci's musings; a site-specific riff on Proust. As if such material weren't risky enough, she writes her scripts at the last minute, during the rehearsal process. A 1998 winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, she nabbed a 2002 Tony Award for "Metamorphoses," which conjured Ovid's tales around an onstage pool. Recently she has reimagined scores for New York's Metropolitan Opera.

But until this year, Zimmerman - whose magic-storybook "Pericles" and shipboard-set "Argonautika" landed at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2004 and 2008, respectively - had not attempted musicals.

"I kind of resisted musicals forever, because everyone loves musicals, you know what I mean?" she says, with a laugh, as she sits in a quiet lounge off the Shakespeare Theatre's Sidney Harman Hall. "And I love the underdog, and the obscure text!" As if to underscore at least the canine metaphor, her pet Beary - a husky-esque mutt rescued from a shelter, now her rehearsal companion - nestles at her feet.

But showtunes have finally caught up with Zimmerman: Her production of Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" has waltzed into Harman Hall, where it runs through Jan. 9. A co-production with Chicago's Goodman Theatre, which presented it earlier this fall, the musical features a book newly adapted - by Zimmerman - from Voltaire's 1759 philosophical novella.

It's one of two Zimmerman shows to hit the District this season. Starting Jan. 14, Arena Stage ushers in her Persian-carpet-bedecked "The Arabian Nights" - an older piece that the director is, for the first time, retooling for an in-the-round presentation.

In the recent interview, wearing a gray dress and turquoise scarf, her hair in a ponytail, Zimmerman admitted to being "thrilled" but "scared" by the prospect of spatially reconfiguring "Arabian Nights." By contrast, she spoke calmly of "Candide," often viewed as a thorny theatrical problem.

Adored for its score, the 1956 operetta has a sketchy production track record. Conceived by Bernstein and writer Lillian Hellman as a response to the era's anti-communism, the musical borrows from Voltaire's narrative, which flings a naive hero, Candide, across continents and into ghastly tragedies - wars, an earthquake, mass rape, an auto-da-fe - while he clings to his belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds."

The tale's picaresque structure and one-note satirical tone disgruntled audiences from the start: After premiering on Broadway, the musical lasted a mere 73 performances. Subsequent revivals added and discarded script sections and music, recalibrated the humor, recruited Stephen Sondheim for additional lyrics (Richard Wilbur had penned most of the previous ones), and added Voltaire as a character - among other desperate measures - leaving the property something of a "jigsaw puzzle," as Zimmerman puts it.

It's arguably a puzzle she is equipped to tackle, given her affinity for straggling, travelogue-peppered narratives from distant eras and her flair for integrating words, music, movement and luminous imagery into feats of self-aware storytelling. The hodgepodge elements of "Candide" may not spook a director who, according to her frequent set designer, Daniel Ostling, conceives of theater as "a tapestry," with script, acting and sensory elements "woven together so that they really can't be separated."

Raised largely in Lincoln, Neb., Zimmerman caught the theater bug early. Her "primal scene," she says, occurred during one of her professor parents' European sabbaticals. Playing in a wood near London, the young Mary came across a troupe rehearsing "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"The playfulness and collegiality and fun of it was just so gripping to me," she recalls.

She majored in theater at Northwestern University, and began directing as a performance studies grad student at the same institution, where she now teaches. She became (like Ostling) an ensemble member of Lookingglass, an adventurous Chicago company that mounted, among other productions, her "Eleven Rooms of Proust" and "The Odyssey."

Zimmerman built up name recognition after "Metamorphoses" opened at New York's Second Stage Theatre in October 2001. For audiences shaken by the recent terrorist attacks, the play's incantatory portraits of mutating souls, and lovers united and separated, resonated deeply.

"There was so much in it that allowed me to grieve for the first time," recalls Arena Stage Artistic Director Molly Smith, who saw that off-Broadway production. Zimmerman's haunting imagery, she says, "can take the audience places that language doesn't touch."

Actor Erik Lochtefeld, a longtime Zimmerman collaborator who performed in "Metamorphoses" (and appears in "Candide"), agrees. Zimmerman aims "to speak to the subconscious," he says, adding that viewers are often "struck emotionally by moments they don't quite even understand."

"Metamorphoses" vaulted to Broadway. Back in the Windy City, Zimmerman became a resident director at Goodman, whose executive director, Roche Schulfer, and artistic director, Robert Falls, urged her to try musicals. "I had always thought that Mary's imagination, and her understanding and love of music, and her wit and visual imagination, were a perfect match" for the genre, Falls says.

He was also anxious to keep his colleague around the Goodman more: Zimmerman had begun accepting gigs ("Lucia di Lammermoor," "La Sonnambula," "Armida") at the Metropolitan Opera.

"The gifts that make her a great theater director make her a great opera director," observes the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, who says he pursued Zimmerman extensively for the Met, and boasts that a work like her controversial "Sonnambula" achieved some "real theatrical coups."

Zimmerman, who calls her time at the Met "ecstatic - and extremely challenging," is still fond of her "Sonnambula," which she set backstage at a company staging "Sonnambula." Some audience members booed.

"I knew the moment that inspiration came to me, there were going to be people who didn't like it," she says, before adding, "I don't take it glibly! I want to be pleasing."

Working with music worshipers at the Met gave her a head start on "Candide" (where she has teamed with Music Director Doug Peck). She knew from the get-go that she wanted to create a book more or less from scratch, mining Voltaire, preserving the "melancholy edge" she sees in his novella, and not attempting to impose a conventional show-biz structure. As with works like "The Arabian Nights," she says, "my impulse always is to really trust the quirkiness and unsettledness and oddness of the original text."

And while one Chicago critic speculated that her production might be destined to become "the best of all possible 'Candides,' " Zimmerman disclaims any such sweeping ambition.

"It wasn't my goal to say, 'I will solve "Candide,' " she says modestly. "It's just, like: This is my taste."

Wren is a freelance writer.