BY JONATHAN ABARBANEL

Thanks to her MacArthur Fellowship and her staff positions at Northwestern University and the Goodman Theatre, Mary Zimmerman has what most artists crave–the freedom (if not always the leisure) to do exactly what she wishes to do, which is why she currently is working for no pay to restage Eleven Rooms of Proust.

First developed with her performance studies students from Northwestern University, where she herself trained, Proust was staged last year at the Berger Mansion, a Chicago Park District field house that once was an elegant private home. Divided into tiny clusters of two dozen or so, the audience moved from room to room to observe seemingly-random episodes from Proust’s monumental masterpiece, "Remembrance of Things Past." Of course, the selection of scenes was anything but random. This time around, the work (which opens May 14) is being staged in a rambling, old, multi-roomed industrial space, and is a collaboration between the About Face, Goodman and Lookingglass theatre companies.

Born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, Zimmerman is the daughter of two college professors: a physicist father and an english literature mother. She first started to read "Remembrance" when she was 18, as her mother had. It took her four years to complete the 3,000 page novelistic memoir, which she since has traversed three more times.

Of course, Zimmerman has had notable and national successes with her larger-scale works, all of which she adapted herself, including The Notebooks of Leonardo DaVinci, The Arabian Nights, Journey to the West, Metamorphoses and The Odyssey. These works received their world premieres at the Lookingglass and Goodman theatres, but also have been seen from coast to coast at venues including the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Huntington Theatre, the Seattle and Berkeley repertory theatres and the Mark Taper Forum, where Metamorphoses is playing now with several members of the Lookingglass ensemble. Last month, the production won five Bay Area Theatre Awards, including honors for outstanding drama, ensemble and direction (Zimmerman).

Zimmerman will stage the Phillip Glass opera Akhnaten for Chicago Opera Theatre this summer, and then will develop a new project of her own to inaugurate the 400-seat Owen Bruner Goodman Theatre in January, part of the new North Loop Goodman Theatre complex.

Zimmerman is famous for beginning rehearsals without a script (unless, of course, she’s directing Shakespeare or some such, which she’s done at the New York Shakespeare Festival, no less). But the absence of a script doesn’t mean the absence of a text, she explains.

"I will start on the first day, and there will be a scene I’m thinking of doing or an episode or a story. And we’ll sit in a circle and pass the book around, and everyone reads a paragraph or stanza and passes it on to the next person. And we talk about it, talk about what we like in it, what seems to be important about it. So there is always a text that’s backgrounding. So it’s not a total freefall at all."

The script comes next, but it’s not developed through improv. "I’m very controlling about that," says Zimmerman. "I’m a real stickler about saying this: I don’t do verbal improvisation. I write it. But what I will do is tons of physical and imagistic improvisation. Like, I’ve this idea how to do the camel, or I’ve this idea how to do the boat. And then we try it. Usually, 80 percent works or doesn’t, and then we ditch it or improve, and go on to something else."

While she admits she may be "kind of tap dancing" with her cast, "trying to keep them occupied while I get ahead," she says she usually has some text by the second day. She adds, "sometimes there’s text because I had to write some scenes for the auditions. Sometimes those scenes end up in the play and sometimes they don’t, but I can start there. I don’t ever start anything dead cold. If you’re doing The Arabian Nights, you’re doing it because you like this story and that story. I just dive into what I know I’m going to do. I know I love this scene, so we’ll start there. I start with the thing I have confidence about, and we’ll branch out in all directions from there."

One of the greatest challenges of her dual process of writing and directing, she says, is juggling cast members who usually play multiple roles in her works.

"Certain central roles are assigned at the beginning, but the ensemble isn’t," says Zimmerman. "So every night, when I’m getting ready to bring in a scene, I have to be casting it in my head. And I’m nowhere near ruthless enough to give someone something and then take it away from them, even though I announce at the very first rehearsal that that might happen. It’s a huge chess game in my head; it’s really stressful."

Proust and DaVinci aside, Zimmerman’s most notable works have been drawn from antique texts of the non-Western world, and all have been works with strong narrative lines. In addition to what she calls her "narrative compulsion," she believes she’s drawn to them because they all originally were oral texts.

"To me, they translate extremely well back into performance because they come from performance," says Zimmerman. "They come from being told aloud, and then are fixed in some print form or another. Also, the things that novels or stories do that’s different than things that are written for the stage are interesting. The way they move through time really quickly, or slow down time, or dwell on a moment, or go over 15 years in two sentences. And that they can invoke the absolutely fantastical in a way a playwright would not; because he knows he’s writing for the theatre, and that this would be an impossible image. I like to confront those impossible images and try to do them."

Zimmerman’s works all have been notable for their use of music and for visual impact, both the design elements and the elaborate movement/choreography. Not a dancer herself, without any plastic skills of sketching or sculpting and claiming to be "a musical moron," she nonetheless succeeds in creating remarkable and arresting imagery. She says she doesn’t know where her visual ideas comes from, although "they tend to come when I’m in motion," she says, and she tries to pay attention to her dream images. As for visual influences, she claims that her personal taste in art favors "really bourgeois 19th century representational painting" and that she thinks of herself as loving to see dance, although she actually may attend only two or three dance performances a year. Also, she reports that she has "books and books and books of photographs."

Half-jokingly, she explains that she came to directing because she couldn’t express herself in other ways. "I sort of felt like I’d found my vocation, because I used to have fantasies of being able to record my dreams on a machine, or hire someone to paint the images I saw. This was an adolescent fantasy, because I didn’t have the skill. I suppose if I’d trained, I could’ve, but it just sort of felt beyond me. I don’t know the conventions of translating three dimensions onto the page. I take photographs, but so does everyone."

As for other directors Zimmerman admires, she names Peter Brook (who’s Hamlet will come to Chicago Shakespeare Theatre next season), Julie Taymor, and choreographer Pina Bausch, whom Zimmerman cites as a major influence. But she credits her Northwestern professors–Frank Galati, Paul Edwards and Leland Roloff–as teaching her the most about theatre, with special emphasis on Galati.

"I can remember many, many quotes from Frank," says Zimmerman. "I was a sophomore, I remember his saying to us, 'Don’t act, be.’ And I also remember him saying 'Concern is concentration.’ But mostly the things I picked up from Frank are very practical, canny, showbizzy things, of which he is a genius. Instead of staging left to right, to stage upstage to downstage. How much more dynamic that is. I think he was teaching me that there is a craft to it. And also how to be as a director. I was in shows directed by him, and he had a separate way of how he spoke to each actor, depending on how they needed to be spoken to. One he’d be very technical with, the next very emotional with. Dry, or warm, or however they most liked to work, he was going to find that out and speak in their own language to them. He’s an intensely generous director."

But she most credits Galati with giving her a generous world view of theatre. "I began to understand from him that the truly sophisticated position isn’t to dislike things, but to like things. And that the truly sophisticated theatre-goer understands the essential virtue of everything he or she sees. Not what’s stupid and bad about it. Frank always saw the love and the effort in everything he went to. He could find the affirmation and the joy in the silliest little nothing thing. He could see that it was remaking the world in its own little way."

The upcoming Eleven Rooms of Proust is an unanticipated pleasure for Zimmerman–"the most joyful thing I’ve done for a long time," she calls it–which came about when a large industrial space at 4039 North Ravenswood became available. Although it will run the same 55 minutes as at the Berger Mansion, Zimmerman reports that it will "differ hugely, because the whole center of this performance is to respond to the place that you’re in, and the architecture that you’re in. It’s an extremely different space. A lot of the text will be the same, but the staging and the locales of the staging are all different. I’m not going to waste one of these rooms trying to make it what a Berger Mansion room was. I’m going to try to play into the rooms here."

Once again, small groups of audience–30 maximum–will move through the space, witnessing the 11 scenes. A new group will begin every half hour, with six groups each evening. That means the audience tours overlap, requiring Zimmerman to double cast certain characters. Confusing? Perhaps, and made more so by the fact that Zimmerman readily acknowledges few audience members will have read all 3,000 pages–or any–of the original work. Still, Zimmerman insists the audience will be able to access the work.

She explains, "It’s always been a point that the evening not just be, 'Oh, that was very interesting and very cool,’ but that it be an emotional experience. Part of the way to make it an emotional experience is that there has to be some narrative that they can attach to. Almost all people, when they try and do anything with Proust, attach to the Swan-Odette narrative, because that’s the most novelistic and conventional narrative in the book. The Swan-Odette love affair is actually the most central thing about the house ("house" meaning her production). It’s told in fragments, but you get the rudimentary idea. He meets her, he is crazy for her, and the relationship starts to go south, and it becomes obsessive. You see that much. Non-realistically, but (we) perform the essential quality of it, as well as preserve the language."

As for future projects, Zimmerman’s next year includes remounts of The Odyssey at the McCarther Theatre and the Seattle Rep, in addition to her Chicago Opera Theatre and Goodman assignments. She says it’s a quandary to figure out where she wants to go next, and what she really wants to do.

"I have the opportunity to work at my (full) capability in the theatre, and I’m sort of relaxed about that now," she explains. "Sometimes I miss the kind of really scary challenge of new things. Even though I work in this way that is scary, I’ve now done it so much, and I have a bunch of people who’ve done it so much with me, that it doesn’t quite get my adrenaline racing like it used to."

She finds the idea of directing plays by other people, especially more Shakespeare, engaging. "I’ve done three Shakespeares now, and he is difficult and stimulating enough to keep me interested."

Zimmerman has no desire to follow Galati or her Goodman boss, Robert Falls, to Broadway, although she’d like to stage "an old-timey musical, like Guys and Dolls. You know, the really good ones. I always say it’s my musical unsophistication that I don’t like contemporary musicals at all, but I’m really being disingenuous. I really don’t think they’re very good. Sometimes at the Goodman they talk about letting me do a Gilbert and Sullivan, which I think would be really fun and interesting."

Of Broadway she says, "I’ve never been able to make myself very interested because I think I would have to give up the kind of control that I’m used to. I so admire Julie Taymor and Bob Falls for being able to face down the giantness of those machines. That’s a kind of struggle I don’t want."

She also has said "no" to inquiries from Hollywood, which have come her way since The Arabian Nights. She tells the story of a Hollywood executive who admired Journey to the West, her adaptation of a Chinese Buddhist epic. "But does it have to be about God?" he inquired. "Couldn’t it be a romance, or about a sword?" "Sure," Zimmerman said, "it could be about a sword. But that wouldn’t be a project I’d be interested in."

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