A
Stage Design Worthy of Leonardo Da Vinci
By ROBERTA SMITH
Take the writings of a leading Renaissance
man. Sprinkle with Surrealist uncanniness and
other entrancing visual effects. Simmer in the
juices of 1960's avant-garde dance and 70's
performance art and garnish with eight talented,
attractive, gymnastically inclined actors. The
result is a postmodern stew called "The
Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci." It is
the latest work of the director Mary Zimmerman
to reach Off Broadway, opening at the Second
Stage Theater next Sunday. |
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In 2001, Ms. Zimmerman's "Metamorphoses,"
a re-enactment of nine myths from Ovid that centered
on a 27-foot-wide pool of water, played to raves and
full houses at the Second Stage, transferring to Broadway
in 2002 and winning a Tony Award for Ms. Zimmerman
for best direction of a play. "The Notebooks"
continues her use of the up-to-the-minute strategy
of appropriation, which pervades nearly all contemporary
art forms. In this case, the text comes from Leonardo's
writings, and is less a traditional play than a lively
lecture-demonstration. The words and the actions are
pocked with avant-garde devices, like the repetition
of simple but incongruous everyday gestures (flicking
dandruff off one's shoulder), or the punctuation of
ponderous monologues with mundane chatter. Such conventions
variously bring to mind Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown,
Robert Wilson and Pina Bausch and seem by turns derivative
and a testament to the vitality of the avant-garde.
They provide evidence that ideas hatched on the margins
of culture continue to flow inexorably into the mainstream,
to the benefit of all concerned.
But in the not-so-long run (85 minutes,
no intermission), "The Notebooks" provides
an unusually intimate picture of what might be called
"the other Leonardo"; not the mythic painter
of the "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper"
who was venerated during his lifetime, but the Leonardo
whose peripatetic genius emerged from his copious
writings, sketches and diagrams in the centuries after
his death.
The original notebooks contain an
amazing range of communiqués: aphorisms, shopping
lists and occasional personal asides, as well as longer
meditations on mechanics, painting, optics and the
proportions and movements of the body. There are tips
for young painters, drawings of plants, detailings
of human musculature and designs for fortifications,
hydraulic systems and, most famously, the first flying
machine. From all this Ms. Zimmerman has artfully
pieced together a Leonardo sampler that creates a
portrait of the artist as a scientist, inventor and
visionary; as a kindly employer and elegant phrasemaker;
as an early empiricist — the keen observer who
saw God in all of nature; and as a man who purchased
songbirds in the markets and set them free in the
hills.
The artist's words are spoken by members
of the ensemble, nearly all of whom are veterans of
previous Zimmerman efforts. They are also conveyed
through mime, animated recitation, song, dance, childlike
games and feats of strength and agility, including
hanging upside down. A result is that, with garments
that blend Renaissance and Victorian fashion, the
production can resemble a tribe of upper-class English
cousins entertaining themselves on a rainy Sunday.
Scott Bradley's ingenious set contributes
to this impression. Its expanses of giant floor-to-ceiling
filing cabinets may signify the immense and versatile
storehouse of knowledge that Leonardo assembled in
his notebooks. But the dwarfing scale also creates
the impression that the rabbit's hole of "Alice
in Wonderland" has led us back to Lewis Carroll's
study. In addition, the drawer handles serve as ladders,
while the drawers pop open to function as seats or
to reveal Surrealist incongruities that evoke Magritte's
painting of a steam engine coming out of a fireplace.
One drawer yields a long trough of
water into which more water is sprinkled while an
actor recites Leonardo's observations about ripples.
From another comes a cadaver for his dissecting table.
A third, pulled out during a discussion of the effect
of light on the clothing and skin of a woman dressed
in white, reveals a thick swath of golden wheat.
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One of the most
striking effects, visible through a quasi-Palladian
arch, is a misty landscape of a winding river
and soft, rather Chinese-looking hills that
may appear vaguely familiar. It is based on
one of art history's greatest backdrops: the
magical bit of terrain behind the "Mona
Lisa."
Ms. Zimmerman repeatedly stresses
the ability of language to be not only enlivened,
but renewed by speech, as when Leonardo's thoughts
on proportion, percussively chanted by Louise
Lamson and Lizzy Cooper Davis, take on the cadence
of modern poetry: "From the roots of the
hair to the bottom of the chin is a tenth part
of a man's height. |
" Sometimes we are reminded that
ego is hardly a Freudian invention, as with Christopher
Donahue's comic delivery of Leonardo's self-serving
comparison of the sculptor's rude existence to the
refined lifestyle of the painter, during which another
actor strikes poses like "David," the best-known
sculpture of Leonardo's arch-rival, Michelangelo.
But "The Notebooks" is above
all a testimony to the insatiable acuity of the artist's
eye, always on the move, always looking, questioning
and learning, and pulling the mind along with it.
It pulls our eyes as well, toward sudden moments of
visual clarity. Leonardo's thoughts on shadow are
illustrated with startling simplicity when one actor
sits in the doorway of a darkened house, one side
of his face drenched in light. At the same time, another
actor underscores Leonardo's love of beauty by admonishing
the reader to take special care when depicting young
faces: the shadows on them are never hard-edged, because
adolescent skin is slightly translucent.
The artist's dense writing on perspective
is made riveting by a model of one-point perspective
— the signal invention of Renaissance painting
— that the actors construct by stringing twine
about. Then, four of them settle in front of its radiating
lines to create a tableau based on Leonardo's "Madonna
of the Rocks." Survivors of art history lectures
will appreciate the added strings, which delineate
the always meaningful direction of each figure's gaze.
And there are a few startling historical
discoveries. Who knew, for example, that 100 years
before Galileo's heretical conception of the universe,
Leonardo wrote this simple sentence: "The sun
does not move"?
In a question-and-answer session after
one preview performance, Ms. Zimmerman said the facsimile
of the notebooks she consulted showed the statement
was written on an otherwise bare page. Perhaps Leonardo,
famous for leaving paintings unfinished, thus feeding
Florentine gossip that his interests were too many
and too distracting, intended to add further thoughts
later.
The
New York Times
Junio
2003
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