Writing From the Heart

Mary Zimmerman On Her Creative Process

From The Clay Issue of ArtAntica
Mentioned in this entry: Mary Zimmerman

Sometimes people have asked me how I came to choose or decide on a particular text for adaptation. The truth is that the verbs decide and choose don’t feel appropriate. I no more decide what text I am drawn to than one decides whom to fall in love with. We don’t fall in love based on a careful consideration of the pluses and minuses of the choice, we don’t carefully weigh the consequences or think much or what anyone else will think when it happens: we just fall in love, it’s done before we know it. If I had to apply the word “choose” to the transaction, I would contend that the texts choose me. I don’t really get ideas, ideas get me; and once an idea has gotten me, it won’t let me go; it insists on being done.

Almost every text I’ve ended up staging is something that I encountered in childhood but then forgot about for decades. I had a startling experience once: I had just finished adapting and directing The Odyssey for the first time, at Northwestern University in 1989 or thereabouts and I went home afterwards to visit my family in Nebraska. While there, I discovered a series of drawings I’d made when I was ten or twelve or so, drawings of scenes from The Odyssey. Each one of them was of a scene that isn’t actually pivotal or famous, and each one of them was a scene that I’d just lavished a disproportionate amount of stage time on: the sorrow of Calypso as Odysseus builds his boat in order to leave her; the acrobatic displays and games of the Phaeacians; Telemachus giving his first public speech. Time passed, and after having re-staged the show first with Lookingglass and then at the Goodman, I saw the drawings once again and noticed that for Telemachus’ speech I’d drawn a single branch above his head to indicate “outdoors.” More than 25 years later we had exactly replicated that setting at the Goodman with a single branch, identical in size, shape and orientation.

When I work on a new adaptation I begin rehearsals with no script. The set design and an idea for the costumes have been arrived at, and the play is cast and some actors know some of the roles they will play, but the script itself is made by me alone in between the hours of rehearsal and brought in daily to the company. The whole rehearsal process is a sort of free fall that is strange and frightening and yet one which, I believe, allows the conversation between the text, the world, me and the company of actors and designers to be as continually alive and as fluent as possible. There are an enormous number of decisions being made every day in this way of working, and there isn’t time for all of them to be completely well thought out. In the initial stages of rehearsal I rely on the unconscious because I must; I have deliberately set things up so that I don’t have time for second thoughts, to doubt the possibly idiosyncratic thing that is developing, to make the more calculated or self-conscious decision. Initially, the unconscious, that store of fragmentary images from childhood, from dreams and fantasies – the heart, in fact –leads. Later on, when the script is complete and we can see the whole shape of the show, then the more practical, rational, clarifying side comes into play; the editing and shaping and second thoughts come in. Yet often the image, the line of text, the gesture that I thought most harrowingly risky, deeply personal or strange, turns out to be the moment of the play that most strongly or universally resonates with the audience.

The artistic process for me feels like return: return home. In rehearsal for a new play I have the sensation that we are looking for a path that is already there, that we perhaps once knew but have forgotten. What is the right way to say this? To show this? How do we make ourselves transparent so that the story comes through expressed in the way it wants to be expressed? We are searching for the right way to follow, and we all know it when we’ve found it. I remember feeling proud when I first started making plays, thinking that my colleagues and I had made something out of “nothing” with our plays, that we had “built” something from the ground up. The metaphor was architectural. Eventually I came to realize that the process, for me, is best described in archeological terms. Like archeologists, we are digging in the dirt, trying to uncover something, and yet the object is being shaped by our digging. We mustn’t be anxious and dig too fast, or we will damage the thing we are seeking to uncover; but we mustn’t be lazy or we will arrive on opening night with dirt still clinging to the story and obscuring it. Paradoxically, the final shape of the play is both contingent and inevitable: Contingent on the character of the company and each of its members, the space we are performing in and the events of the world as we are working, and inevitable for those very same reasons.

So in the end, although making a play involves making thousands of choices and decisions every day, those choices and decisions are the result of who I already am, who the company already is, what the story is already saying. Our material is the treasure chest of the text and the treasure chest inside ourselves: the enormous store of fragmentary memories, longings, hurt, broken glass and glances, all of which force their way back into the world in the form of a single branch above a company of people, a group of tumbling acrobats, a girl by the edge of the sea.