ML - Michigan Avenue

2012 - Issue 5 - September

Michigan Avenue - Niche Media - Michigan Avenue magazine is a luxury lifestyle magazine centered around Chicago’s finest people, events, fashion, health & beauty, fine dining & more!

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Lookingglass's home in the former Water Tower Water Works Anjali Bhimani have envied. This month the show—which earned Zimmer man the 2002 Tony Award for Best Direction when Broadway—enjoys it a played revival on at Lookingglass Theatre, where it debuted in 1998. For years, the national profile of Chicago's theater was defined by David Mamet's performance based style. on in-your-face dialogue and Steppenwolf's mus- cular But Zimmer man's taste for epic mate- rial—often "The question of whether we change in life is huge for me. " traditions—and a penchant creating arresting tableaux (in partnership with designer Daniel Ostling) added a new dimension to oral for the kind of work people expected from the Windy City. Whether exploring the genius of Leonardo da Vinci or tackling operas old (Lucia di Lammermoor) and new (Galileo, Gallei with music by Philip Glass), Zimmerman has always been guided by a deep fascination with the notion of transformation. While helping her mother pack up the family home in Nebraska this summer, she came across draw- ings she created during her childhood. "It's really surprising how obsessively I drew gods and goddesses—Zeus holding lightning bolts, Daphne turning into a tree. The question of whether we change in life is huge for me—and how unwanted change is the sorrow of life, yet some- thing is always produced from that. All my work deals with those questions and how they relate to love and the death of love." Lookingglass is Zimmerman's longtime creative home and the labora- tory where she created The Arabian Nights, Argonautika, The Secret in the Wings, and Eleven Rooms of Proust (in collaboration with About Face Theatre). But Metamorphoses remains a special milestone in that relation- ship. "This show was not only very important to our artistic lives, but three marriages came out of it," says Zimmerman. "Three couples met on this show, and among them they now have five children. Two of the original cast members, who were my students at Northwestern, are in this produc- tion. There's something beautiful about that kind of lifelong return." The Monica Lewinsky scandal was still fresh when Metamorphoses pre- miered in 1998, and the world was in shock from the collapse of the Twin Towers when the show opened in New York three years later. Who knows if this election year will add a gloss to these tales of chaos and order, Olympian foibles, and human yearning. But Zimmerman is happy to be telling them again. "There's a perpetual reharvesting of what they can mean. If I weren't interested, if I weren't longing to revisit those images and ideas, I wouldn't be doing this." MA MICHIGANAVEMAG.COM 77 With the opening this month of Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, Lookingglass Theatre Company celebrates a quarter century of wildly inventive activity. The brainchild of a group of Northwestern students, it emerged in Evanston in 1988 with an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Through the Lookingglass. Today, with a Tony Award for Excellence in Regional Theatre to its credit and a highly visible home on North Michigan Avenue, Lookingglass is a local institution with a loyal following and an enviable national reputation. Devoted to the development of new work through intense collaboration among its 22 members and 15 artistic associates, the company combines an often highly physical presentation with a keen literary sensibility. At Lookingglass, movement, film, and music frequently create a multilayered experience. And from a rendition of Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop to David Schwimmer's Trust—a searing look at sexual predation in the Internet age—the ensemble continues to offer audiences a range of work, all of it steeped in the conviction that live performance remains a medium of singular, unparalleled communicative power. The group has produced such crowd-pleasing spectacles as the circus- inspired Hephaestus (featuring members of the Wallenda Family, Ringling Bros., and Cirque du Soleil). It has also made a specialty of embracing the city, its writers, and its history, saluting such talents as Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, and Upton Sinclair, and conjuring the Great Fire and the Eastland disaster. The success of its efforts is reflected not only in its Tony Award, but also its frequent recognition from The Joseph Jefferson Awards Committee for shows including Hard Times, 1984, The Idiot, and yes, Metamorphoses. Lookingglass Celebrates 25 Years of Cutting-Edge Theater PHOTOGRAPHY BY T CHARLES ERICKSON (ACTRESS); STEVE HALL, HEDRICH BLESSING (BUILDING)

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