first works.
In 1998, soon after her terrifically inventive Broadway staging of
The Lion King
had brought her widespread recognition of a kind not generally enjoyed by directors who devote themselves, as she had done till that point, to staging Carlo Gozzi fantasies,
Titus Andronicus
, and Stravinsky’s
Oedipus Rex
, the director was interviewed by Richard Schechner, a professor of theater and editor of
The Drama Review
. (The interview was published in John Bell’s
Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects
.) During the interview, Schechner askedwhether Taymor felt an affinity for what he called “American traditions of performing objects—stuff like the Macy’s parade, the Disney and other theme parks.” “I never liked those things,” Taymor replied. “Not even as a kid. I think I always felt that that kind of thing was just goofy, literally. The roundness of everything—the aesthetic of it—never appealed to me.… I’ve never seen the Macy’s parade.”
To the roundness of the pop-culture aesthetic—and, perhaps, the accompanying flatness, the literalness of the pat “messages” favored by so many pop narratives—Taymor has, by contrast, always preferred the suggestive symbolic forms of what, in a videotaped interview about her 1992 production of the Stravinsky
Oedipus Rex
in Japan, she’s called “mythic, archetypal stories”: folkloric and traditional narratives whose large and abstract formal patterns offer the interpreter plenty of room to maneuver, not least since the plots are already well known. (“It’s all about interpretation,” she has said. “If you do
Hamlet
, we all know
Hamlet
… it’s all about how you tell a story, not ‘is the story new.’ ”) Looking over the landscape of her work, it’s hard not to think that the intersection of action and abstractions—what, in describing her use of Herbert Blau’s “ideographs” in staging, she has called “essences … the most essential two, three brush strokes”—is where Taymor thrives: communal rituals (the basis of some of her early work in Indonesia), religious rites (one early piece she did, on her return to New York from East Asia, was a staging of the Passover Haggadah at the Public Theater for Elizabeth Swados), even the “ritual” of psychoanalysis. She once worked with a psychoanalyst to create masks of psychological archetypes: the overbearing mother, the benevolent patriarch, the bully, the victim.
That it is the formal, the stylized, the extreme that give Taymor’s imagination room to expand has been evident from the start. It was obvious in her acclaimed 1994 staging (adapted for film in 1999) of
Titus Andronicus
, a work whose extremity, which scares away many directors, inspired some of Taymor’s most beautiful and imaginative designs and stagings. (Her 2010 film version of
The Tempest
, by contrast, was curiously slack—not least, you suspect, because so much of it is filmed outdoors on a pretty island. Taymor doesn’t know what to do with natural space; she likes the artificial confines imposed by the stage.) And it was clear in one of her first large New York successes, in 1989: an admirable stage adaptation of
Juan Darién
, a story by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga. The story has the elements of the myths and folktales that Taymor enjoys, while providing the ethical element that, for her, is a crucial part of what theater and ritual do (“It reasserts your place in your own culture”). In it, a jaguar cub is turned, by the force of a grieving mother’s compassion, into a boy—and then retransformed, by the power of the neighbors’ cruelty and fear, into a beast. Among other things,
Juan Darién
was an early instance, along with the Gozzi plays, of Taymor’s fascination with human–animal metamorphosis. And indeed, with metamorphosis in general, not least as an item in the actor’s toolbox. “You should be able to transform your body,” Taymor has said, recalling the lessons she
In 1998, soon after her terrifically inventive Broadway staging of
The Lion King
had brought her widespread recognition of a kind not generally enjoyed by directors who devote themselves, as she had done till that point, to staging Carlo Gozzi fantasies,
Titus Andronicus
, and Stravinsky’s
Oedipus Rex
, the director was interviewed by Richard Schechner, a professor of theater and editor of
The Drama Review
. (The interview was published in John Bell’s
Puppets, Masks, and Performing Objects
.) During the interview, Schechner askedwhether Taymor felt an affinity for what he called “American traditions of performing objects—stuff like the Macy’s parade, the Disney and other theme parks.” “I never liked those things,” Taymor replied. “Not even as a kid. I think I always felt that that kind of thing was just goofy, literally. The roundness of everything—the aesthetic of it—never appealed to me.… I’ve never seen the Macy’s parade.”
To the roundness of the pop-culture aesthetic—and, perhaps, the accompanying flatness, the literalness of the pat “messages” favored by so many pop narratives—Taymor has, by contrast, always preferred the suggestive symbolic forms of what, in a videotaped interview about her 1992 production of the Stravinsky
Oedipus Rex
in Japan, she’s called “mythic, archetypal stories”: folkloric and traditional narratives whose large and abstract formal patterns offer the interpreter plenty of room to maneuver, not least since the plots are already well known. (“It’s all about interpretation,” she has said. “If you do
Hamlet
, we all know
Hamlet
… it’s all about how you tell a story, not ‘is the story new.’ ”) Looking over the landscape of her work, it’s hard not to think that the intersection of action and abstractions—what, in describing her use of Herbert Blau’s “ideographs” in staging, she has called “essences … the most essential two, three brush strokes”—is where Taymor thrives: communal rituals (the basis of some of her early work in Indonesia), religious rites (one early piece she did, on her return to New York from East Asia, was a staging of the Passover Haggadah at the Public Theater for Elizabeth Swados), even the “ritual” of psychoanalysis. She once worked with a psychoanalyst to create masks of psychological archetypes: the overbearing mother, the benevolent patriarch, the bully, the victim.
That it is the formal, the stylized, the extreme that give Taymor’s imagination room to expand has been evident from the start. It was obvious in her acclaimed 1994 staging (adapted for film in 1999) of
Titus Andronicus
, a work whose extremity, which scares away many directors, inspired some of Taymor’s most beautiful and imaginative designs and stagings. (Her 2010 film version of
The Tempest
, by contrast, was curiously slack—not least, you suspect, because so much of it is filmed outdoors on a pretty island. Taymor doesn’t know what to do with natural space; she likes the artificial confines imposed by the stage.) And it was clear in one of her first large New York successes, in 1989: an admirable stage adaptation of
Juan Darién
, a story by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga. The story has the elements of the myths and folktales that Taymor enjoys, while providing the ethical element that, for her, is a crucial part of what theater and ritual do (“It reasserts your place in your own culture”). In it, a jaguar cub is turned, by the force of a grieving mother’s compassion, into a boy—and then retransformed, by the power of the neighbors’ cruelty and fear, into a beast. Among other things,
Juan Darién
was an early instance, along with the Gozzi plays, of Taymor’s fascination with human–animal metamorphosis. And indeed, with metamorphosis in general, not least as an item in the actor’s toolbox. “You should be able to transform your body,” Taymor has said, recalling the lessons she
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