| Mary Zimmerman | |
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| Occupation | Theatre director, playwright |
Mary Zimmerman is an American theatre director and playwright, born in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Career
Zimmerman is a member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company and is an Artistic Associate of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BS, MA and PhD from Northwestern University, where she is currently a faculty member in the Performance Studies department. She has earned national and international recognition in the form of numerous awards, including the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1998). She has won more than 20 Joseph Jefferson Awards for her creative work and received a 2002 Tony Award for Best Direction for Metamorphoses. Other productions include Eleven Rooms of Proust and The Secret In The Wings. Zimmerman has also directed noted theatrical adaptations of Journey to the West, The Odyssey, Silk, The Arabian Nights, and The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. She is the director and co-librettist of the 2002 opera Galileo Galilei, music by Philip Glass, commissioned by the Goodman Theatre.
In 2004 she directed a production of Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. Her production was re-staged in 2006 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company Free For All.
In 2006 she directed Argonautika at the Lookinglass Theater Company, which then toured at the Berkeley Repertory Theater and at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.. Recently, Zimmerman directed Shakespeare's Cymbeline at Northwestern University.
In 2007, Zimmerman directed the first of what has become an annual series of new productions for the Metropolitan Opera. She was engaged to stage a new production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor starring Natalie Dessay, which opened the company's 2007-2008 season. The production received mixed reviews, but was a success at the box office.[1] Zimmerman's Lucia was revived in 2008-2009 with Diana Damrau and Anna Netrebko as Lucia. It was broadcast worldwide in the Met's Live in HD series with Netrebko and tenor Piotr Beczała.
In March, 2009 the Met premiered Zimmerman's production of Vincenzo Bellini's La Sonnambula (starring Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez). The production, which moved the opera's setting to a contemporary rehearsal hall, received some boos from the opening-night audience as well as mixed-to-negative reviews in the press.[2] It was also presented in the Live in HD series. For the company's 2009-2010 season Zimmerman is slated to direct a new production of Gioachino Rossini's opera seria Armida starring Renée Fleming .[3]
References
- Staff writers (2002). "Biography: Mary Zimmerman". American Theatre Wing. http://www.americantheatrewing.org/biography/detail/mary_zimmerman. Retrieved 2008-05-28.
External links
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