Mary Zimmerman is an American theatre and opera director and playwright from Nebraska. She is an ensemble member of the Lookingglass Theatre Company, the Manilow Resident Director at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, and also serves as the Jaharis Family Foundation Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. She is currently a faculty member in the Performance Studies department at Northwestern. She has earned national and international recognition in the form of numerous awards, including the prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. She has received more than 20 Joseph Jefferson Awards for her creative work in the Chicago Area and won a 2002 Tony Award for Best Direction for her adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Other notable productions include Eleven Rooms of Proust and The Secret in the Wings.
Early life and education
Although Zimmerman was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, she spent much of her childhood in Europe, splitting time between her parents’ home outside London in Hampstead Garden, England, and in Paris. Both of her parents were academics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, her father a physics professor and her mother a professor of comparative literature who studied the author George Sand. Zimmerman studied theatre and performance studies at Northwestern University, where she received a BS in theatre in addition to an MA and PhD in performance studies.
Zimmerman's involvement in stage productions is difficult to categorize, since she may be billed as director, writer, or producer, but usually takes on several of these roles. She is well known for her revivals of old plays and re-adaptions of classical and pre-classical works, librettos for modern operas, and re-presenting modern film and novels as stage plays.
She has also worked in opera production. She is the director and co-librettist of the 2002 opera Galileo Galilei, music by Philip Glass, commissioned by the Goodman Theatre. In 2007 Zimmerman directed the first of a 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. 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. The production, which moved the opera's setting to a contemporary rehearsal hall, received mixed-to-negative reviews in the press. It was also presented in the Live in HD series. For the company's 2009–2010 season Zimmerman directed a new production of Gioachino Rossini’s opera Armida starring Renée Fleming. Her fourth production for the Met was Dvořák’s Rusalka in 2017, to positive reviews. In February 2020 she directed the world premiere of the opera Eurydice, composed by Matthew Aucoin with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, at the Los Angeles Opera.
Musical productions
In 2013, Zimmerman adapted and directed a musical version of Disney’s version of The Jungle Book, premiering at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the Huntington Theatre in Boston. The production featured Kevin Carolan as Baloo the Bear and André De Shields as King Louie. In 2015 Zimmerman directed the musical Guys and Dolls at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
