Journey to the West
Zimmerman was enchanted. Not just by the costumes but also by the sight of so many grownups being playful and childlike. Adults just didn’t act like that in her world. (Zimmerman’s mother wasn’t the only academic in the family: her father taught physics at the university level.)
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Zimmerman told me this story by way of explaining how she first fell in love with theater, calling this event her “primal scene.” What’s fascinating about the reminiscence is that it contains many of the preoccupations that ripple through her shows: the abandoned child, the absent or ineffectual parent, the cruel authority figure, the holiness of words and books, the importance of playfulness, the journey through a mysterious, possibly dangerous place that leads unexpectedly to the discovery of something wonderful and transforming.
The production is full of Zimmermanisms: sumptuous costumes, beautiful music, dancelike movement, inventive stage effects, like using red ribbons for blood and fans for waves. Zimmerman’s love of beautiful costumes and props goes back at least as far as her first, self-produced version of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci in the late 80s, at the long-gone Edge of the Lookingglass. Actress Joy Gregory, who wasn’t even in the show, told me how much she enjoyed hanging around backstage during that production because of all the wonderful clothes and props Zimmerman had gathered.
And to be fair, the first act of this nearly three-hour show could stand a little trimming. It doesn’t help that Bruce Norris–an actor who usually overflows with charm and personal magnetism–plays the monk as a bitter, introverted pill. We never really care about the monk’s fate, and Norris is upstaged in every scene by Douglas Hara’s remarkable, hilarious monkey. So much so, in fact, that Norris’s monk frequently seems invisible even when he’s front and center. But in a play as filled with marvelous performances as this one, a single mistaken casting choice can’t really bring down the mood. Even if Hara were only half the monkey he is, Jenny Bacon’s endearing, comical bodhisattva, who acts as Athene to the wandering monk’s Odysseus, would lift the show.
