S/M
Four years ago, when Mary Zimmerman first started getting citywide attention for her stage adaptations of The Arabian Nights and Vladimir Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark, one of the most frequently repeated criticisms of her work, both in the press and on the gossipy street, was that she was a mere disciple of Frank Galati and her work a slavish outgrowth of his better-known experiments in adapting nontheater texts to the stage.
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Now, seven local and two New York productions after her initial success, Zimmerman has proved she’s an artist in her own right, a playwright-director with her own voice, style, and methods. Her work may have roots in chamber theater, as does the work of most of her fellow graduates of Northwestern’s performance studies program, but her use of texts is much less orthodox than the more literal-minded adaptations that crowd Chicago’s stages.
The choice at first seems a natural for Zimmerman. Sade left a huge body of work: thick, obscene novels like Justine and One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and thinner, slightly less scandalous plays like Philosophy in the Bedroom. Add to that the writings about Sade published over the years, among them Simone de Beauvoir’s “Must We Burn Sade?” and Maurice Lever’s 626-page biography, published in the early 90s, both of which Zimmerman alludes to. Then there’s the correspondence to and from Sade, plus the journal entries about him. Now think of Sacher-Masoch’s writings and the related correspondence and journals–I recall seeing that Re/Search recently published the writings of Sacher-Masoch’s wife, Aurore Rumelin, recounting their master-slave relationship (she was the master), though Zimmerman doesn’t specifically refer to this. Clearly you have a stack of literary sources too high to be comfortably wedged into a conventional two-hour chamber-theater adaptation.
