Mary Zimmerman is one of those Chicago-based directors with a Broadway resume who has chosen to stay in the city where she got her start. Both a writer and director — a creator of her shows from top to bottom alongside a celebrated design crew — she is best known for her indelible visual images. She memorably staged her hit adaptation of Ovid’s poems, “Metamorphoses,” in an onstage swimming pool — and won a 2002 Tony Award for her efforts.
Zimmerman’s “Mirror of the Invisible World” is currently in previews at the Goodman — a remount of a show she first staged ten years ago in the Goodman’s old digs. True to form, it’s filled with a colorful and highly charged exoticism, a play based on an ancient Persian epic about a king and his seven princess brides. Each hails from a different region of the world, and for one week, the king visits each princess and she tells him a story — “mysterious and highly sensual” love stories that are philosophical in the end: “Parables about how to live and how you should conduct yourself,” says Zimmerman.
Q:How did you come across the text?
A: I was walking on the street in New York and ran into my friend Paul Giamatti, who’s an actor [“Sideways”], coming out of Coliseum Books. He’s a huge bibliophile — a compulsive reader — and one of the books he had with him was “Haft Paykar,” which means “seven images” or “seven beauties.” … First of all I love ancient texts and Middle Eastern texts, and this is a 12th Century Persian epic from ancient Iran and I immediately thought it was right up my alley. So I went in the store and got a copy. Or I took Paul’s. I actually don’t remember which.
Q: Is there a meaning behind the play’s title?
A: That was the nickname of [the poem’s author] Nizami, meaning that he was capable of reflecting the soul — or the inner truth of the world that is invisible but real.
Q: At least one review from 1997 mentioned the “Kama Sutra.” So, sexy stories?
A: Oh they’re all really sexy. I remember hearing the “Kama Sutra” thing, and I think it’s kind of inaccurate in that the “Kama Sutra” is more explicitly about how to have sex, and that’s not what these stories are at all. The thing is, the way it’s cast … there’s only one man. So the seven women play all the characters in each other’s stories, and play men more than they play women. So they’re kissing each other all the time, you know one of them supposedly male, one female, but they’re nonetheless having [simulated] sex with each other all the time.
‘Mirror of the Invisible World’
Sexy and mysterious stories adapted from an epic poem from 12th Century Iran
When: Opens July 1, runs through July 29
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
Price: $20-$68; call 312-443-3800
