Attempts to illustrate the working brain often use the image of stacked filing cabinets. The set design by Scott Bradley for The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci stacks filing cabinets, drawers, stairs, with a connecting framework—all used to contain and become stage props that reveal the mind of Leonardo. The set is the connective tissue accessed by the actors (all playing Leonardo) as they interpret Mary Zimmerman’s choicest “clippings” from the 13,000 pages of journals left by one of the world’s greatest minds. You can actually see two of the original journals here preserved at the National Library of Spain. Note that Leonardo wrote left-handed, and from right to left, making his script unintelligible to the casual reader. It's thought that he did this so as not to smear the writing and drawings—and to make it difficult to steal his ideas.
Photo credit: Goodman Theatre
The eight actors speak the words of Leonardo, fast, then repeated slower and slower—and in the first third of the performance, it felt to me as dense as a staging of Stephen Hawkins A Brief History of Time—not that I got past the first few chapters. That’s how lost I was in Leonardo’s “powers of nature: weight, force, accidental movement, and percussion.” According to the program notes, the performers chose their own actions to express the words. There is no choreographer in the credits. There is a Movement Consultant, Tracy Walsh, and a Movement Captain, Adeoye, one of the performers. In the “forces of nature” and throughout, the actors use their bodies across the set as much as their voices to convey the full sense of the concept Leonardo is discussing. It’s a stunning three-dimensional presentation of words and images from a page.
For me, The Notebooks became more interesting as the production moved into Leonardo’s thoughts on sculpture vs painting—why painting afforded the artist more opportunities for expression than sculpture. There is only one known sculpture attributed to Leonardo today, and that was just authenticated in 2019.
Photo credit: Goodman Theatre
The final segment on perspective is riveting. Four performers create a tableau at center stage and the others draw gold strings of “perspective” to various points of the set framework, illuminating what Leonardo wrote about how to create perspective in a two-dimensional painting.
Mary Zimmerman first wrote and produced The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci in 1993 at The Goodman Theatre. She’s had lots of time to rethink her original concepts, but there is little that changed between productions. Even one of the performers, Chris Donahue, is from the original production. He’s easily identified as the oldest actor on stage.
This is a stellar production–89 minutes of education, entertainment, and enchantment.