Mary Zimmerman

Mary Zimmerman (born August 23, 1960, Lincoln, Nebraska, U.S.) is an American director noted for her adaptations for the theatre of classic works of literature.

Zimmerman received a B.S. (1982), an M.A. (1985), and a Ph.D. (1994) at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. She joined the staff of Northwestern as an adjunct assistant in 1984 and in 1999 became a full professor in the department of performance studies. In addition, she was an ensemble member of Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago and served as an artistic associate of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Zimmerman made her mark on the theatre world with her creative theatrical adaptations of such classic works of literature as The Thousand and One Nights (1992; as The Arabian Nights), The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1994), Journey to the West (1995), In Search of Lost Time (1998; as Eleven Rooms of Proust), and The Odyssey (1999). In 2002 Zimmerman won the Tony Award for best direction of a play for Metamorphoses, her adaptation of tales of mythology from the Classical Roman poet Ovid’s epic poem of the same name. Zimmerman’s next directorial project was Galileo Galilei (2002), a new opera by Philip Glass, for which she also cowrote the libretto.

Among other productions that Zimmerman subsequently directed were the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre (2004) and the operas Lucia di Lammermoor (2007), by Gaetano Donizetti, and Armida (2010), by Gioachino Rossini. She also adapted a work by the Greek poet Apollonius of Rhodes for her production Argonautika (2006) and a Tang dynasty legend for The White Snake (2012). In 2013 Zimmerman debuted the fanciful musical The Jungle Book, which translated Rudyard Kipling’s tales to the stage by way of the 1967 Disney movie version. She later adapted Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” for the theatre, and it debuted in 2018. Two years later Zimmerman directed the first stage production of Eurydice, an opera by Matthew Aucion. Among her numerous honours was a 1998 “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.