Her Magic Kingdom

Talk about strange bedfellows.

Julie Taymor, the provocative and often controversial muse of avant-garde theater and opera, may not sound like Disney’s kind of employee, yet she has been hired to direct and co-design Disney’s “The Lion King” for Broadway.

The MacArthur “genius” grant recipient is best known for her theatrical spectacles featuring masks, oversized puppets, dance and a stew of traditions from an array of non-Western cultures. Taymor is nothing if not innovative.

Audiences scrambled to get tickets to her staging of Carlo Gozzi’s “The Green Bird” when it premiered in New York earlier this year; the Theatre for a New Audience production opens Sunday at the La Jolla Playhouse, where Taymor, 44, is currently in rehearsals.

Though fable-like in many regards, “The Green Bird” is a complex and sophisticated comedy. “My work is very bawdy and very scatological,” says the soft-spoken Taymor, seated outside the La Jolla theater during a break from tech rehearsals. “I don’t do children’s theater.”

Which doesn’t exactly recommend her for a job like “The Lion King,” which she has been helping adapt for the stage since last fall. At the time she was hired by Disney, Taymor had just finished directing the Los Angeles Music Center Opera production of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman,” which brought her some scathingly negative reviews, and which she said she’d rather not talk about in print.

Yet there actually was a certain logic to Disney’s choice. “There are not that many people who work [with] humans and puppetry,” Taymor says. “I deal in fantasy. And who believes in fantasy more than Disney?

“People are very grounded,” she says. “Most theater is about naturalism. Most film is about realism. So it’s surprising in that they took a chance.”

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Take a close look at “The Green Bird” and “The Lion King” and you begin to see connections between Taymor’s two main projects of the past year. Both, for instance, are coming-of-age stories.

“The Green Bird,” Taymor says, “attacks philosophy on many levels, but always with unbelievable comedy,” while “ ‘The Lion King’ is a classic tale, a kind of story that comes out of all cultures.”

Taymor has spent a sizable portion of the past year working simultaneously on the two productions. Not long after she was hired by Disney, she agreed to stage the Gozzi play for Theatre for a New Audience. Both she and the show’s composer, Oscar-nominated composer Elliot Goldenthal, have worked with the company on several previous occasions. The composer of “Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio,” a longtime collaborator with Taymor, also lives with the New York-based director.

Theatre for a New Audience artistic/producing director Jeffrey Horowitz had been encouraging Taymor to stage the comedy for some time, though she was reluctant to tackle it. “Even Gozzi calls it a scenic monster: There are 25 scene changes,” says Taymor. “It’s all masks, commedia dell’arte. But I reread the play and realized what a good play it was.”

Taymor designed the production’s masks and puppets and co-designed the sets (with Christine Jones) and costumes (with Constance Hoffman).

Like only a few other American artists working today, Taymor prefers to both direct and design (or at least co-design) her productions; she believes form and content are inseparable. “There’s always meaning in technique,” she says. “You don’t just do a technique if it’s not supporting an idea, emotion or plot point. The technique is saying as much to you as the words are.”

In “The Green Bird,” for example, a principle character’s transfigurations are mirrored in the way his costume changes throughout the course of the play. The green bird character is represented by a puppet manipulated by an actor, who is also the prince who was turned into the green bird.

“The actor who plays the green bird is in black, but he’s meant to be seen,” says Taymor. “He’s not supposed to disappear. But you concentrate on the puppet of the green bird when he’s speaking it.

As with “The Green Bird,” Taymor is both directing and designing the costumes and co-designing the masks for “The Lion King.” And as is her style, she will include tricks and changes that are visible to the audiences: “We’re not going to hide all the mechanics,” says Taymor, who also notes that many of the prototypes for “The Lion King” have already been built.

“To me, that’s what theater is about,” she says. “It’s about exposing the techniques, and that’s what makes it magical.”

While the transformations in Disney’s only other theater production, “Beauty and the Beast,” have intentionally been kept hidden, Taymor says her employers seem to be with her on this one. “Now you might think Disney is all about not knowing how things are done,” says Taymor. “But I haven’t gotten that feeling from the company when I’ve shown some of the ideas.”

Taymor was, after all, first drawn to the project by the daunting challenge it represented. “One has to say, ‘How do you put 400 animals on stage?’ ” Taymor says. “The fact that it’s impossible to do in a theater is a big plus for me,” she says of the work, which is scheduled to have a reading in mid-August.

So how is she going to do it? Very carefully, she says. “If you look at the movie, the characters of the animals are very emotional characters and you don’t want to lose that on the stage,” she says. “The challenge was to create the theatrical image that one would want of the animal world and yet not lose the humanity of the human performers by putting people in animal costumes.”

“Without going into tremendous description, I think that I found a key to that,” she says. “I think that we’re breaking ground theatrically. I know I’m doing things I’ve never done before, ever.”

* “The Green Bird,” La Jolla Playhouse, UC San Diego campus, La Jolla. Tues-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 25. $19.-$36. (619) 550-1010.