After Her Global Travels, Ideas Were Just Lyin’ Around

Here’s how Julie Taymor, director of the stage version of “The Lion King,” said she feels contemplating “Julie Taymor: Playing With Fire,” the large-scale exhibition of her work that opened recently at the Field Museum.

“Exhausted,” said the Tony Award-winning director, who is also a highly skilled artist. “Most of the masks and puppets are my own sculpture. It’s overwhelming.”

Reached in Mexico City, where she is directing “Frida,” a film about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo that stars Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina and Antonio Banderas, Taymor said she was also excited and pleased by the lavish display of her work, ranging from puppets she carved as a twentysomething fledgling director to set pieces from “Titus,” the 1999 film she directed that starred Anthony Hopkins.

“Everything was designed for another medium, and you never really get to appreciate the details of that kind of craftwork unless you see it up close,” said the Manhattan-based director, who added that she has creative inspirations even in her sleep. “I do have potent dreams at times.”

The 7,500-square-foot Taymor retrospective at the Field Museum, which originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, covers 25 years of her work and includes her handcrafted masks and puppets, life-size sets, video clips, costumes, preparatory drawings and models, and a facsimile of her original “Lion King” script.

Taymor’s career as a director reached a commercial peak when she won two Tonys (as director and costume designer) in 1998 for “The Lion King” (now running in New York, Los Angeles, London, Toronto, Osaka and Tokyo), but it stretches back to a production called “Way of Snow,” written, directed and designed by Taymor and produced in Java and Bali in 1974-75. That play is represented in the exhibit by the buffalo-hide shadow puppets she carved for it.

“We think Julie Taymor’s work fits really well with the collections and the mission of the museum in that she draws from other cultural traditions in terms of performance and theater,” said Field Museum project administrator Todd Tubutis.

Combining Performance and Anthropology

Visitors will see influences in Taymor’s work from Indonesia, where she lived for four years, from Japan and from Africa.

“The context they’re putting my work in is performance and culture and anthropology, and it has meaning as a living art form,” said Taymor, a native of Boston who started performing in her backyard at age 7, studied mime in Paris as a teen and worked with experimental theater groups in New York City during her college years. While living in Indonesia in the ‘70s, she founded a theater company called Teatr Loh (which means “oh my God” in everyday Indonesian), and also survived hepatitis, malaria, a serious bus accident and a severe wound to her leg, suffered while climbing to the top of a volcano to witness an initiation rite that inspired her early production “Tirai.” Her masks from that play, produced in Java, Sumatra and Bali in 1978-79, are on display.

Visitors enter the exhibition through an archway between two walls of fabric illuminated by moving red and orange lights to simulate fire. Robert Weiglein, exhibition designer for the Field and a theater buff, had set pieces displayed on platforms, rather than on the floor, “to allow the audience to look up, adding a certain sense of awe.”

Perched well above eye level and flanked regally by ionic columns that were not installed for the exhibition (“They were put there by Daniel Burnham,” the building’s architect, according to Weiglein) is a lead-coated oversized armchair from “Titus.” Fans of that movie may remember it as the throne of the decadent Saturninus, played by a heavily made-up Alan Cumming.

In the movie, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s bloody tale of revenge “Titus Andronicus,” Taymor blends times, using contemporary elements in an ancient Roman setting. She said she “loved the idea of a gigantic 20th century-style armchair made out of metal, with rivets--the humor of that. It’s not very deep--just a strong image.”

Among other especially strong images are the fleshy-looking full-body suits she sculpted that are shown in a set from “Fool’s Fire,” a film based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe; Mr. Bones, a Bunraku-style puppet in “Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass,” based on a Uruguayan story about a boy who is turned into a jaguar; and masks and costumes from Igor Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex,” an opera Taymor directed starring Jessye Norman.

In the “Lion King” portion of the exhibition, which has been dramatically lighted throughout by the musical’s Tony Award-winning designer, Donald Holder, the production’s father figure, Mufasa, stands in theatrical costume and sculpted mask with his lioness wife, Sarabi, in front of a fabric sun bathed in changing colors--from rosy pink to deep blue--to evoke sunrise and sunset.

For Taymor, “The Lion King” was a unique challenge because it followed Disney’s hugely popular animated film. Loath to try to duplicate filmed characters on stage, she used stylized, rather than naturalistic elements and simple mechanical designs rather than technological special effects.

To create a stage version of the wildebeest stampede, represented in the exhibit, she said, she started with “the main theme, the circle of life,” and came up with “the idea of doing old-fashioned mechanical theater and playing with perspective, using miniatures on rollers to create the illusion of the wildebeests coming out toward the audience.” In front of a series of increasingly large rollers are actors (mannequins, in the exhibit) in wildebeest masks.

“The audience is participating with their imagination--and that moves them. The film is very literal, but in the theater you need just a suggestion,” said the director, who added that among her future projects is a theatrical production of “Pinocchio” she will direct for Disney.

“Many of these ideas came from my travels in Japan and Asia, where theatrical forms have always used stylization,” she said. Stylized elements in “The Lion King,” including animal figures that are part human, like a cheetah in the exhibition, have been hugely popular with audiences.

“She is going back to the very analog way of doing things, of saying it requires a human being with skill and talent and a real sensibility about how a cheetah would move on stage,” said Weiglein. “She really engages people’s curiosity and talents.”