Over a lifetime of theatregoing—three decades of it as a professional in the field—I’ve learned that this art form has a unique power to persist in the imagination. I remember sounds and images from plays I saw in the 1980s, moments of drama burned into my memory by a great actor or inspired director, live, right in front of me. I don’t recall movies in quite that way, or paintings, or poems. The physical presence of theatre, the human materiality of it, leaves traces that remain for a long, long time.

That’s one reason tonight’s show is so special to me. Its images, its moments, its humanity, are still fresh in my mind from the last time I saw them, from the first time I saw them. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci played in New York City in 1994, after its triumphant premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, and was the hottest ticket in town. I was at the beginning of my career then, and I somehow snagged a seat. I’d never seen anything like it, and it delights me that I now get to see it again, and share it with the audience of the great theatre company I now direct. It also delights me to welcome back to the Globe the visionary artist who made this indelible work, and whose 2015 production of The White Snake left its share of images behind in the memory banks of San Diego theatregoers: Mary Zimmerman.

Mary has made something that, while not exactly a play, is very much a work of theatre. Notebooks is metaphoric, non-narrative. It’s not a story about something, but instead a portrait of that thing. It’s a three-dimensional representation of one consciousness, of a single mind that’s one of the most capacious and monumental in human history.

Scientist, philosopher, and artist, Leonardo da Vinci was a man of voracious curiosity and was possessed of a seemingly infinite capacity for wonder. His voluminous notebooks are the source of every word spoken in this show. They are jammed with wild stuff: anatomy, physics, botany, mathematics. There’s a shopping list. There are strange ruminations on the largest human questions, and then random jottings of the goings-on in the lives of friends. Over countless pages, da Vinci asks questions: why can’t a man fly? Why does the same person look totally different when light hits them from some new angle? The questions emanate from a mind that’s never satisfied, from a kind of human Google that ranges across every conceivable interest with equal enthusiasm. The Renaissance was a time for generalists, for polymaths, a time perhaps richer than our moment of extreme specialization and narrowness of focus. Da Vinci’s focus was wide.
And Mary Zimmerman’s is too. She conjures from da Vinci’s mind a dream in corporeal form, a series of thoughts in motion. Ravishing stage pictures, precisely choreographed and dynamically enacted, emerge from the gorgeous teamwork of eight performers whose inventiveness and ingenuity are as bottomless as their source’s.

Da Vinci knew that the world is a marvelous place. Zimmerman knows it too, and she understands that no human invention expresses those marvels quite as fully and engagingly as the theatre. Perhaps that’s why I remember this show so vividly from all those years ago; perhaps that’s why the show remains in this revival just as incandescent as it was when it was first created. It’s a work that deploys the fruits of imagination to make beautiful images about imagination. It’s unique, and that’s what makes it so memorable.

I’m very grateful to Mary and her fellow explorers of da Vinci’s mind for helping the Globe launch our 2023 programming with such abundant creativity. It’s an inspiring way to kick off a new year.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.