The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
As I made my way up the aisle after the show, I heard a fellow attendee mutter, “Well, that was a bit too cerebral for me.” It was all I could do not to stop and assure him that if he wasn’t grinning at what he’d just seen, he was probably too cerebral for it. Yes, the text spoken by the eight actors was taken entirely from the titular notebooks, and yes, the action on stage served as a sort of illustration of those excerpts, and yes, Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the great geniuses of human history. But writer-director Mary Zimmerman hasn’t given us Da Vinci the genius; she’s given us Da Vinci the man. And small surprise: these aren’t his treatises, these are his notebooks, the place where you can find his advice on portrait lighting alongside his complaints about how much his, um, manservant has stolen from him lately. Their presentation here is occasionally profound and insightful, as in the twice-recounted memory of peering into a dark cave as a boy and noticing the simultaneous rise of fear and excitement in his breast. But it’s much more frequently funny, a good-natured ribbing of the Great Man. My cerebral theatergoer was most likely trying to follow the talk of force and weight when he should have been paying attention to the actor’s hilarious scribblings on the chalkboard while he spoke. And maybe he didn’t notice when an exhaustive account of bodily proportions got interrupted by one actor’s hesitance to have anyone measuring any sort of lengths around his nether regions. But how was he not guffawing at Leonardo’s account of how we might make human flight possible, or his petulant treatise on why painters are superior to sculptors (ahem Michaelangelo ahem)? There is beauty in the staging and wonder in the words. But go in looking for laughs, and let the cerebral stuff creep in ‘round the edges
When
Ongoing until Sunday, February 26, 2023
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm & 7pm |
| Tuesdays, 7pm |
| Wednesdays, 7pm |
| Thursdays, 8pm |
| Fridays, 8pm |
| Saturdays, 2pm & 8pm |