by Ben Spatz
Julie Taymor is maybe the most visually brilliant theater designer out there right now. I was looking at some photos from her shows, and trying to figure out how she got these amazing ideas: A king whose right eye glows electrically; A woman's face painted white except for a red streak crossing her mouth from chin to upper lip; A man whose head is a rock; A woman whose hands are twigs.
I think I figured it out. She eats metaphors for breakfast. I can't do that yet. I think of Caliban: He is brute, base, ugly, heavy, cunning, lustful. I might for a moment even think of him as "rocklike." But that is just a metaphor. I quickly dress him in more "normal" (read "cliche") clothes, and try to bring his rocklike-ness out through his character. But Julie Taymor eats metaphors for breakfast. She thinks that Caliban is rocklike; She turns his head into a rock.
She thinks of a woman whose hands are cut off. She thinks that this womans arms are like cut branches. She doesn't bring the metaphor back into "reality," she leaves it where it was born. She turns the woman's hands into twigs. I think this is her secret: To let the artistic sensibility wander just outside of reality, where it will discover new metaphors and new visions, and then to pull those metaphors and visions directly back into our world, without dulling their edges in the process.