Ruth Leon recommends…The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci – Goodman 

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci – Goodman 

Click here for tickets: streaming tickets $25.00

 Chicago’s Goodman Theater gave life to The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci nearly thirty years ago. It was a smash hit. Now it’s being revived in the Goodman but, just as importantly for those of us not living in Chicago, is now available online.

Leonardo strove to know the world equally through artistic and scientific means. This poetic portrayal of one of history’s most imaginative minds returns to the Goodman nearly three decades after it burst onto the stage in a career-catapulting production for adaptor/director Mary Zimmerman. In a production composed entirely of words from his notebooks and various treatises, da Vinci’s ideas on topics from mathematics, anatomy, architecture and engineering, to philosophy, love and the human spirit come to vivid life.

Mary Zimmerman says “The show is really a portrait of a consciousness, sourced only from the notebooks. It’s meant to be a manifestation of those sheets of paper, which are crowded with very many different things—a shopping list, drawing of an angel, geometric formulae, architectural notes. The incidents of his life are present in the show to some degree, but it’s really about that ever-probing, ever-curious, ever-wondering consciousness.”

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