1960-10-28
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Unpolished and ultra-pragmatic industrialist Jean-Jacques Castella reluctantly attends Racine's tragedy "Berenice" in order to see his niece play a bit part. He is taken with the play's strangely familiar-looking leading lady Clara Devaux. During the course of the show, Castella soon remembers that he once hired and then promptly fired the actress as an English language tutor. He immediately goes out and signs up for language lessons. Thinking that he is nothing but an ill-tempered philistine with bad taste, Clara rejects him until Castella charms her off her feet.
In the midst of the Hundred Years War, the young King Henry V of England embarks on the conquest of France in 1415.
When an old adversary threatens Rome, the city calls once more on her hero and defender: Coriolanus. But he has enemies at home too. Famine threatens the city, the citizens’ hunger swells to an appetite for change, and on returning from the field Coriolanus must confront the march of realpolitik and the voice of an angry people.
Leonardo da Vinci 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.