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With ‘Rusalka,’ Will the Fourth Time Be the Charm for Mary Zimmerman?

Mary Zimmerman at the Metropolitan Opera House.Credit...Gabriela Herman for The New York Times

The director Mary Zimmerman sat down on the Metropolitan Opera’s stage during a recent rehearsal for her new production of Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” a Czech “Little Mermaid” about a water nymph who gives up her voice to become mortal and pursue a human prince. Ms. Zimmerman stretched out her legs in front of her, and for a few moments she just watched the action, looking like a child taking in a bedtime story.

But if it were to lull you to sleep, the dreams “Rusalka” inspired might well be nightmares.

“The story might be meant for children but contains some kind of psychological warning or truth in it, a dark warning,” Ms. Zimmerman said in an interview after the rehearsal. “True love should not require the loss of yourself and your voice.”

Ms. Zimmerman, 56, had her most indelible success with her lyrical, alternately poignant and witty adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” which was set in a stage-sized pond and won her a Tony Award in 2002. She was one of a series of Tony-winning directors Peter Gelb lured to the Met when he became the company’s general manager in 2006; “Rusalka,” which opens Thursday, Feb. 2, follows her productions of the early 19th-century bel canto operas “Lucia di Lammermoor” (2007), “La Sonnambula” (2009) and “Armida” (2010).

Those previous stagings were controversial, particularly the “Sonnambula,” which rather opaquely transferred the action to a contemporary loft where a company is rehearsing, yes, “La Sonnambula.” Ms. Zimmerman has been spoken of alongside fellow Gelb favorites Bartlett Sher and Robert Lepage — both of whom also have new work with the company this season — for being asked back time and again, even after their promising visions keep failing to make it onstage fully formed. (To be fair, this sense of letdown may be the overburdened Met’s fault as much as the directors’.)

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From left, John Relyea, Natalie Dessay and Michaela Martens in “Lucia di Lammermoor” from 2007.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

But for Ms. Zimmerman, the fourth time may be a charm. If she never quite found her footing in the rigid conventions of bel canto, there is more in common with her theater work in the later, dreamier, more epic “Rusalka.” Ms. Zimmerman’s concept for the opera, conducted by Mark Elder and starring Kristine Opolais, Brandon Jovanovich, Eric Owens and Jamie Barton, evokes both Romanticism and the receding flats of classical theater; the costume silhouettes evoke both the French 17th century and the Victorian era.

“I feel I’m at the core of what I’m interested in and have been all my life,” Ms. Zimmerman said of the piece. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

This is really, so long after “Metamorphoses,” you going back in the water.

I think if I had not had my fill of water, as it were, if I’d never done that, we might have started from a point of real water, because it’s so beautiful. But in repertory, it’s literally nearly impossible. So we started from the woods, the fairy tale woods, the hidden woods. If you read the instruction in the score, it does say “Woods and a meadow by a pond,” even if people tend to put the pond really front and center.

Was it a work you had wanted to do?

Peter [Gelb] suggested it for me. I was going to do “Pearl Fishers,” but sometimes finances are such that if there’s a good production around, it’s easier to just borrow one. [Penny Woolcock’s production of that Bizet opera came to the Met in 2015.] When he broke that news to me, he said, “But I’d like you to do ‘Rusalka’ instead.” I’d seen Renée [Fleming] sing it live in HD, and I was working with her on “Armida” when she was doing it here. So I knew it a little bit, and when he suggested it, I felt it was right for me. The thing that was heartbreaking was that it was in Czech. That was and remains the most intimidating thing about it, for a theater director especially. Where they’re saying this and that, but you don’t know the exact word.

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Renée Fleming in “Armida” from 2011.Credit...Ruby Washington/The New York Times

How do you view the piece? What’s your take on it?

When I started studying it, I noticed this entire opera is at night, every single scene. In the middle of the night, you don’t know what time it is. Time is at a standstill, and it’s hard to give a sense to the audience that things are going somewhere. So I want to activate the story so it feels we’re moving through space and time. We wanted to amplify the sense of transformation and things actually happening, of the plot actually going somewhere.

“Rusalka” is an opera that, in Europe at least, has been the focus of a lot of directorial intervention. Have you avoided that?

I always want to lean toward the story that’s there. She is still a water spirit, and her father or uncle or spiritual father is still a water gnome. There are still those imaginary creatures, but with very real and serious problems. I’m not putting it in Paris, and she’s not a prostitute or anything like that, but it doesn’t ignore the sort of gender politics in it, which are really there.

Your work at the Met, especially that “Sonnambula,” has been heatedly debated by audiences and critics like myself. Do you see this “Rusalka” as a way to prove yourself?

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Natalie Dessay in “La Sonnambula” in 2009.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

I take each piece as it comes and respond to it as I do. I’m just doing my job as I see my job. I actually like “Sonnambula” the best. The second time we did it [in 2014], it was kind of loved. That’s not an uncommon switch in the world of opera. The idea of the traditional holds sway until there’s the new traditional, and the radical always feels outlier until through time it’s shaped into the traditional.

The main difference between directing theater and directing opera is the opera audience and its knowledge of the text. That knowledge goes back to childhood, and it’s an oral knowledge, often from recordings, accompanied by an imagined virtual perfection, or that virtual perfection is a production they saw as children. And that’s wed to the music in the heart and mind. There’s a longing for how we first experienced it or how we experienced it virtually by listening to it — disembodied and therefore divine — and any materialization of it is, by definition, incorrect, at first.

I don’t have disrespect for this. It’s part of the form, it’s part of the obsession. Part of the love is that love of the past and the old and the repeated.

The constraints are so different than in theater.

Mike Nichols came to see the open dress of “Armida” and said, “When do you open?” I was like, “In four days.” And he said, “Oh, so you still have time to make cuts.” And I had to tell him we can’t make any cuts.

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Kristine Opolais, left, and Jamie Barton in “Rusalka.”Credit...Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

But there’s something great about the assignment of it: “This is the score, and you have to make the story work within that and bend to it.” To amplify the music, illustrate it in some way, to make it visible.

You had success with an adaptation of Disney’s “The Jungle Book” in Chicago in 2013. What’s happened with that project?

The movie was made. [Disney released a live-action “Jungle Book” film last April.] It was sort of known, but Disney’s divisions are very separate. And word came down that they were rebranding it through this new movie, and everything about the musical will stop. That’s fine with me, though I would have liked to continue it and make it better.

And what about “Metamorphoses,” which still lingers in the minds of many theatergoers?

I got to New York and got an email from one of the producers saying, “We think it’s time for a revival.” And I just don’t think so. The company [Lookingglass Theater Company of Chicago] revived it a few years ago, but we just did it at home. And we took it to Arena [Stage in Washington] because we’d never done it in the round. That was something new; that was a reason to do it.

I like to make new things and keep making things. I don’t think it’s going to happen. I don’t want to. It belongs to the past in a way for me. It’s a treasured memory.

So what is next for you?

I’ve never done this, but next year I’m going to try to take a year off, not just from teaching [she is a professor at Northwestern University] but from directing. Because I’ve had three to seven openings a year every year since my late 20s. I’ve worked a lot since I was young.

So I’ll be without the perpetual pressure of something I’m supposed to be doing and finishing and see if whatever is inside me wants to express itself in some different way. We’ll find out.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Fourth Time’s the Charm?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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