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Back before paying customers in the U.S., Taymor began as a designer at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and went on to direct imaginative productions of Shakespeare and opera as well as such fablelike works as Juan Darien (first staged in 1988) and The Green Bird. She frequently collaborates with composer Elliot Goldenthal, with whom she lives in a spacious Manhattan loft. The two are currently working on a new opera called Grendel, based on John Gardner's novel, retelling the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view, and are hoping to revive Liberty's Taken, a picaresque musical set in the American Revolution, which they wrote and first staged in 1985.
"I love epic theater," says Taymor, "theater that exposes the strings and the manipulations, theater that can only be done as theater. Realism has spoiled people. Much of what I see onstage might better be done in another medium; you could just as well be at the movies." An evangelist for theater in a multiplexed world. Disney may be ready for Taymor, but is America?