Julie Taymor has never visited Africa.

But thousands of theater-goers experience Julie Taymor's vision of the African savannah each week as portrayed in Disney's The Lion King, the current, hit Broadway musical.

Ms. Taymor, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Tony (for the The Lion King), an Emmy, and two Obie Awards, is a director and designer for the stage, currently preparing to direct a feature film of her adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. The story of her 20-plus year career is told in Playing with Fire, recently published by Abrams.

And Ms. Taymor is a superb teller of stories, a painter of stage pictures in light, costume, and sound. Her success has to do with honesty -- the creation of images that are true to her vision of the material at hand. Audiences, invited to share her telling of the story, are transfixed.

Joel Snyder: In a presentation to the National Council on the Arts a number of years ago you said the limitations of the theater are what excites you about working in theater. Can you elaborate on that?

Julie Taymor: When you are limited in your ability to present a realistic image you have to use your imagination more fully. The limitations of theater actually make the opportunity grander because your imagination is much better than reality. You call upon all the various images you have gathered.

I've never been to Africa, but when I think of it I think of the National Geographics I've read and the movies, TV shows and animals I've seen. Then I add my understanding of grass and air that I felt as a child on Martha's Vineyard. I put all that together, play with scale and come up with the "grass heads." If you were making a movie, would you be allowed to do that? No, because you might as well go to Africa and shoot the savannah.

One of my favorite things about The Lion King is hearing from parents whose kids go home after the show, put fabric on a stick and run around pretending they're birds. You know, if a kid wants to create a bird on a computer, he or she can get the elements right from the computer. What you get looks like a wing and a beak and a bird's leg. But when they're doing this the kids aren't really thinking about space because the computer is two-dimensional like TV and film. But using actual space and fabric gets them thinking about what creates a bird. The silk fabric flying through air creates the sense of space.

I think it's very sad that children aren't given the basic tools to create with. They're given such sophisticated tools now that their imaginations aren't really being tapped. Everything's way too literal. Sitting in a chair in front of an ugly box when you could be running around in an open space seems regressive to me, not something that is going to make a more creative human being.

But are you concerned about inaccuracies on stage? For example, what if, in using your imagination to create the grass heads, you used grass that's just the wrong color?

It can be any color I want it to be. Why should it be one thing or another? Look at the jungle costumes in The Lion King -- they're completely out of my imagination. And they're totally authentic because they're authentically from my imagination. Authenticity isn't about duplication -- it's about whether it feels real. And "real" doesn't mean literally real. It means that it speaks to you, that it touches you, that you understand it . People know instantly when they see that what it is. Therefore, it's communicating.

I've always been impressed with how the stories you tell often operate on myriad levels, making them appropriate, then, for people of all ages and capacities.

It depends on the piece. I've done a couple of Shakespeare's plays and, obviously, Shakespeare, in his day, wrote plays that also operated on many levels. The fighting, the gore, the fun, the story-telling, the love stories, the sheer drama -- these elements appealed to the groundlings. The poetry, the music, the politics and the philosophy appealed to others. The great plays have always operated on myriad levels -- good drama, mythic drama, classic drama can do that. But not every piece that I do does that. For instance, my piece Juan Darien definitely has many levels, but it actually may not be appropriate for little kids.

The Lion King is a very classic tale, a "coming of age" story that has no age limit. The story speaks to all ages and, in fact, to any culture. It's the classic prodigal son story, the circle of life -- if you go away, you must come home again and take up the mantle and be part of a community. It's a story that speaks pretty much to everybody. How you tell the story is what makes it either a children's movie or a piece of theater that can have many levels.

For the theater version we tried to develop the darker edges of the story to make it a deeper one. The movie was only 80 minutes. My version is a 2 hour and 45 minute spectacle. We had more time to create nuances that may not have been in the movie. My version is not as simplistic as the movie and has a bit more individuality as a story.

My visual work has never been naturalistic or literal. I've always liked having many levels of meaning and symbolism. So you might get it on one level but on a whole other level the mechanics are exposed and there's a sophistication in having that. There's pleasure, as a child, when you get to enjoy seeing how something is done -- as an adult you get that plus you get the potential symbolism. In The Lion King, when the gazelle wheel moves, you're reinstituting the circle of life motif in the mechanics themselves. There's a message in the medium.

The best art, I've often found, is something you can go back to time after time and see new things.

Yes, and this is very true of The Lion King. You can't get it all in one sitting, which is fine. You don't have to come again, but it definitely has so many layers that you need to come more than once to get all of them.

At Broadway prices, of course, it would be difficult for most people to do that. But are there plans for a video -- "The Making Of Lion King", for example?

Yes, there is a video being developed. And there's a book out, of course.

Tell us about your use of setting to mirror the theme/story in your works. How have you used visual images to reinforce or propel the story or the theme?

The idea of circular movement is a major one throughout the The Lion King in the choreography and in the visual design. For instance, there's the "pride rock" which spirals out of the ground, and the "wildebeast rollers" stampede, which is circular. When you work on a piece as a designer/director, you try to abstract everything down to its essence. That's an ideogram. The element of the circle was so obvious in The Lion King that it became the element that I tried to weave throughout the piece as a visual component.

So someone watching who couldn't hear, would pick up those themes?

Of course -- they're all over the place. They're in Mufasa's mask, the halo of his mane. Because I'm both a designer and a director, that's how I think and how I work. I'm not thinking "Oh, we need to recreate Africa here." That's not the point. We've got to do in theater what theater does best, not what film does.

People often say that some of the first musicals were unique in that the music actually propelled the story, contributed to character development. So in the same way, the spiraling of "pride rock" adds to/propels the theme and the story of The Lion King. Are there other examples from other works of yours where visual elements or the music propels the story, not just the words?

Always. For instance, for Titus Andronicus, the live theater piece was set within a gold frame and a red curtain, a classic revenge image which also tells you that you're going to see a spectacle. The play is about violence, not only the violence itself but how we in the audience are spectators to violence. In the feature film version I'll set it in a Roman coliseum -- I don't want it to be a theater piece with the gold frame and a red curtain. The coliseum becomes "the bookends," the first theater of cruelty where audiences sat there and watched the spectacle of violence as pure enjoyment.

Bertolt Brecht, the great dramatist, was a master of "breaking the fourth wall"- telling a story directly to an audience. And Paul Sills' Story Theater used actors as a character and as a narrator commenting on the character, directly to the audience and, often, provoking a change in the audience's point of view on a given topic. Is that part of your style?

I think that each of my productions has its own style, its own needs. If you look at Titus, it doesn't look anything like The Lion King. If I'm doing a Shakespearean play or an opera, it's not going to look anything like Juan Darien. To me, if there's to be an effect on the audience, if they are to change, it's because they're emotionally or intellectually touched and therefore changed by the experience of going to the theater.

As for the fourth wall, I don't totally understand it because I've never understood how there could be anything but three walls in a theater. You know you're in a theater and you know that what's up on stage is an imaginative creation. It's not like a film where you're like a "Peeping Tom," peering into what looks like a real situation. I quite often acknowledge the audience. As I said before, it's not just the story but how you tell the story. That's the pleasure, the point. The experience of the storytelling in The Lion King is as enjoyable as what the story is. And probably more so, to tell you the truth.

Quite often, with this kind of story, you know it already. It's nothing new. It's a reaffirmation of something you know. That's why it falls into the ritual mode. You look at an artist for how he interprets, not what he interprets. We've heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony a million times, but that doesn't mean we don't want to hear it again. We want to hear a new artist's interpretation. So, it's the telling of the story, the communicating, the nuances. It's like, we know we die; therefore, how do we choose to live until then. We're not shocked by the ending of our tales -- it's nothing new. It's how you live it that's important, how you experience life.

So is there one Taymor style? Use of puppets, for instance?

I don't use puppets if I don't need to. The Taymor style is to adapt the style according to the piece.

One last point -- about scale. Much of what's so effective about The Lion King is the grand scale of the images -- the giraffe, the elephants.

And the smallness, the teeny mouse. People always wonder "Wow, how could you put the best thing first -- the circle of life opening with the elephants and the giraffe?" Well, you have to because that's the way the thing begins. But the only way to come up with the second scene is to go right down to a puny little shadow puppet with the silly little hand-held light. That teeny, weeny, black shadow puppet balances the big, huge spectacle. It's really the balance, from one scene to the next, that is effective. As a director, that's what you have to work on -- those transitions and how one thing plays up against the other.

For an in-depth look at Ms. Taymor's work, including photographs and work drawings, see Playing With Fire by Julie Taymor and Eileen Blumenthal, published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers.

Photographs by Joan Marcus, courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown. © Walt Disney Company.

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