She may have the most talked about play in New York, but performance studies Prof. Mary Zimmerman doesn’t have enough clout at Northwestern to turn down the heat in her Annie May Swift office. It’s sweltering on the second floor, so Zimmerman is sporting a black tank top and jeans. She looks ready for spring.

Or more specifically, March. That’s when her play, “Metamorphoses,” hits Broadway.

Broadway may seem like a big deal, but Zimmerman talks about her play’s relocation to the Circle in the Square theater in New York in an oddly casual manner-as if everyone has a show on Broadway at one point in life. “We’ll see how this goes,” she says .

So far, “Metamorphoses” has gone quite well. Time magazine theater critic Richard Zoglin praised it as “avant-garde theater at its most vital and ingratiating” and one of the best productions of the year. The USA Today gave “Metamorphoses” its No. 2 spot on its year-end top 10 list, and the play also won praise from the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly

Its move to the Broadway stage will only be the next step in a series of success stories for Zimmerman’s adaptation of Ovid’s classic series of myths. “Metamorphoses” first opened at Northwestern as “Six Myths” at the Barber Theatre in the spring of 1997. Zimmerman then took “Metamorphoses” to the Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago, followed by productions in Los Angeles, Seattle and Berkeley. This fall, “Metamorphoses” greeted New York’s off-Broadway audiences at an ideal time. After Sept. 11, audiences were looking to either laugh carelessly or see something of true heartwarming substance, and Zimmerman’s show fit the bill of the latter perfectly.

“The text had resonances of sudden violence and death, but then transformation and a transcendence,” Zimmerman says. “It’s a painful and traumatic change into something new and peaceful.”

“Metamorphoses” has a very personal place in Zimmerman’s heart, and its move to Broadway has Zimmerman treading carefully. “It’s the play that is the most mine,” she said. “I got to say, ‘my designers, my cast, no changes.'”

Broadway, of course, is an entirely different venture for Zimmerman. For someone who is so used to being heavy-handed in the decisions about her shows, the commercial business of Broadway is a little unsettling. When her producers in New York sent her a proposed poster for “Metamorphoses,” she was taken aback by the glossy proof. “It looks like a perfume ad to me!” Zimmerman says.

In the meantime, Zimmerman has had to adjust to the limelight. In past years, she has won critical praise for her shows at the Goodman Theatre and Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago and she was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 1998. Now she is being compared with the likes of her mentor and NU performance studies professor, Frank Galati. She says she takes her success as it comes.

“I’m pleased, of course,” she says. “But (going to Broadway) isn’t a fulfillment of a life dream.”

Though Broadway may want to keep Mary Zimmerman, Northwestern’s performance studies department is where she calls home.

“Its shocking to realize that I’ve been here basically since I was 18,” Zimmerman says of her long history at Northwestern as a theater student, graduate student and professor.

Zimmerman says she has no idea whether her students are aware of the magnitude of her famous work. “For awhile I made it a policy not to talk about things outside of my school life,” she says.

Zimmerman’s students appreciated her modesty but wondered why she didn’t include stories about professional theater in her classes. This quarter Zimmerman has taken a departure from her usual reserved style. Her performance of narrative fiction class will study her version of “The Arabian Nights,” a show that she directed at the Steppenwolf Studio Theatre in 1997. She says her new openness about her career doesn’t seem to have affected her students much, though. “I don’t think they’re handing in more assignments on time,” Zimmerman says.

Zimmerman doesn’t seem that changed by the increased attention, either. Instead of simply basking in the success of “Metamorphoses,” Zimmerman is already at work on her next project – she’s collaborating with Philip Glass and writing the libretto for “Galileo, Galilei.” Look for it this summer at the Goodman Theatre. nyou