Tony-winning Mary Zimmerman’s “Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci” isn’t so much a drama about da Vinci as it is a showcase of visual wonders curated by the director/adaptor, accompanied by greeting-card-sized sound bytes from the great Renaissance genius. The 29th anniversary revival in the Goodman’s Owen theater offers a grab bag of beguiling visual flourishes as it spotlights segments Zimmerman has culled from the 5,000 pages of notebooks left behind by the 15th century polymath.
That’s a shame, because there are wonders in the notes left by the man who painted the “Mona Lisa,” determined the sun was fixed in the sky, and whose many inventions — self-propelled cart, parachute, diving suit, flying machine — laid the seeds for their modern-day equivalents.
