Theatre Design & Technology - May 1973 - 16

easily and quickly stored and which won't show much
wear-and-tear in handling".
"In Russia, acres of scenery just won't do -- outside
of the Bolshoi perhaps. Here in America, we suffer from
a Tyranny of Scenery. For professional shows, the settings
can eat up 5/6 of the production budget. And not just
for the building of the sets. Or even for rebuilding them,
after you find out they don't work! What really costs is
the transportation on out-of-town tryouts and on tours and the people you have to hire to manage the scenery.
It is madness!"
"Over there, things are always so much lighter; even
at the Bolshoi and the Moscow Art Theatre now. I don't
mean to demean their stagelighting, after we've said how
important it is. It's often quite remarkable in its effects.
But, owing to their production and performance schedules,
it does tend to be a kind of lighting 'shorthand'. We
wouldn't settle for such methods. But they don't understand some of our lighting practices, such as bringing
Iights into a bare Broadway theatre for each new production. That doesn't make any sense to them. They cannot
understand that we have virtually no continuity in theatre
companies. That each Broadway show is a new ensemble·
constantly changing - and that it will never be reconvened
to do a new play. To them, that is as if the Ford Motor
Company reconstituted itself every time a new Ford
comes off the assembly-line."
But then there is so much difference between the two
theatre cultures. Jerome Lawrence notes, with some
chauvinistic chagrin, that there are 600 professional
theatres in the Soviet Union - playing constantly. This
figure, of course, does not include the many, many

amateur stages of factory groups, universities, schools,
and communities. Ruefully, Lee observes that, in the
week the authors' The Incomparable Max closed in New
York, there were on view in Moscow alone some 175
dramas. Not counting musicals, operettas, operas, ballets,
puppet-shows, vaudevilles, concerts, and circuses! In the
23 days set aside for Lawrence and Lee to see productions, during a month-long visit, they managed to squeeze
in 27 different plays. In Moscow, they counted some 25
theatres; in Leningrad, about 16. And each theatre, as
Lawrence notes, has 80-100 actors on annual salary, six
or more stage directors, designers, dramaturges, piaywrights-in-residence,
technicians, craftsmen, workers,
ushers, secretaries, and the like.
Some of the plays by such leading dramatists as
Arbusov, Volodin, and Rosoff should be seen in the
United States. To that end, they are hoping to get idiomatic translations made by American scholars, after which
established playwrights will prepare stage versions. "But
not re-set in Long Island", Lawrence insists. "The locale
must remain Russian."
Arbusov's The Promise, produced by the late Helen
Bonfi Is and Morton Gottlieb, was a very brief visitor to
Broadway several seasons ago. It was effectively translated, attractively designed, well staged, and subtley acted.
The rapid demise of such a deserving production brings
this comment from Lawrence: "Broadway? The ~ with
Broadway I These plays must not be done on Broadway.
They should be done in our regional theatres, on university and community theatre stages!"
Looking for an explanation of the popularity of
theatre in Russia - as opposed to the relative lack of

Design for Galileo by B. Brecht: E. G. Stenberg, 1966 Drama Theatre on Taganka, Moscow

THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

MAY. 1973

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