Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1978 - 13

Figure XI

Edwin Thomas Hall (1973)
(theatre mode)

sionallevel and this puts the United States in a different class
altogether. With this lack of precedent for public philanthropy
in support of the performing arts, it is not at all surprising that
the experience of the United States has and will continue to
be very different in this regard. In virtually all localities except
New York City since World War II, the United States has been
forced to engineering innovation as a substitute for traditional
European theatre design.
It is precisely because of this unstable economic situation
that the theatre auditorium design innovations initiated by
Wagner-Brandt and Adler, and the development of a literal
operational engineering interpretation of Sabine's reverberation equation, have, in the hands of a few dedicated
American theatre designers (but not architects), come into
their own, but in a context qUite different than that envisioned
by their creators. In the past two decades American theatre
designers have achieved a series of innovative, multiple-use,
proscenium theatres, as well as regional thrust-stage and inthe-round designs (both improvised in older non-theatrical
structures and those designed as new structures) that have
no precedent anywhere else in the world. These bUilding
programs have been supported fi nancially by private nonprofit corporations, municipalities, arts councils, and highereducational institutions where, often as not, the public and
private sectors have pooled their resources. Since World War
II this has become nationwide in scope, and in the case of the
technically sophisticated design, and engineering execution
of the multiple-use proscenium stage and auditorium, is now
being exported notably to South America and the Middle
East. Two principal courses of action have resulted from the
frenzied building activity of the past two decades.
The technically sophisticated are multiple-use and multiple-form. Each represents a new theatre design synthesis in
which a concomitant engineering solution has solved a series
of complex, inter-related design problems within a single
auditorium. This can best be described as kinetic seating
geometry and room volume, and provides the alternate variable acoustics and seating geometries essential to the separate requirements of absolute music, proscenium oriented
opera/musical comedy, and spoken drama. This design is
confined to the single-ended or proscenium stage and fanshaped auditorium.
The other is a theatre designed exclusively for either proscenium or for non-proscenium oriented spoken drama, and
USITT/Summer, 1978

is manifest by an auditorium that converts between two distinctly different forms. This idea, not indigenous to the United
States, is directly descended from that originally conceived
by Max Reinhardt, and is the logical outgrowth of Wagner's
ideas for total theatre realized in the early 1920's at the
Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, and tangentially from the
open stage experiment by Jacques Copeau at the ThMtre du
Vieux Colombier in Paris. The thrust stage auditorium in its
static form as one part of the Reinhardt experiment has been
brought to its present state of maturity in the Western Hemisphere by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, and has since been exported
back to Western Europe and elsewhere in the world. Esthetically considered, these static concepts of both thrust-stage
and theatre-in-the-round combine within a newly designed or
non-theatre building volume either the thrust stage of Shakespeare and a much reduced-in-size classical theatre auditorium of ancient Greece, or a return within an enclosed space
to the primitive constructions of the ancients. Proliferation of
both on a national scale has solved, in an altogether different
context than heretofore, the theatre design problems inherent to an auditorium and stage used exclusively for nonrealistically staged spoken drama. To date these efforts have
been publicly, privately, and academically subsidized on an
exclusively local basis. Within the prevailing theatre economy
in the United States these four schemes are proven to be
artistically viable and technically practical; but all of them, so
far as their financial health is concerned, wage a continuing
struggle for survival.
The principal reason for these developments is rooted in
contemporary socio-economic realities that are applicable to
the initial capital funding of a theatre bUilding, as well as its
long-term maintenance and artistic operation. Successful
theatre audita ria, restricted as they are to the musical and
forensic arts, must adhere to intrinsically high standards of
design. Furthermore, experience demonstrates that in all localities (with but a few of the largest cities excepted-principally New York) any community theatre will automatically be
used for all kinds and styles of performance whether it is so
designed or not. When performances of all kinds for a year
are totaled, less than half the total performance nights possible are actually utilized in well over ninety percent of all
communities in the United States.
Basic American pragmatism in economics of operation, as
well as design, has reacted to this situation as Americans
Theatre Design & Technology

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1978
