Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1979 - 24

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bright for the East audience. For the West audience, looking
through the five scrims, the scene is very dimly lit; it is very
difficult for them to see what is going on. Then when B-1, the
second version of the first scene, takes place it is close to-and easily perceived by-the West audience, which has perceived the first scene dimly.
M: What is the relationship of the five corridors to the two stories? That is to say, how do the two versions share the corridors: What is the pattern?
K: The "A" story begins at one side of the box, in the outside
East corridor, and the "B" story begins in the outside West
corridor. The second scene of each story takes place one
step farther into the box-we are in the second corridor on
the East for one, the second corridor on the West for the
other. The third scene in each story occurs in the center corridor. Now the two stories pass through each other. The fourth
scene of each is in the fourth corridor away from the audience
that was originally closest to that story. In the fifth scenes,
each story has completed the passage through all five corridors. The sixth scenes move back to the bedrooms, which are
in the second corridors in from the outside; the beds are arranged symmetrically, and the same thing happens in both
scenes, which use exactly the same dialog.
M: I gather that the corridors are essentially formal organizations of space that could be used in a number of plays. But at
certain points is there some connection between these formal
spaces and actual spaces? You referred to the second corridor, in each case, as the bedroom. How do the spaces you
have created relate to actual places?
K: Yes, the corridors are essentially neutral spaces that can
become anything. There is no furniture in them, although
chairs and small tables are sometimes added. There are just
scrims and the lights hanging over the corridors, except that
in the second corridor in from each side there is a small platform, two feet wide, six feet long and eighteen inches high.
The platform is just a black box. The first time we use the second corridors, it is an outdoor scene, so the boxes become
mounds of earth, raised spots in the terrain. When the stories
pass through each other, the same corridors are used as the
bedrooms; what had been the location of the outdoor scene in
version "A" is now the bedroom for version "B", and the outdoor location for "B" is now the "A" bedroom. In the darkness, both platforms have been set with blankets, sheets and
pillows to turn what were previously neutral mounds of earth
into beds.
M: You mentioned that the stories pass through each other.
To what extent are the spaces designed to allow the two sto-

ries to merge? Is "merge" the right word, or is it specifically
.'passing through' '?
K: Originally, the play was not written for the two stories to
pass through each other; it was conceived so that one story
would be in the foreground for one audience and in the background for the other audience. Each audience would witness
a play that was seen clearly and one that was seen dimly.
M: Simultaneously?
K: No, alternating, as we actually did it. That's the way we rehearsed it. There were many more scenes--eight or nine-but I didn't feel that the writing was adequate in the later
scenes, and I cut them out. They were redundant. By the time
the box was built and the corridors ready and we came to rehearse in the theatre, there were only five scenes. Ela
Troyano, one of the actresses, suggested that the stories pass
through each other, which I felt was a beautiful idea. Perhaps I
might have arrived at the same idea in a day or so, but she
came up with it, and I immediately realized that it was possible, that it worked very well, and that very little reblocking
was necessary. Actually we blocked the scenes as foreground
and background, and then during the first run-through we did
at the theatre, I merely told the actors to pass through each
other. It was very simple; just a few changes in blocking were
needed to make that adjustment.
M: Is the fact that the two stories pass through each other designed to suggest that they are actually connected in any
way? As though, for example, they were taking place in the
two halves of a double house?
K: No. This is a problem for the audience, and I don't know
what to do about it. People are used to putting material together intellectually in terms of a story narrative. If you're telling two stories at the same time, just through habit audiences
have a need to put them together. But there is nothing that we
do to indicate to them that the two stories are connected or
should be connected. The stories pass through each other;
they do not meet.
M: There is a sense, as one watches the play, of characters
receding in space. That is to say, those actors who are nearest you are brightly lit, and they appear somehow to be bigger
than the characters performing several corridors away from
you. Was this an intentional concept?
K: Certainly, dimness and the gradation were intentional, but I
couldn't tell until I got the scrims up exactly what the perceptual effect was actually going to be--and not knowing was
exciting to me. We had some problems when we first hung the
scrims with no box around them. When the actors were far
away from you they were almost invisible. But by putting in the
black felt floor and a ceiling and end walls to contain the light
it became easier to see the actors. What little light we had was
now focused on them. A spectator still has to work to see the
actors, and to hear them. But the effect is that, as they move
through the depth of the box, one version of the story becomes perceptually clearer, and the other one grows perceptually dimmer. The distance is greatly exaggerated by the
scrims. Spectators are unable to tell exactly how many corridors there are and how far away the actors are. There is a lot
of ambiguity, and I like that very much.
M: Right. I thought there were three corridors inside the box,
and I recall that somebody else in a review said there were as
many as eight. When the characters are in the corridors farthest away from you, you really only see fragments. The lights
illuminate the skin, light-colored clothing, and so on, but the
rest of their bodies seem to trail off into the darkness.
K: That is true. The only possibility when there is an audience
on both sides is that the lights be of equal intensity throughout. If the audience were only on one side, the units farthest
away could be of higher wattage, and so forth, but this was
not possible in our set-up. The lights in the corridor closest to

Brooks McNamara, a contributing editor to TD& T, teaches in the Graduate Drama Department at New York University, is director of the Shubert
Archives, President of the Theatre Library Association, and co-author of Theatres, Spaces, Environments and several other books.
Michael Kirby, founder of the Structuralist Workshop, is editor of The Drama Review, author of several books, and a professor in the Graduate
Drama Department at New York University.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1979