Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006 - 13

PHOTOS BY R . FINKELSTEIN

too skimpy for the needs of the profession. There are hundreds of good actors and dozens of fine
directors, but then too there are hundreds of theatres, so the math doesn't always work out. In my
experience, design seems to be the area that most often beats the math. Good design not only lights
up our theatres in Keats' sense-"Beauty is truth and truth beauty"-but makes visible the beating
heart of the play, creates spaces, clothes, shadows, and sounds that not only tell but reveal story,
metaphor, and symbol, and define the creative boundaries and reveal character as much as any director or actor ever does.
Long before America became interested in the European idea of the dramaturg as essential to
defining the work to be done in relationship to the text, our designers were the play's real
dramaturgs, and still remain so. In the simplest sense, designers work on four or five plays to each
one a director does. Thus, in their maturity, they tend to know a lot more, in a hands-on sense,
about the literature, its style and events, and its content, than do the majority of directors. Great
designers are theatre's Yodas.
For the health of our theatre, it is my opinion, that designers should be forced, even against
their wills, to serve at least a three-year term as artistic directors. They know everybody-the acting pool, the directing pool, the design pool. They know about money and budgeting. They have
endless IOUs to call in. They are endlessly politic and collaborative. And, they have better taste than
the rest of us.
So, why are we wasting them? We are, by all accounts, a more and more visual culture. We are
more and more interested in visual intelligence. It seems almost a no-brainer to put designers in
charge. The only reason that we don't is that design has not been designated as a career path to artistic direction. It is the theatre's glass ceiling. And it is long past time for it to be broken.
Now, I'm not, God help me, suggesting that designers should direct, any more than I would
suggest that directors should design. Although, there are examples on both sides of such crossovers. But, the field of artistic direction demands the widest understanding in all areas, combined
with the most stringent use of money, the deepest intelligence in collaboration, and the most stylish
approach to having dinner with rich people. So are we talking about directors or designers?
I want to take a moment to pay homage to some of the things I've learned about my own trade
from designers. I grew up in theatre's age of Freudian behavior. You move people around by getting
them to the bar cart and back; or to their coats to get their cigarettes, or downstage to the imaginary window to see people arriving. The Freudian part is that all behavior was thought to be about
dominance and sex. It was particularly true about cigarettes, if I recall. By the way, if you had told
me in my youth that there would be signs in the lobbies of theatres saying, "There will be a cigarette
smoked in tonight's performance," I would have thought you were from an alien culture.
All this meant that I had no idea what the visual contribution to text and understanding could
really be. It was design that taught me the art of composition, the use of levels, the importance of
foreground and background, the value of color, form, and focus, the relationship of the actors to
the architecture of the sets, the sculptural use of light, the importance to meaning of atmosphere,

THEATRE

DESIGN

TECHNOLOGY
SPRING

2006

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