Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2010 - 56

The rest of the twentieth century is dominated by the development of new forms, the increase in the number of collegiate
theatre training programs, accreditation, and the integration of
the academic and the professional theatre sensibilities.

New Forms and New Venues
In many ways the academic theatre played a significant role in
the development of new forms and new venues. Up until 1960
there were only about twelve operations that we today would
refer to as Regional Theatres, including Arena Stage (originally
started by college faculty members), dallas Theatre Center, and
the Cleveland Playhouse. but then in 1959 the Ford Foundation
started to fund theatre construction and operation, and around
that time also, National and State Councils for the Arts were created and began to fund arts organizations. by 1966 there were
thirty-five regional theatres, by the 1990s there were 250, and
by 2008 there were over 350. A significant number of those new
operations were started in the middle 1960s. Robert brustein
started the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1966. That same year Greg
Falls started A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, where I was one
of the inaugural designers. Others in the 1960s included Patricia McIlrath, who started Missouri Repertory Theatre, and Rex
Henriot and Gerald Reidenbaugh, who started Syracuse Repertory Theatre (now called Syracuse Stage), where I was Associate
designer starting in 1968. The significance of these operations
is that they were all affiliated with an academic theatre program.
Thus, students at those institutions had the opportunity to study in
an environment shared with professional theatre practitioners. As
the century progressed the practice increased.
Another consideration was that not all of the new theatre
operations were in traditional proscenium theatres. It was common practice then to use whatever space was available-in some
cases found spaces were adapted for theatre productions. Economics played an important part too. both the cost of construction and production could be high for proscenium theatres; thus
less expensive practices were preferred. Tyrone Guthrie was influential there. After designing and building the Stratford Shakespearean Festival's permanent home at Stratford, Canada, with
the help of Tanya Moiseiwitsch, he founded the Guthrie Theatre
in Minneapolis (then called the Minnesota Theatre Company)-
both with thrust stages. Americans now discovered how well
Shakespeare and other classical dramatists worked on the thrust
stage. After contemporary productions were perceived as being
equally successful on the thrust stage almost everyone wanted
a thrust. Consequently, many were built because they were less
expensive to build, were easily adapted from large found spaces,
and production costs were significantly reduced. In many academic and regional theatres that were stuck with proscenium
theatres, there was an impetus to push through the proscenium
arch to improve the actor-audience relationship and to reduce
the esthetic distance-the result was the creation of an even newer form, the extended apron theatre. That was done at Syracuse
Repertory Theatre, Syracuse Stage (until a more traditional thrust
was built), and at a number of academic institutions.

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Other theatre operations were attracted to the arena theatre,
again because of reduced construction costs, ease of adaptation
from found spaces, reduced production costs, and the even
greater reduction in esthetic distance. The first specifically built
arena theatre in the U.S. traces back to the academic theatre. At
the University of Washington, Glenn Hughes built The Penthouse
Theatre (now called the Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre) in
1940 for the specific purpose of presenting modern living-room
comedies. The building was designed by Glenn Hughes and John
Conway, the department's faculty designer, under the Works Progress Administration. The results were so successful that Hughes
was inundated with requests from other colleges and theatres for
guidance about how they should do their own arena theatres.
For decades theatre practitioners in America's largest cities had been pressing any available space configuration into the
service of theatre-unfortunately few people knew about it. At
least one academic, Walden boyle, who had such experience in
his background and who was a founding member of the Theatre
department at the University of California, los Angeles, was also
experimenting with flexible theatre arrangements. The publication of his book, Central and Flexible Staging, in 1956 made an
entire nation aware of the potential for creating a unique audience and stage arrangement for each production. The idea took
hold like proverbial wild fire. Seemingly, every academic theatre
program had to have a space that could be modified on a show
by show basis. The most significant specifically built flexible theatres were at University of Texas, Austin, California Institute of the
Arts, and Rutgers University, New brunswick. The idea was even
tried on broadway in Candide and Dude. Subsequently, at least
one regional theatre, Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence,
had a flexible theatre as its main stage facility.
In a few cases some institutions tried to build one facility that could be converted to all the traditional configurations.
Some civic presentation houses tried this also, but the most
famous academic one was the loeb drama Center at Harvard
University. The consensus was that such facilities were acceptable in some configurations, but rarely adequate in all. Consequently, few additional single space totally-flexible facilities
were built and the practice has all but died out.
This last half-century of experimentation led to the current collegiate situation in which two spaces are considered
minimal. Typically the main stage is a proscenium theatre variation, often with an extended apron potential that may or may
not lend itself to thrust productions. Sometimes the main stage
space is a pure thrust stage. The second space is often a Flexible Theatre/black box/Experimental Theatre/Studio Theatre
with more or less actual flexibility.

Expansion and Employment
The most important aspect of the development of the Regional
Theatre movement was that professional-quality theatre became
available in almost every moderate-sized city in the U.S. From
an academic point of view this increased the number of employment opportunities outside New York City. No longer must

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2010