Theatre Design & Technology - Oct 1967 - 50

spaces in which to put plays. One of them was the American Place Theatre; I also designed the first production there.
I guess that the new Festival Stage that I designed for the
American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford is now three
or four years old; and right at this moment, I am working
on what is, I suppose, a modern concept of a wagon stage,
a pageant wagon for Theatre in the Street, which is a
very interesting group of people who have been together
now for about six years. They work with the Welfare Department in various places in the City. They work off the
back of a truck. They drive into a street and, in thirty minutes, they set up and perform a number of plays, each generally about two or two and a half hours long. They perform
only by daylight, and everything is kept on a simple, efficient level. It has been a very interesting thing to work on.
BOWMAN: Our next panelist is Mr. Thomas Wilfred. Mr.
Wilfred, as most of you will certainly know, is one of the
pioneers in the use of light as a creative medium.
He has been referred to, and rightly I think, as the father of
much of today's projection activity because of his very early
Lumia series, his Clavilux, and the direct beam and multiprojector systems. He is also the author of the text, Projected Scenery.

Now, the argument there has been, "Yes, but that will detract from the action on the stage." It can never do so if
the scenic artist remembers that he is an accompanist. He
very rarely plays solos. If he cannot surround the play with a
setting that will intensify the action, then he has failed.
BOWMAN: The Reverend Alvin Carmines is Associate Minister and director of the award-winning Arts Program at Judson Memorial Church. Reverend Carmines is a composer and
was awarded an "Obie" in 1965.
CARMINES: At Judson, we have both a dance theatre and
a drama theatre. Recently, we had a dance concert where
one of the solo dancers was accompanied by various uses of
what we would call the "new technology." The dance employed "strobe" lighting, film, tape-sound and slides, and
most of us-and I think most of the audience-felt that it
was exciting, successful, good.
About a month ago, we produced a play where the language
in the play was highly poetic and episodic, and we decided
to employ the same kind of material. We had slides and
films behind the players; and sounds, and strange lighting
went on and on for various intervals; it was a total disaster.
Peopl e felt absolutely" blitzed" afterwards. The comment by

most of the people who left was, "Some of the slides were
WILFRED: I spent most of my life in the theatre without a very pretty."
floor; with a stage extending from the bridge of your nose to
I have been fascinated by this problem in drama, and why it
infinity; so to come down to a theatre with the floor and a
somehow works in dance and yet has generally been unsuccyclorama was, of course, a little cramping.
cessful with plays and with theatre that has any kind of narEighteen years ago, Professor Conway, in Seattle, wanted rative structure to it. In this respect, we have been exploring
me to work on his new repertory theatre. He gave me the the uses, recently, of different spaces in our church. We are
lighting problem, and it is probably the first theatre in the doing a short play now that uses what we call a garden,
United States constructed primarily for projected scenery: what most people would call a parking lot; we put the audiwith the light projection right inside the proscenium, seven ence there for the first short play, and then we move into
feet deep; a ten multi-plate projector in the center covering
the entire screen; and two direct beam projectors on either
side for the several planes of settings.
We used this instead of the old Linnebach projector. That,
in turn, goes back to the Chinese shadow theatre sometime
around 100 B.C., so it really is an ancient affair. My improvement over the Linnebach was to put the sky effects
way back as near the lamp as possible for diffusion so that
you could change the sky almost imperceptibly from day to
sunset, to night, and back from dawn to daylight. Then a
little farther out from the lamp came the background, and
still farther out came the frame for the background settings.
The further you got away from the lamp, the sharper the
image on the screen. Therefore, you got a feeling of depth
that the old Linnebach could not give you.
The keyboard (Clavilux) I designed to be used in the back of
the auditorium and three feet above it, where the player
would have a graphic view of the keys he was moving. It
was gauged to the shoulder movements so that the player
could move all the keys without moving his torso. He could
see the stage completely, without being seen and he had
his notations right before him. The idea worked beautifully.
Now, the latest idea which I have been working on is the
Heptarama Theatre. That is an arena theatre surrounded by
seven screens. In between each two screens is a column,
the column being diametrically opposite the screen, that has
a projector, so that with seven simple projectors, you can
cover the entire auditorium around the audience and players
alike with any setting. All that you need for scenery backing
is the little filing cabinet near each projector. The area lighting comes from above mostly, and also from the columns,
above and below the projectors, so that you have lighting
from all sides.

a very small room, more crowded, for the second act, and
then into another theatre for the third. I am interested,
somehow, in why the sound in the parking lot-cars, sirens
and birds, and everything else-does not distract at that
place, whereas with our attempt to use technology in the
theatre we found it most distracting.
BOWMAN: Don Synder executed the mind-expanding projections for Timothy Leary's lectures. He also designed projections for fashion, design, church, and for television. Did
you ever design anything for the theatre?
SNYDER: Well, I might soon. I have not been primarily concerned with the theatre. From my point of view, I have been
trying to develop what could be called a religious ritual outside of the theatre and outside of the church, although the
church has been the environment that has been more available to me. I would like to bring this kind of religious ritual
into the dance hall which to me is the new church or the
new theatre. Primarily, I would like to create a new, mystical religious atmosphere that people can become a part of,
as participants, rather than as an audience. A new kind of
psychology is involved in this.
The audio-visual presentations that I do are, in my opinion,
a very small part of what I would like to accomplish IIvith
much less material and much more refined and sophisticated
technology. I think that the word that most people are familiar with, that would best describe the direction that I have
been going in, is "psychedelic," a word that has been used
a great deal in the last year or two. Semantically, I don't
think that I could begin to define it for you. Perhaps there
is some visionary aspect to it. Perhaps there are some drug
aspects to it; but one thing IS certain, and that is that the
younger elements in the population are not only attrar:ted to
it, but constitute a formidable religious force. I think such a

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