The Theatre is a Dre m The Paintings of Jon Vancura AN VANCURA IS A CO TEMPORARY CZECH SCE OGRAPHER whose designs for opera have gained wide recognition in his own country. His work is also familiar to the American design community because of his prominence in past international stage design exhibitions. Vancura won Silver Medals in the Czechoslovakian Exhibits of the 1979 and 1983 Prague Quadrennials; his designs for The Magic Flute won the Silver Medal in the 9th Annual International Stage Design Exposition held in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia in 1990 and the Gold Medal in the Mozart Thematic Section of the 1991 Prague Quadrennial (Figures 1 & 2). Vancura began working as a designer in the thearre in Liberec in 1974 at the height of the "Period Of Normalization" that followed the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He was fascinated with the world of opera because he perceived in ir the potential for imaginative uplift, escape, and nourishmenr for his admitredly large ego. Vancura's distinctive style of design is characterized by great painterly skill, a hyper-realistic style of execution, an exuberan t use of color, and a tremendous sense of scale, nor only in the design but in the sketches themselves-some of his finished renderings measure as much as 2'-0" x 6'-0". Vancura's unique style of painting and rendering is best shown in his sketches for The Marriage of Figaro produced in the ational Theatre in Prague in 1988 (Figure 3). This rendering, which is Vancura's transposition of the design into the Stavovske Theatre in Prague, also shows clearly his love of the archirecrure of old opera houses and his fascination with the relationship between the architecrure Delbert Unruh TD&T 1993 WINTER 17