The Shapes of Our Theatre
by Jo Mielziner
Whether you design sets or just use them, you pay attention to Jo Mielziner. He not only made sets for productions, he created a new visual language when he conceived a picture of transparency and concreteness for the first Death of a Salesman in 1949. His book Designing for the Theatre, a Memoir and a Portfolio, gives insight into how he got into resonance with director after director and can serve as a guide to forming a design approach.
The Shapes of Our Theatre is a less revealing work, but there's a reason I am taking special note of it.
(Rules are made to be broken, right? So I'm breaking my own spelling rule in deference to Mielziner and writing "theatre." Just this once.)
Shapes is a pictorial history of the spaces people have used to play in. In sketches and text, Mielziner shows how the Greeks organized an environment for performance, then goes on to Roman, Medieval, Renaissance and more recent periods (into the 1960s). He recounts how the relationship of player to audience changed from age to age and how new technologies affected theatre design. Every drawing represents not only the stage and the performers but also the viewers. You see the interplay of all the factors that go into building the right theatre: mobility of the troupe, daylight and artificial light, acoustics, relative status of audience members, movement onstage, endowment of companies with money and facilities, and all the rest. The book is a useful overview and a quick read. For architects it is probably still more vital.
But as long as we're paying attention to Jo Mielziner, let's pick out one key passage (pages 141-42):
Realism is still a dominant trend today because many playwrights, and even stage directors, tend to adhere to the false theory that truth, or veracity, is best supported visually by literal realism. . . . .
My objection to literal realism does not mean that in certain types of playwriting selective realism is not valid. Selective realism stresses certain expressive elements of a setting while essential details are either omitted or reduced to the simplest suggestion. . . . .
The more we suggest in the simplest and most provocative ways, the truer we will be to the medium. Generally noncritical audiences are intrigued by the effects of trompe l'oeil, and even by a totally executed, realistic setting, but they are quick to accept imaginative and symbolic solutions if they are boldly and clearly conceived. [Emphasis added.]
In amateur theatre, my "medium," three of four directors choose--without thinking about alternatives--a visual language of literal realism. From the beginning of the design process, they think of the stage set as an immediate, complete representation of a place, with all working parts. The designer who works with these directors has a hard job to suggest a different mode of communication.
A few plays really are about places. That old community theatre favorite Arsenic and Old Lace, for example, is difficult to put on stage without the Window Seat, Panama and San Juan Hill. I'm not sure it could be done at all, and even less sure it would be desirable. Neil Simon's farce Rumors would probably fall to pieces without at least six of its seven doors. Twelve Angry Men would seem simply brutish if they weren't locked into that little jury room.
Far more often, the playwright is concerned with characters and relationships. The School for Scandal doesn't have classrooms. A fully executed set would be a fault in Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses or John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, where quick scene-to-scene contrasts help build and resolve conflicts. And this is saying nothing of Shakespeare.
Designers for community theater must find a better way to communicate with directors about communication. There is more than one approach to setting the play, more than one way to tell the story, more than one channel between production and audience. Directors of my acquaintance seem fearful of suggesting anything that they can show--in three dimensions, with full wood-grain treatment. It isn't their fault, though I do regard it as their deficiency.
Sometimes you present a place. Creating illusions is one of the things theatre people do and love to do. Other times you rely on a different strength of the medium, the collaboration of audience with designers, director and performers. You use the absence of representational detail as a way of engaging the viewers in creating the moment. Both approaches have their grounds, and it's wrong to restrict the visual language to literal realism before considering options.
What's needed, and what I don't have, is the skill of persuading a director to consider visual languages other than that of bare-faced literal realism. Mielziner's book may help me devise those arguments, and it may help you too.
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The Shapes of Our Theatre