Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

92 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
The arch frames the action.
Backstage
activity is
concealed.
Unencumbered
acting space
Proscenium
Actors (and audiences) can
enter from all 4 corners.
The action
is truly
surrounded.
Thrust
A simple space
able to adapt
to a variety
of staging
styles
Varied
viewing
perspective
“Experimental”
atmosphere
Arena
Black Box
Illustrated here are the four basic staging formats: proscenium, thrust, arena, and black box. Deciding where to locate
the stage in relation to the audience is the first consideration in theatre design. Drawing © John von Szeliski.
a theatre, not in a bedroom or butcher shop, and seeks to
draw us more deeply into the play’s larger issues and concerns.
One of the most famous examples of metaphoric
scenery is Peter Brook’s celebrated 1970 production of
Midsummer Night’s Dream, which featured an all-white
box set with hidden doors and trapezes. The design looked
nothing like the woods surrounding ancient Athens. But it
evoked some of the core themes of the play, like childhood,
whimsy, and the excesses of love and passion.
Although stage design today most often combines realism
with metaphor—these terms are best described
as end points on a scale, rather than purely exclusive
categories—these complementary design goals have
each contributed mightily to the important position of
scenery in the theatrical experience today.
Realistic settings carry on the tradition of “illusionism”
established in eighteenth-century painted scenery. At that
time, an ingeniously arranged assembly of wings (vertical,
flat scenery pieces to the left and right of the stage),
borders (horizontal, flat scenery pieces hung above the
stage), and drops (short for backdrops: large, flat scenery
pieces at the rear of the stage), along with the use of
forced perspective (a technique that creates the illusion of
depth on a flat surface), created the lifelike appearance
of offices, dining rooms, servants’ quarters, and factory
yards of many a dramatist’s imagination. By the nineteenth
century, this wing-and-drop set, as it was known,
yielded to the box set: a three-dimensional construction
of interconnected hard-covered “flats,” representing the
walls and occasionally the ceilings of a real room, which
was then filled with furniture and objects taken from realworld
environments. The box set is very much alive today
and is indeed a major scenic format for contemporary
domestic drama (particularly comedy) on New York’s
Broadway, in London’s West End, and at many community
and college theatres across America. Though no
longer voguish (it rarely wins design awards), the box set
fulfills the staging requirements of a great many domestic
comedies, thrillers, and linearly structured dramas, particularly
those requiring interior settings. Moreover, by
adding three-dimensional features, box sets allow for acting
and playwriting opportunities unachievable in wingand-drop
scenery by providing solid, three-dimensional
staircases to descend, doors to slam, windows to climb
through, bookcases to stash revolvers in, and grandfather
clocks in which to hide characters. Public fascination
with realistic scenery reached its high-water mark in
the ultrarealistic “theatre of the fourth wall removed” of
the late nineteenth century, during which the box set was
used to such advantage that it helped foster a uniquely