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

Theatre 95
Stagecraft
Quince’s “Significant” Moon
Shakespeare understood and at times apologized for
the pictorial limitations of the scenery of his time (“Piece
out our imperfections with your thoughts,” he advised
the audience in the prologue to Henry V). But he also
appreciated its capacity to signify—rather than merely
depict realistically—the world of his plays. In Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the character Peter Quince
directs a production of “Pyramus and Thisbe” with a
group of amateur actors and ponders the “hard things”
this play requires, such as the effect of moonshine in a
bedroom chamber. One actor, finding that the moon will
be shining on the night of performance, suggests they
simply open the window and let the real moon shine in.
Quince, however, prefers that an actor hold up a lantern to
“disfigure, or to present” the moon. The created “scenic”
moon is preferred to the real one because it signifies
moonshine; it is intentional and consequently meaningful
rather than accidental and therefore meaningless. To
indicate a “wall” in the same play—the other “hard thing”—
Quince refrains from bringing in a real wall and instead
has another actor put on “some plaster or some loam” so
as “to signify wall.”
Life may be a tale, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth says,
“full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but the theatre
tells tales that signify a great many things. Thus scenery’s
function is not merely to depict but to signify—to “make a
sign,” to be “significant.”
The “scenery” designed by Katrin Brack for Chekhov’s Ivanov, as produced by Berlin’s Volksbühne in a 2008
Los Angeles tour, consisted almost entirely of stage fog. Within a towering rectangular surround of white fabric,
Brack created a “wall of mist” that billowed up from the floor, dividing the stage in half so characters could make
their entrances and exits by simply walking forward or back through the fog. Because the play, Chekhov’s first, is
largely about a Russian community beset by depression, despair, and anxiety, Brack’s setting—with great support
from Henning Streck’s lighting—completely captured the confusion of the characters and the malaise of their pre-
Revolutionary society. Bulgarian-born Dimiter Gottscheff was the director. © Thomas Aurin