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

Theatre 99
Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat, about a couple who were presumed
killed in the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack but who
were actually having a secret affair in an apartment across town, lends
itself to both realistic and highly stylized stagings. Robert Jones’s
realistic staging (above) beautifully sets off Sinead Cusack’s effusive
exhilaration as Abby (with John Hannah as Ben) in London’s Almeida
Theatre production of 2003, while Arden Hard’s setting (right) for the
Zurich Schauspielhaus production of the same play in the same year
focuses instead on the play’s situation rather than on its characters,
making LaBute’s play—as directed by Christina Paulhofer—less
personal but more intensely political. Above: © Geraint Lewis;
Right: © Zürich Schauspielhaus/photo Leonard Zubler, Zürich
Williams’s Glass Menagerie and the adding machines
in Elmer Rice’s Adding Machine. No prop is too small,
or too insignificant, to escape the attention of the scene
designer and prop master.
THE SCENE DESIGNER AT WORK
The scene designer’s work inevitably begins with
several re-readings of the play, normally followed by
research on the play and its original historical period
(and the periods in which it may be set), a consideration
of the type of theatre in which the play is to be