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

Theatre 161
Staging sometimes begins with a reformulating of the nature of the playing space itself. Today’s directors may
completely redefine the relationship between audience and actor, either by placing the audience on the stage and
the actors in the “audience” or by making other variations on the conventional theatrical arrangement. In Mihai
Maniutiu’s Job Experiment, for example, which the director adapted from the Old Testament book of Job, the play’s
actors—perhaps echoing Satan’s Biblical question to God, “Have you not put a fence around him and his house?”—are
surrounded by a closed-in polygonal wall (codesigned by Maniutiu and Christian Rusu) that is pierced by forty-four
windows through which audience members, one to a window, peer in on the action. Here Job (kneeling, right—“he
sits among the ashes,” says the Bible) is in anguish as an angel of death kills his herd of cattle, represented by gold
balloons. Maniutiu explained his goal was “not to bring old rites to life but to create a ritual fiction.” The production was
presented at the 2008 Romanian National Theatre Festival in Bucharest. © Pierre Borasci
concrete visualizations: sketches, drawings, renderings,
models, ground plans, working drawings, fabrics, technical
details, and devices. During these conferences the
design evolves through a collaborative sharing in which
the director’s involvement may range from minimal to
maximal, depending on how well the initial concept and
the developing design seem to be cohering.
The director’s function at this stage of design is to
approve or reject, as well as to suggest. As the person
who sits at the top of the artistic hierarchy, the director
has the last word on design matters, but that does
not mean she or he can simply command the show into
being. Theatre design, like any creative process, cannot
be summoned forth like an obedient servant. Moreover,
the rejection of a designer’s work after the initial stages
inevitably involves serious time loss and budgetary
waste—not to mention the risk of angering your artistic
team before clocking even one rehearsal. For these
reasons, the directorial effort must be committed from
the outset to sound collaborative principles. Once under
way, the director-designer collaboration must take the
form of shared responsibility in a developing enterprise,
not confrontation between warring artists attempting to
seize control.
Casting the Actors The time has come to cast the
play with actors. An old cliché states that “casting is
90 percent of directing,” and while certainly a simplification,
it contains more than a germ of truth. Actors
not only attract more audience attention than any other