[ad_1]
In a WORLD filtered from the screens, a situation that has become even more acute during the pandemic quarantine, the most anachronistic excitement of the theater seems to be watching the lives unfolding before us. The players may not be literally within our reach, but the absence of a barrier between us and them, the illusion that, for once, we are actually in the room – the sound of the human voice in agony or joy, a jug of water hitting the floor – has never seemed more exciting and necessary.
Or maybe not. Even before Covid-19, many ambitious productions took place, not in the three-sided black boxes that defined experimental taste and emerging punk in the late 1970s, or in the crowd-pleasing theater that pioneered ancient Greece. and Rome and revived in the mid-20th century, but in carefully designed glass cubes that evoke the high Modernism of the International Style and the minimalist lofts of the contemporary metropolis. There seems to be no more obvious violation of dramatic immediacy than this.
Yet design has been ubiquitous lately. After a long Broadway break, “Lehman Trilogydirected by Sam Mendes” opens at the Nederlander Theater next month; Over the span of nearly three and a half hours, the three actors play a character cavalier from the over 160-year history of the famous investment house Lehman Brothers, housed in a revolving transparent box designed by British designer Es. Devlin. Federico García Lorca’s 2016 Young Vic production “YermaDirected by then-31-year-old Australian Simon Stone (1934), it was re-enacted in 2018 in what was essentially a giant terrarium in New York’s massive Park Avenue Armory. That same year, German designer Miriam Buether created Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” (1991), directed by Joe Mantello on Broadway. And for the 2017 National Theater adaptation “NetworkComing to Broadway the following year, Belgian auteur Ivo van Hove put the stage manager in a large glass box and cast him as a character directing both the actual play and the legendary television broadcast. complo.
Glass, a purely contemporary material, creates what Buether calls “the ultimate film quality, like looking through a lens.” Even before fear of infection drove us behind protective plexiglass shields and most human interaction was reduced to Zoom, theater audiences were beginning to appreciate the illusory perceptual effects of multimedia innovations – video projections have become commonplace on stage, especially under the leadership of van Hove and others. Such effects are now part of the theatrical experience, a way to distort audience expectations. Updating a classic with, say, a modern dress or a gender-blind casting was provocative and transformative, allowing us to see the text again; now the scene itself has become a shaking terra nova, a glass cage that literally embodies the themes of isolation and vulnerability in these works.
FOR THE VIEWER looking at something from within, glass offers both a subtle change and a seismic change; it changes everything while visually changing very little. “You know what you’re watching is different, but you can’t quite understand why,” says Buether, 52, who created two rooms for the second act of “Three Tall Women.” separated by a plexiglass wall and then placed behind them a mirrored wall, creating multiple images of the characters and reflecting the play’s concepts of identity and time. “It’s like making the fourth wall concrete, it’s like looking at a window. You adapt to it quickly – so it’s transparent – but it never really disappears.”
2011 film Henrik Ibsen’s “For Stone, who has performed behind glass half a dozen times”Wild Duck(1885) At the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, arrogance works best in one particular section of the canon: intimate plays that “pull the dark night of the soul”. As an expert in reviving the indigenous works of naturalism that dominated European theater in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he believes that using glass, often in nearly bare settings, has allowed him to reinvent these plays for a new generation. Stone notes that at the time of Ibsen’s writing it was radical to place works in bourgeois living rooms rather than castles and fields, but such environments now seem banal. “I thought to myself: ‘What would happen if you really put the glass between the action and the audience?’” he says. “’What if you make it an obstacle to be overcome, to which the audience must bend?’”
For “Yerma,” he wanted it to seem inevitable that the protagonist would go crazy when she couldn’t have children; For “The Wild Duck,” he was trying to add a clinical twist to the plot that resulted in a young girl unexpectedly hitting herself in the chest: “I was very aware that I wasn’t turning it into suicide porn,” she says. For Anton Chekhov’s 2017 Theater Basel production, he used a series of revolving stacked glass boxes – roughly reminiscent of a Modernist chalet.Three SistersIt was published in 1901 because it made the realities of their lives even more brutal and limited. Paradoxically, the actors succeed in the glass box, adding: “Sometimes full exposure can hinder them. You have a very close connection with the audience; You are too aware. The illusion of being in a private room makes them feel safe.”
Still, working behind glass comes with its own technical challenges. Especially if you put your plaster in a box with a lid, you eliminate the possibility of acoustic naturalism. Many games are recorded on microphone these days, but the amplification is designed to be imperceptible and create the illusion of proximity; when it is a closed cube, the realism becomes more complex. “Yes, you lose the sound of the natural voice,” says Stone, “but you gain an extreme aural intimacy.”
Devlin, 50, who has designed tour sets for operas as well as for Billie Eilish and Beyoncé, is also accustomed to the exchange of a glass box. Mendes, who started as a theater director before moving to cinema, and such a backup set for himself come together in an epic historical piece like “Lehman”. The boardroom and other office spaces where the game dissolves “enter the audience’s space, conveying both claustrophobia and expanse,” he says, and winks at the glass-enclosed conference spaces that have become the heavy hands of corporate America. An attempt to convey “transparency”. Inside, the box is divided into three rooms with interior glass panes where actors scribble the names of those who died in the civil war and commodity prices. The perimeter of the rectangle is made up of glass panels with open spaces between them, improving acoustics and acting as openings, allowing movement to transition from widescreen to closing. The rotation of the box also creates the equivalent of a Hollywood viewing shot: “Sam loves it, of course,” says Devlin.
But squeezing the action into a single room also has a deeper meaning. When Devlin teamed up with director Trevor Nunn on the 1998 London revival of Harold Pinter “BetrayalFeatured in a deconstructed replica of a residence (1978), where the windows are just outlines on the walls, it was a reference to the British sculptor. by Rachel Whiteread 1993 “House” is a ghostly, solid concrete replica of a row house that had stood on an East London street for three months. Together, the sculpture and production reminded viewers that the boundaries of the house can be both rigid and temporary. For “Lehman” Devlin alsoTangoA 1981 semi-animated eight-minute short film by Polish director Zbigniew Rybczynski, where dozens of people sit simultaneously in a small front hall, where their elaborate dances compress time and space. “There is a message embedded in a single room,” Devlin says, “the architecture itself is the vein in which history – whether intimate or monumental – is brought to life. Glass helps you make this message clear: A room is more than a passive container. It reminds of life.”
Set design: Todd Knopke
[ad_2]
Source link