Irving Pichel

“ For two movements that are bound to affect the theatre of the future are bringing the lay public clambering over the footlights and crowding in at the stage door. One, the Little Theatre Movement, is almost altogether a lay insurgency. In scores of communities, it has made its way; tradesmen, students, clerks, mechanics, people of leisure and working people with a little leisure, have come together and in a short time have plumbed the silly little mysteries of back-stage, and have brought into their theatres a little bit of the real Mystery of life and art that belongs there. ”

“ A dressing-room door, inopportunely opened, will let a beam of light fall upon the stage, often spoiling the lighting of a scene. The slamming of doors, sound of voices, and other noises are almost unavoidable. And the argument usually advanced for so arranging dressing-rooms—that the actors can hear what is going on on the stage and thus be in time for their entrances, is fallacious. This very fact breeds in them a confidence that makes them careless, and they are more often late than if they were required to wait for their cues on the stage. ”

“ They inhabit that mysterious, unexplored back-stage. And a clever manager will encourage this sort of curiosity by advising his people not to show themselves in the street, except unavoidably. The matter of seeing the actors close may be dismissed with a quip,—they might be found respectable upon acquaintance, or, more likely, dull. But the truth about the back of the theatre is the truth about the conjurer’s hat,—there’s nothing there to see, except the pitiful little bag of tricks, the snowstorm and the wind. ”

“ If the little playhouse is without any mechanical convenience, if its stage is cramped and mean, it can still achieve visual beauty through light. This force brings into the playhouse the most vibrant, subtle and affecting gift of the physical world, barring only the human presence. ”

“ If the designer has bad taste, there is no help for it, except to avoid him. If he is an artist, let him exercise his art on the interior of the auditorium and forget the sort of thing that has traditionally adorned theatres and wedding cakes.
But, most of all, let him talk with the artist, if there should luckily be one, who is going to work in the particular theatre, and learn from him the sorts of play that are to be done, and the æsthetic of the group that is to present them, if it has one, and so find some clue to the atmosphere the auditorium should evoke. ”

“ But these are faded flowers that cannot be brought to life, and the theatre of to-day, its plays and its players, are moved by a different spirit. Whatever lure these tinselly old temples have is a reminiscent one. To-day, there may be found theatres with the simplicity and peace of a church, the unobtrusive luxury of the drawing-room, and even, by overshooting the mark of simplicity, the bareness of the lecture-room or the legislative chamber. ”

“ Right here lies the crux of the problem of installing lights in the little theatre. A dual approach is required, as in any art: the creator’s vision of what he wishes to do, and the technician’s knowledge of how to go about it. The greater responsibility rests on the first function, for we must settle whether we are to try to reproduce nature or attain a correlative beauty. To me the beauty of a stage sunset has rarely been the beauty of a real sunset ”

“ And the transcendent theatre art of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin or of the Art Theatre in Moscow does not hang upon the skill with which the one has used a revolving stage or with which the other has devised its scenery. The German theatres have to a remarkable degree increased natural illusion in scenery and lighting; but in spite of that there is about as much bad theatre art in Germany as good. Where greatness is found, where the artist has most truly realized the function of the theatre, it will be seen that his spirit has transcended utterly the possibilities of his physical stage ”

“ I should be ill-advised in advising ambitious groups interested in building adequate little playhouses to set aside finally the known and tried methods of play production and the stage they involve for methods adapted to a type of drama that may not yet exist, for methods that must be evolved only by sensitive and versed artists of the theatre. It is true that many signal new ideas come into any art through workers who do not know or trouble about tradition, young hands who blunder upon valuable methods through attacking their medium experimentally. ”

“ In it we have the only single agency in the theatre that can work with all the other agencies, binding them together—that can reveal with the dramatist, paint with the designer, and act with the actors.
The machinery by which this medium is brought to the stage and through which its wonders are wrought commands a deep respect. Tradition has already laid its heavy hand here, and innovation in lighting equipment moves slowly. It is almost wholly within the last five years in the United States that lighting units of marked novelty have been introduced. ”

“ The limitations of his stage often compel him to an inventiveness different only in scale from that displayed by the great German technicians of the theatre. No Harvard student who ever shifted scenery for the Dramatic Club in Brattle Hall can outgrow his enthusiasm for the feats achieved on that absurd stage. At the Artists’ Guild in St. Louis, it gave us unbounded glee to set the massive chamber of The Queen’s Enemies on the cramped stage there. To be confronted with deficiencies of one sort or another—mechanical or fiscal—which must be overcome, is unquestionably a spur to ambition. ”

“ There are limits beyond which mechanical skill or inventive genius cannot alter the obdurate confines of the physical stage. But there are no heights to which a human spirit, set in public upon a platform, however narrow and close-walled, cannot rise. In view of this great spiritual fact, I would solemnly warn any little theatre or community house that has money to spend for modernity, not to spend it on the kind of advance stage machinery discussed in this chapter, but to spend it on artists. ”

“ The system of wholesale manufacture and distribution of theatre products is on the wane, and the theatre as an art, as a social institution of the rank and significance of the school or the church, may soon have the field to itself. Hourly, in the little theatres, in community drama undertakings, in the municipal theatres, in the classrooms and the clubs, and on the school stages, the new theatre is growing up. ”

“ It may be that the stage of the future is to be something quite different than that we now have. As a theatre of truth supplants the theatre of illusion, it may be found that the stage of to-day does not answer at all. The theatre is undoubtedly in a transitional period and artists are striving for new forms and new methods of presentation. ”

“ More and more can this be true in the theatre, as the artist comes to regard light as a pure medium, as he learns more of its profound effect on human emotion, even on the working of the body’s organs, and as he becomes familiar with the thousand subtle ways in which the earth and its atmosphere modify the light sent by the sun, reflecting and refracting it, stealing certain colors from its whiteness and leaving others, resolving it prismatically by mists and clouds and the swirls of atmosphere. ”

“ Opportunities to build stages are not frequent; he knows more about building them than using them, and the models he follows have not been often enough refreshed by the innovations of theatre experts. His patterns are largely outmoded. In the largest high school in one of the greatest midwestern cities, I have seen a stage built no more than five years ago in which is exemplified almost every stage feature of the civil war period—a vast curved apron, grooves for wings, and a stage floor sloping from the back wall toward the footlights. ”

“ The outstanding point about the stage, apart from the life the actors bring to it, is that it is a machine. It is a mechanical device used to aid in the setting forth of a play, much as a potter’s wheel aids the maker of vases, or a mortise and tenon machine helps the cabinet-maker. Perhaps the cabinet-maker is no less a hand-craftsman because he uses the mechanical device to shorten his labor, and it is probable that the vase has a truer form for being turned on a wheel. ”

“ We are accustomed to regard as the stage of a theatre that part on which the actors appear, immediately behind the footlights, bounded, right and left, by the proscenium arch. As a matter of fact, this is a very small part of the stage. From the construction of many school stages and many of the stages of the little and experimental theatres, I am convinced that this misconception really exists. It is true that many little theatre groups have been obliged to choose between a cramped stage and no stage at all. ”

“ Two important things the stage worker of the modern theatre contributed, through his rough approximations of realistic effect, two things that will serve, whatever our aim in lighting. He saw that the light at some seasons, in some weathers, and at some times of day, is less bright than at others, and that it fades at dusk. ”

“ Ultimately it will be seen that a forthright attempt to imitate nature on the stage can result only in failure; the painted or modeled semblances of rocks, trees, grass or distant prospects are in the long run seen to be what they are not what they pretend to be. Similarly, close as the light of the stage can be brought to resemble the light of the outer world, it will still be short of complete fidelity to its original. ”

“ Only at noon do we have literally overhead lighting. Even then, the beam of light is so broad as to envelop the figure on all sides, and is so variously reflected by the dome of the sky, by trees, rocks, water, houses, that there is, in addition to the direct downward light, a considerable “general” diffused illumination. At most hours of the day, the rays of the sun fall upon the earth and its people at a long angle. The factor that gives relief and prevents a dull flatness in the light of nature is the dominance of east over west in the morning and of west over east in the afternoon. ”

“ When matter has been twisted and beaten into the cunningest perversions of its first form, the craftsman is still not satisfied; for his spirit can soar to further reaches where none of the elements can follow. This is truer of the theatre artist, perhaps, than of any other, save the musician (who is, after all, a theatre artist) . The theatre has been, these many centuries, the theatre because of the limitations that encompass it, not in spite of them. ”

“ These errors of construction, after all, indicate but one thing—that the stage has been regarded as a characteristic type of structure, to be built according to established rules, rather than as a place designed to fulfill a peculiar function. A stage is a space on which a dramatic action is to be revealed before an audience. Whatever the space at the builder’s disposal—its size or shape—or whatever the building he must remodel, that is the only thing to be considered. A play is to be given. The players must be seen and heard. ”

“ Over all, one stage main switch should control all the lights of the stage. The auditorium lights, with their own switches, should be controlled from the same board as the stage lights.
The outstanding item of expense in building a good switchboard is the cost of dimmers, the resistance devices by which the intensity of the light is controlled. They vary in capacity with their wattage and type. But the dimmers, more than any other part of the control system, contribute to the flexibility of the machine. In a modern theatre they are indispensable. ”

“ When traps are needed in the floor, they can then be cut without difficulty at any point.
The lighting equipment of the stage, by far the most important of its mechanical attributes, I shall describe later, but I shall treat here of one device, which is structural. It is one of the German inventions for the perfection of illusion to which I have referred, and the only one I recommend to little theatres, far and wide. I recommend it because of the added beauty it can bring into the playhouse, rather than because of its merit as a part of the perfect machine. ”

“ For, inevitably, these various kinds of work must be done in the theatre, and the people who do them must find space here or there for their work, and the things they make must be kept somewhere. Unless each job and each product is assigned its proper corner, the building is soon a clutter of stuff, accumulating dust, getting jostled about and broken. Then we are back at the old, dark, dirty theatre we are trying so hard to improve upon. The provisions discussed above, though they are not on the stage, are very much a part of it, and go far toward making it an instrument of precision. ”

“ It has tried to become a more perfect machine,—more nearly an instrument of precision. It may be significant to observe that, although masterpieces of drama gave impetus to the development of the illusion stage,—outstandingly the plays of Ibsen,—the illusion stage has brought forth no masterpieces. In this country, it may be held responsible for the buzz-saw, train-wreck, or horse-race type of melodrama, a type now happily removed from the theatre by the moving picture with its still higher degree of visual veracity. ”

“ Where there is an experimental and creative attitude toward the theatre such types will be evolved without any such rudimentary manual as this. Where a manual is wanted, a stage should be built that can be used easily, by everybody who wishes to use it, and which will give readily, in return for effort spent upon it, a revenue of beauty. These pages will achieve enough if they go a little way toward eliminating the usual inept, difficult constructions that for these many years have cumbered the way of folks, young and old, who wish to entertain themselves in the theatre. ”

“ In Germany, the stage as machine has been developed to an extraordinary degree, and, for the most part, never debauched by exhibitions of effects for their own sake, as in our sensational melodrama of half a generation ago. ”

“ Hardwood should never be used for the stage floor. The architect of the excellent Arts and Crafts Theatre in Detroit, in his desire to use only the best of building materials, specified a stage floor of maple. As a consequence, it is almost impossible to support scenery by the use of stage braces, screwed to the floor with a stage screw or “peg.” Soft wood into which the pegs bite easily, is the only sort to use. ”

“ The only true dome in this country was installed by Samuel J. Hume at the Madison Theatre in Detroit, now used as a moving-picture playhouse.
With such a dome, a great deal of the litter of painted scenery can be done away with. A background of light takes the place of the usual painted back-drop, and much of the scenery usually set at the sides or hung overhead, merely to keep the eye from penetrating to the back-regions of the stage, is no longer needed. ”