Stagecraft

“ If we want to estimate the chances of the non-realistic play to advance beyond its expressionist beginnings in Germany, we must try to understand the present state of the art of theatrical production, and the past of play and players, the theater and its stagecraft. ”

“ Your imagination supplied the scenery and lighting. A small table turned upside down and placed on top of another table may have 48been your next invention. A curtain drawn about its three sides and your string of Christmas-tree lights gave you a very satisfactory little theater. As your stagecraft developed, you may have seen possibilities in a soap box or a dry goods box. By knocking out one side to make a proscenium opening and painting scenery on the back of the box or on to cardboards which you slipped in and out, you had a very real stage. ”

“ For all this they need imagination in setting, not actuality. Form carries the spirit up and out. Indications speak to it louder than actualities. Design, which is of the spirit, drives out mechanism, which is of the brain.
The day of the machine is over in the theater, the day of its domination at any rate. For a time it looked as though the name of the old theater in the Tuileries would have to be painted over every stage door in Germany—La Salle des Machines. Now the stage machine is sinking into its proper place—the cellar. ”

“ With the sliding and sinking stage a little further advanced, you can imagine the scenery taking a really furious interest in the actor, pursuing him from floor to basement and back again. You can imagine some new director working out a drama in which a cathedral chases an apostate priest about the stage, or a phallic column pursues the heroine into the darkness of the cellar only to lose her as she rises triumphantly on the last of the seven mystic stages guided and blessed by that unique functionary of the German theater, the Obermaschineninspektor. ”

“ Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have been abusing the picture-frame stage, stamping on the footlights, pulling out the front of the apron, pushing the actors into the loges, down the orchestra pit, onto the prompter’s box, out upon runways or up the aisles. They have even gone clear out of the playhouse and into circuses, open air theaters, and public parks. All to set up a new and mutual relationship between the actor and the audience. ”

“ But then he made the thing a compromise between the Greek theater, a circus, and the modern playhouse, by slapping a proscenium arch into the side wall and installing behind it a huge stage with all the mechanical folderols of the day—great dome, cloud-machine, revolving stage. It was beyond human nature to resist the temptation of playing with the whole gigantic toy. Neither Reinhardt nor the directors who succeeded him could be content, as they should have been, to lower the curtain across the proscenium, to plaster up the fourth wall. ”

“ The German technical men are beginning to chafe at the limitations of the machines, to be content to push them into second place. If you talk to Linnebach, at Dresden, once high priest of the sliding stage, you will note with some surprise that the word einfach has a Carolinian way of getting into the conversation. Things must be simpler. No big solid sets; instead, some curtains and lights and a dome on which to project painted designs. The word Podium also crops out. ”

“ After light and a setting of bodies comes just as much of the ordinary plastic scenery of the stage as you need, and just as little as you can get along with. If you care to dig a bit under the ring, and install machinery that will lower the floor in sections, pile up hills in concentric circles or even lift a throne or a well or an altar into the middle of the circus while the lights are out—well, there is nothing to prevent you. Juliet’s balcony may hang above one of the entrances ”

“ The spirit of the theater as it has developed since the war seems to call upon the designer and régisseur instead of the mechanician. When artists were building heavy and cumbersome settings, elaborate in physical proportions if not in design, sliding and revolving stages were unquestionably necessary, though we may well ask how much the presence of the [Pg 66] mechanisms tempted the artists into such excess. To-day, however, the setting is being stylized, the stage itself made formal. Machinery becomes irrelevant. Copeau does not need it even for the realistic Les Frères Karamazov ”

“ It was the most natural thing in the world that the Germans should turn their stage into a machine shop. When they build one of their great five-story office buildings they begin by [Pg 58] laying a railroad along two sides on the street level and another up in the air above it, and putting in a traveling elevator, dump-cart, and crane that runs along on the tracks; after they have this gigantic apparatus in order, building the building is mere child’s play. ”

“ We want a defined and permanent artificiality that shall give the actor scope, serve as a pied-à-terre, not join in a fantastic competition. We can escape plastic and limited reality in the Redoutensaal, while we supply the actor with a background that harmonizes with the living character of his body. At the same time we can secure the vivid indication of mood or time or place which we seek, and achieve it more vividly because of the permanence of the main fabric of the stage, and its contrast with the merely indicated setting. ”

“ In the first decade of the twentieth century, the “flat” was flat indeed, and the painted wing and backdrop ruled. If there was any depth, it was the space between wing and wing, or the false space of painted perspective. Then the ideas of Craig and Appia, making a curious alliance with Realism, forced the plastic upon the stage. The solid, three-dimensional setting dominated. When directors and artists began to discover the physical and spiritual limitations of “real” settings which could present nothing bigger than the actual stage space, many went back to the painted flat. ”

“ Working as a designer of picture-settings, the artist can only suggest action, but not dictate it, through the shapes and atmospheres he creates. The important thing is that almost all the designers of real distinction in Europe are tending steadily away from the picture-setting. They are constantly at work upon plans for breaking down the proscenium-frame type of production, and for reaching a simple platform stage or podium upon which the actor shall present himself frankly as an actor. ”

“ Der verrückte Krieg was all that prevented the development of a most ingenious mechanism for erecting the erector that builds the building.
The German stage machine is a Frankenstein stage-hand. It is intended to do the work of scene shifting at great economy of effort and time. Actually the German theaters seem to employ more stage hands than the American theaters, and the waits are no shorter on the whole than those we are able to manage if we want to. ”

“ Neither the latter method nor Belasco’s is wholly satisfactory in a theater that forswears representation, a theater like the Grosses Schauspielhaus or the Vieux-Colombier or the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Electric light on the stage begins as an imitation of the real. ”

“ They put their brains and their machines at work upon these pieces, as well as upon the realistic, and soon they had developed methods of production for non-realistic plays quite as admirable for the purpose as any of their tricks for lifting the fourth wall before our very eyes. ”

“ The presence of the artist as director in some future theater without scenery, implies a decided influence on the type of acting.
Such a stage itself, thrust boldly at the spectators, if not actually placed in the midst of them, tends to dictate a frank, direct contact between players and audience. In such a house an actor will be all but forced to desert the purely representational style of to-day, and to present himself and his emotions in an open, assertive, masculine manner as objects of art and of emotion. ”

“ These enable the “fly men” to cross the stage quickly without necessitating their coming down to the level of the stage. In modern stages of the better class, iron and steel construction is very largely used for the gridiron, flies, etc., and, of course, tends to decrease the danger from fire.
Nearly all of the older stage floors fall three-eighths to one-half inch in a foot, from the back to the front, in order to enable the audience to see the actor or singer as he retires “up” the stage; but in modern stages the floors are usually level, as then the scenery can be set plumb. ”

“ Rocks and trees of papier maché and canvas are brought in and placed in position. If any things like chandeliers are used, ropes are dropped from the gridiron to [266] secure them at the proper height. The stage machinist stands in the middle of the stage and gives an order now and then to some of the men, the scenes and the drops and borders are raised or lowered, or the set scenes straightened until all are in order and able to pass the critical eyes of the machinist and the stage manager. All of this is done without confusion, so carefully is every man trained in his duties. ”

“ The scenic artist, who is often known to the people only by his work, has some extraordinary duties to perform. When a combination or company has a date at a theatre a week or so beforehand, they send on small models of the scenery they require for their play. These models greatly resemble in their general appearance and size the toy theatres that are sold to children. The stage carpenter, who goes around day and night treading the stage in his own shuffling and careless way, and who is entirely unknown to the public, takes the models and builds frames over which canvas or muslin is spread. ”

“ With properties, as with stage carpentry, everything depends upon invention, and for every new opera the property master is obliged to devise new properties and new effects for which he has often no precedent.
When the curtain falls for good after the encores, the stage machinist blows a sharp blast on his whistle, and as if by magic all the singers and the chorus who have not gone already, leave the stage, and their places are taken by a swarm of stage hands. The fly men raise the drops and the borders out of the way, while the men on the stage take away the movables and the set scenes. ”

“ The illusion in both of the plays we have mentioned is very similar, but we think the American invention is preferable. At the proper moment the large screw shown in the lower part of our engraving is set in motion by the electric motors. It lifts the mechanism of the horse race up to the level of the floor, which had previously covered it. The lights in the theater are turned out, and after a few moments of inky blackness the flying horses appear at the side of the stage, in a blaze of light, and seem to strain every nerve, fairly flying past the varied landscape. ”

“ Each piece of machinery, furniture, scenery, &c., should have a proper place where it should be left [Pg 21] when not in use. Nails, pins, hammers, and other articles which come in constant use, should be kept in a large box near the stage. By working systematically, every thing will move on with clockwork nicety, and all confusion be avoided. Colored fires should be burnt in the ante-rooms at the sides of the stage; smoke and clouds should be produced at the back, or in the centre of the stage. The preparation can be ignited by fastening a lighted fuse to a long rod. ”

“ The back stage has no openings or mechanism beyond certain trap-doors to a scenery store, and the necessary electrical mechanism for raising and lowering scenery for storage purposes. Between the various sections of the stage, long longitudinal flaps, 2 ft. wide, have been formed, which can, be easily opened to allow scenery to be passed through below for transformation scenes and the like. Each section is equipped with what is termed a pair of chariots, to hold "wing" lights placed on so-called wing ladders. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nelson Waldron, the stage machinist, who elaborated the system and obtained a patent on it. The stage in the theater we refer to is moved up and down in the same manner as an elevator car, and is operated so that either of its divisions can be easily and quickly brought to the proper level in front of the auditorium. This enables the stage hands to get one scene ready while the other one is in view of the audience. The shaft through which the huge elevator moves up and down measures one hundred and fourteen feet from the roof to the bottom. ”

“ The roof of the stage over the rigging loft is a huge skylight, opened or closed from the stage. The skylight is made light-proof for matinee performances. On the gridiron are rigged the blocks and pulleys through which pass the lines attached to all the scenery that goes up in the air, or "up in the flies," which is the name given the space between the top of the proscenium arch and the gridiron. To take scenery up, is "flying it," in stage language, leaving the sight of the audience; whatever goes up "flies," and whatever is carried off to one side311 or back is "struck." ”