Word: proscenium
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...beginning of the play and in between scenes, the proscenium arch lights up, and downstage left a character appears to tell a story about Scottie. It is this theater, "tonight," and we are in the audience "to pay tribute to Scottie Templeton," who is celebrating his 51st birthday and has just emerged from successful cancer treatments in the hospital. At first these interludes seem irritating and gratuitous, as though Slade were trying to disguise a one-set, chronologically ordered comedy by Pirandello-ing it up a bit. But afterwards, you can appreciate how these anecdotes should have worked: this...
...knows he is no mad builder like Ludwig II of Bavaria. The center's theater building, now under construction, will almost comply with Moliere's notion that all drama needs is a platform and a passion or two. It will house three theaters, none with a conventional proscenium. Seawell called in Gordon Davidson of Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum as consultant. He has come up with a plan to ally his own successful theater with Denver's troupe to be. "Time is the hardest thing to buy," says Davidson, 44, whose theater won a Tony Award...
...Trials of Brother Jero is rather simple. The one set, designed by Joan Ferenchak, furnishes a classic example of how to use the Mainstage's variable space to good advantage. The structure is simple--a wooden frame shack, covered with ostensible palm fronds, along with a similarly covered proscenium arch set off by blue backlighting; but when combined with the main acting area, a sand-covered expanse in front of Jero's home/church, the intended effect is achieved. No flashy techniques distinguish the lighting scheme. Another minor criticism can be directed at the music--the same fragment of a song...
Finally there was the seemingly insurmountable problem of the Vivian Beaumont Theater itself. Designed with flexibility in mind, it has proved to be remarkably rigid, combining the bad qualities of both theater in the round and traditional proscenium stage-with the advantages of neither...
Mamet began writing and directing at Vermont's Goddard College; after graduation he became an actor. But, he confesses, "I was terrible, and it bothered me a lot." He was bothered enough to try the other side of the proscenium in 1971, when he started the St. Nicholas Theater Company. He and his co-founders transferred the project from New England to Chicago three years later. Mamet now divides his time between that city and New York...