Word: prosceniums
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Always, in his paintings, one feels that things are happening on the other side of the frame, which is a virtual proscenium. It is exactly this removal that equipped him so well, at the outset, as a stage designer. As Friedman argues at some length in his text (and as a group of Hockney's easel paintings, included in the show, makes clear), theater has never been far from the core of his art. His shallow space quotes the conventions of the stage: flats, curtains, wings. There is a taste for exotic figures (red Indians, ancient Egyptians) and stage...
...Director Sills chose Jules Massenet's Cendrillon, a rarely performed, exquisitely frothy turn-of-the-century version of the Cinderella tale. The English subtitles, selectively translated from the French libretto, were projected on a dark, 6-ft. by 47-ft. screen unobtrusively suspended below the theater's proscenium arch. Members of the audience could either ignore the running titles or read along as the action unfolded onstage...
...strains to hit high notes. Brenneman especially shines in her solo, "Who Stole the Tarts," a song about the procedings of her trial as a pastry thief. In an amazing rapid-pace monologue, she imitates all the other characters at the trial, as she darts about the tree-stump proscenium...
...such as Mourning Becomes Electra. The small spaces force the players closer, keeping the energy level of the play from dropping too low. Magaril also makes good use of the Ex's backstage, setting some action in the passage behind the normal playing area. The enclosed area, almost a proscenium stage within the larger floor, simply by its framing, infuses any scene within it with emotion. Yet, the most impressive sequence is the end, produced only on the stage, but done much less traditionally than the rest of the play. Lit with harsh, direct white light rather than colored floodlighting...
...full of echoes of figures, rooms, sociable encounters; they are small, "unheroic" but exquisitely phrased. The space they evoke is closed, artificial, without horizon or other legible references to landscape. One seems to be looking into a box full of colored flats and wings-a marionette stage, behind whose proscenium the blobs and cylinders of color glow with shivering, theatrical ebullience. "Curious," as the English art historian Lawrence Gowing remarked in a recent essay on Hodgkin's work, "that no one has recognized in Hodgkin a God-given stage designer, a man with a mission to the theater...