It was unlike any theatre I had ever seen, a temple to possibility, its playing
space so flexible that it could accommodate tons of dirt, trees, or a tank. It
could be configured into a big warehouse or an intimate salon. Pillars
staggered throughout the space and lightweight beams that could be attached to
them and stacked allowed it to be made wide and shallow, long and narrow, small
and boxy. High ceilings allowed for objects to be hung and flown. A Paul
Bunyan-sized door enabled objects as tall as trees to be trucked into the
space, for horses, cars, bulldozers even, to carry materials into the space or
move onstage as part of a production. The space could be loaded with earth or
flooded with water. It was a theatre out of a dream. Only I didn’t dream it. I saw it for real, with a number of other writers
attending this year’s convention of the American Theatre Critics Association in
Dallas. We were given a tour of the facility, which sits in a field in a mostly
undeveloped area of Addison, one of the many bedroom communities that dot the
Metroplex. The Addison Center Theatre was developed by some area artists who
began doing productions there in a small stone cottage on the same property as
the current facility. In the one-room space, they pushed the limits of
environmental staging, opening the doors to incorporate car headlights and the
surrounding fields into a show, covering the floor with dirt, filling the room
knee-deep with water. After some years, with support from city leaders and
substantial income from the hotel/motel tax, they were given the opportunity to
build their own theatre. They imagined every kind of show they might want to
produce – small, gigantic, surreal – then designed a theatre flexible enough
for them to stage those shows in it.
The experience of seeing the Addison was startling to me. As I looked over the
space, my mind was ignited with ideas for its use: The Tempest on a real
island surrounded by water. Waiting for Godot on a vast plain.
Oklahoma with the audience in an honest-to-Tulsa cornfield. They weren’t
terribly original concepts, but they were new to me and they kept rushing into
my brain. The room invigorated my thinking about space, an aspect of theatre to
which I hadn’t given much thought before, and what thinking I had done tended
toward the conventional, making the most of standard boxy rooms with set
entryways and traditional seating. Presented with a space which allowed for
more possibilities, my mind made a creative leap and I began to conceive of
approaches to work that might be more dynamic, more theatrical, more exciting
than was my natural bent.
Since that visit, I’ve quite naturally been more interested in the use of
space in stage productions and how incorporating more flexibility into local
performance venues might push Austin theatre to a new level of creativity. But
I’ve also begun thinking about how flexibility might be applied to other areas
of theatre here, specifically to areas in which arts companies have suffered
ongoing problems in the production process.
Austin theatre doesn’t lack for ambition when it comes to choosing plays to
produce. We love our Lears and Hamlets, our Threepenny
Operas and Sweeney Todds, our The Importance of Being
Earnests and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Deads, and we stage
them regularly. And why not? Such works are thrillingly theatrical, in their
rich use of language and action, their rendering of indelible characters and
sharp conflicts, in their exploration of ideas and communication of human
emotion in all its colors. They represent the art at its peak and deserve to be
done again and again.
What we run into again and again, however, are local productions that don’t
realize the rich dramatic or comedic potential of these ambitious theatrical
works. Now, not managing a deeply moving Three Sisters or a riotous
Tartuffe every time one stages one is not a situation unique to Austin;
these works stymie great artists everywhere. But the thread that runs through
many of the flawed productions of great plays locally is an ill fit of
resources to material. We take these complex, very demanding works, and produce
them with actors who cannot always make the text clear or whose emotional range
is limited, with staging that does not always appear clearly thought through,
and with costumes that are threadbare and sets that are slipshod.
The underlying causes of these problems vary from show to show. Sometimes
actors seem to have been miscast. Other times, they appear suitable for the
roles but look under-rehearsed. At times, the blocking or pace suggests the
director didn’t seriously study the text. Occasionally, sets and costumes look
as if they might have been more polished if only there had been a little more
time before opening. Often, they look as if they might have been more polished
if only there had been a lot more money. The impression created by these
productions, whether it is always the case or not, is that the artists involved
did not allow themselves sufficient time and resources to do these plays
justice.
Not all plays are created equal. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear are very different works and make very
different demands on the companies that produce them, in the size of the cast,
period setting, actors’ facility with language, physicality, playing drama as
opposed to comedy, and so on. What the theatre has developed, though, is a
production process that treats every show as roughly the same. Directors give
themselves several months to study a script; they hold two or three nights of
auditions and cast most, if not all, roles from the actors who audition; the
show is rehearsed generally four to six weeks; then it opens. Locally, that
situation is compounded by the propensity of some companies – usually smaller
ones, but not always – to stage every show on roughly the same budget,
regardless of the shows’ size or demands. It is as if we have begun to see the
production process in the same way that we see most performance spaces: as
something with certain specifications that we cannot alter and which must limit
our creative approaches to a play’s production.
While it’s true that some limitations which can’t be overcome will exist for
every production (otherwise every actor in town would be making Equity-level
wages for every show), Austin’s stage companies have more freedom in the
production process than they seem to think. Except for those companies with
Equity affiliations (and there are relatively few of those locally), there are
no rules regarding the ways in which companies can cast shows, no restrictions
on how many weeks a production may be in rehearsal. Even for Equity companies,
there are no laws dictating how long a director may study a play before
rehearsals begin or in which season a certain script must be produced.
Producers and artists are in control of these areas and can make adjustments in
them if they so choose. Too often, they have not because something – the desire
to do a show at a certain time because it’s hot commercially or a particular
space is only available then or they are opposed to pre-casting or holding
extra auditions or they can’t afford renting rehearsal space for more than four
weeks or better costumes – something is acting as a wall or walls that’s
cramping their ability to produce the best work they can.
What Austin theatre lacks is a sense of how to break down those walls and
realize these plays to their full potential. We need to put ourselves in an
Addison for the production process, a mental space in which we have the freedom
to do anything we can imagine. Take three months to rehearse Julius
Caesar? Have the resources to build a dark, richly paneled set for A
Doll House? Get the best actress in Austin (fill in the blank yourself) to
play Medea? It’s possible in this space, and the importan0t thing about
being there and opening yourself up to any and all possibilities is that it
sparks those creative impulses toward the dynamic and theatrical, and that puts
you closer to the greatness at the heart of the play you seek to realize in all
its glory.
Once you have envisioned a dream production, it may be that the old
throw-the-show-up-in-four-weeks-with-whatever-we’ve-got won’t work for you. And
it shouldn’t. Why do a half-assed production of Hamlet? Who does it
serve? Not the actors, not the audience, not the play. We should be envisioning
the best productions possible, then finding ways to get as much of those
visionary productions realized onstage as possible. If it’s Hamlet, what
about casting the title role three months before formal rehearsals start, with
the director and actor working one-on-one on the text? What about stretching
the rehearsal period, beginning not with blocking but with a week of table
work, just talking through the play with the cast so that everyone understands
the work on the same level? What about adding extra time into the load-in to
allow for set and costume construction? What about adding a dialogue coach or a
fight choreographer or a dramaturg?
It’s no use crying “poor me” on this one, begging off by saying “we don’t have
the resources to rehearse for six weeks or to costume everyone in period
clothing or to hire extra personnel.” No one is forcing anyone to take on the
masterworks of the theatre. They are done, ostensibly, because artists have a
passion to do them. If that is truly the case and artists here want to produce
them in a way that does justice to them, then they need to consider what that
will take, everything that will take. And if the cost is too great for
them to produce the work at one time, they should wait until they can get the
resources together. The great thing about these plays is they aren’t going
anywhere. They’ve been around for years, often centuries, and they will still
be here in a month or six months or six years.
Theatre has always been, and always will be, an arena of limited resources.
But it is founded on imagination, and we may find that the best way to get
beyond the limitations that restrict us in the production process is to apply
the same imagination to it that we do to the art. Some companies are already
starting to do that: the Zachary Scott Theatre Center, which gave set designer
Christopher McCollum extra time to build the posh London residence for The
Sisters Rosensweig; the Austin Shakespeare Festival, where director Noel
Koran scheduled a seven-week rehearsal period for the upcoming Twelfth
Night; Troupe Texas and Root Wy’mn and Anarchy Productions, all of which
use minimalism to thrilling theatrical effect. The evidence is there. See for
yourself what can come from a little flexibility. n
This article appears in August 11 • 1995 and August 11 • 1995 (Cover).