INTRODUCTION
Architecturalineptitudes are more likely to be perpetuated and in time condoned than those in any other art. Generally speaking, a bad painting is scrapped, poor music remains unpublished and unplayed (along with much good music, no doubt), and bad books, after a time, cease to be read. But a building is somehow inescapable. Having a durability that needs no treasuring, and being erected more often for use than for beauty, a building generally achieves longevity, and the bad art crumbles no sooner than the good stone. Usefulness, great initial cost, sturdy stuff, are all against a building’s being put out of the way merely because it is ugly. Or even, as a matter of fact, because it does not successfully serve the purpose for which it was erected.
As people live in a house, or work, day after day, in a store or factory or public building, they become used to inconveniences, bad arrangement, and lack of proper facilities. They complain for a time, perhaps, and then forget. And after a while, when the house has become home, or the large building has gathered tradition, a sort of admiration settles upon it. What is really plain ugly or wrong or bad appears quaint and full of “atmosphere.” And is imitated. Style and tradition embalm the very features that make the building a bad building.
In the theatre, this perpetuation of musty, tradition-hallowed faults of construction has been carried to an extraordinary extreme. There is more ritual, one might believe, in constructing a stage and auditorium in accordance with honored custom than there is in the building of a church. In the more modern theatres, there have been notable improvements over the theatres of a generation ago; but in the auditoriums and stages of schools, clubs and societies, and in other public or semi-public buildings in which such facilities are included as a sort of side issue, the ancient law is observed. The average high school stage seems to be inspired by the faint recollection of a visit to the theatre, supplemented by the examination of old prints illustrating the stage of Inigo Jones.
******
To-day, by a concerted movement throughout the country, hundreds of community houses are being planned as war memorials. These buildings are designed to include facilities for all the social and recreational interests of the communities they will serve.Practically all of them will include stages and auditoriums. At the same time, hundreds of new school buildings are being planned, and these, too, will have stages intended to be useful for dramatic productions. But unless architects have at their disposal much more technical knowledge of the producers’ requirements than in the past, it is certain that most of these auditoriums and stages will be bad—as are the auditoriums and stages in most existing schools. It is to forestall some of the common mistakes that this paper has been prepared—to describe them in detail, and to set up against them the ideal features toward which the designers of such structures should strive.
I believe that the memorial halls are destined to play so large a part in community life that they must have removed from them every obstacle to their fullest usefulness. In every community of moderate size and culture there is a releasing to-day of dramatic impulse, and folks turn more and more toward the theatre as a mode of group expression. The Little Theatre movement, with its eighty-five or more centers renewing their life, now that the war is over, is an evidence of the birth of a new theatre in this country. Innumerable community pageants and masques are an indication that people turn to the drama as a means of expressing their corporate æsthetic. The production of worthy plays by schools and colleges, the interest such institutions are showing in the writing of plays and in the fostering of an indigenous drama, the widespread discussion of the drama and the theatre by clubs, reading circles and drama leagues, all are portents of a theatre that shall be a vital and integral part of our daily community life. And at the very moment these words are being written, the commercial theatre that has so long held the arena is being convulsed by a revolution that may mean nothing short of its eventual extinction. 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.
One of the finest services that the memorial community house can render is to provide a home for the dramatic impulse of the community—not a makeshift home, but one worthy of the fine art of the drama and the fine craft of the theatre. It does notmatter whether or not the building is to be large and pretentious or small and inexpensive; but it matters that it should be fitted to the least detail to fulfill its function efficiently and beautifully.
I do not write these pages as an architect or as an instructor of architects, but as one knowing fairly well the conditions which a stage has to meet when it is used for dramatic representations of any sort. In the course of a rather varied experience in the theatre—amateur and professional, little and big, commercial and “art”—I have encountered practically all the mistakes that are made in stage construction. I have found them to be of two sorts: mistakes of imitation, and mistakes of ingenuity.
The first type of mistake is easy enough to account for. Usually, the auditoriums and stages of schools have been intended primarily for use as “chapels” or assembly halls. There has been a feeling on the part of school authorities that the dramatic instinct is in some way unwholesome and that its expression should be discouraged. As often as not the design of the school stage has been a conspiracy to thwart its growth. The attitude of the authorities has recently changed somewhat, but with the change has come very little more intelligence in the matter. Where, before, they were careful to obstruct, they are now merely negligent, leaving the architect to his own devices. The proceeding is very much at random, and experts are rarely consulted. It is not wholly the architect’s fault that he builds as he does. 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. In addition, there are one or two mistakes peculiar to high schools,—notably the omission of an entrance to the stage, save on one side.
The other type of error which one encounters is usually made by a clever man who has observed the more modern practices in building large theatres and attempts to adapt them to a space utterly inadequate or wrongly shaped for the purpose. Usually he cramps his space hopelessly and renders it even less useful for its purpose than it might have been had no such ingenuity been displayed. The finely equipped stage of the Artists’ Guild Theatrein St. Louis is an admirable replica in little of a fully equipped stage of the commercial theatre. But the stagehouse is so small that the fly gallery at the left and the paint bridge at the back are a constant embarrassment. The stage would have been more workable if these devices had not been employed.
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. There must be means for them to enter the presence of the audience, and exit. The space on which they appear must be illuminated. Somehow the space set aside for the player shall be able to suggest, either by means of scenery as it is commonly understood, or by some conventional arrangement, permanent or variable, a world in which the character he portrays might move.
Beginning with this much specification and no more, I propose to work out with some definiteness the principles underlying the construction of an ideal stage and the relation of the auditorium to it, bearing in mind all the while the fact that many of the stages in the War Memorial Buildings and little theatres are to be small, that large sums cannot always be spent on them, and that they must in most cases serve a variety of purposes.
If we remember always the function our stage is to fulfill, we have two good sources from which to draw practical details for its construction, and a third source, debatable but interesting. First, there are the errors which I have referred to. Some of these I shall discuss in detail in the next chapter. Then, most valuable of all sources, are the conclusions to be drawn from the practice of the most skilled architects and artists of the theatre. And finally, to be considered briefly, there are speculations as to the demands which the drama of the future may make on the theatre,—demands that can be forecasted inaccurately at best, but deserving a glance, perhaps, if only to call attention to the certainty that such demands will be made.