Theatre Design & Technology - Dec 1972 - 16

DUDE RECYCLES THE BROADWAY THEATRE
lESLIE ARMSTRONG CORTESI & C. RAY SMITH

Theatre and architecture have had a long relationship.
The great periods in theatrical literature have always been
accompanied by significant developments in theatre architecture. And now, as in the past, the new theatre - Environmental Theatre - is structuring a different relationship between set designers and architects.
Basically, scenery has become architecture in Environmental Theatre, and whoever goes to a new theatre piece
like DUDE, the recent musical by Galt MacDermot and
Gerome Ragni, had better be prepared for some surprises.
When ticket holders walked into the 1924 French Classical lobby of the Broadway Theatre at 53rd Street, where
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF had just completed its recordbreaking run, they already had some inkling that they
were in for a new kind of theatre experience. First, the
tickets instead of being printed for "Orchestra", "Mezz.!
Loge" or "Balcony" were labeled "Mountains", "Trees",
"Foothills" and "Valleys" - a series of designations
cleared by Bess Myerson's Consumer Affairs Bureau.
From the mirrored be-chandeliered, and classically detailed inner lobby, playgoers with tickets marked "Foothills" or "Mountains" were directed up the broad stairs to
the balcony. Those with tickets to the "Valleys", "Trees",
and "Treetops" were directed to the orchestra doors.
When they entered the orchestra, instead of the usual
seats and a view of the proscenium arch, they found narrow passages along the quasi-Adamesque side walls of the
theatre, with flanking walls of blank panels of gypsum
board. At the end of each tunnel-like passage, at about the
fifth row from the original stage, a flight of crude steel
stairs led over the old orchestra pit and up 14 feet to the
height of the first row of the balcony.
Beneath the usual Broadway house ceiling - a confection of low white arches and domes panelling off deep
blue walls and pendentives - a new kind of theatre was
laid out. Directly beneath the shallow oval dome at the
center of the auditorium, where we traditionally expect
the chandelier, was a mesh of ladders, ropes, trapezes and
garlands suspended above a l"Ound tree stump shaped
stage. This stage, one of the several acting areas of the new
DUDE performance space was right up there against the
balcony rail, hanging out in space.
The balcony served as a principal audience seating area
but seats were also located on all other sides of the new
stage, affixed to a new floor of fireproof plywood extending across the entire orchestra including the old orchestra

pit, through the proscenium arch, and over the old stage
floor. The old orchestra was covered over by the deck
above and surrounded by gypsum board partitioning
forming the tunnel-like passages below.
Around the perimeter of the central performing space
ramps and platforms were located on several levels along one side of the auditorium, high up across the proscenium arch, along the other side wall, and across the
balcony. These were the highways of Dude's progress.
They rose up out of the new performing space on scaffolding, the same scaffolding that supported the deck. The
construction had an almost Miesian purity about it - the
visible highway structures representing the invisible structure of the new performing floor.
To those unaware of the new constructions, the highways might have looked like the remains of a Ming Cho
Lee unit setting of scaffolding-supported platforms. They
were different. They ran outside a large portion of the
audience, around the central stage, and connected the
audience seated in the stage house with the audience in
the balcony. At the same time the arena stage below provided another focus.
"GOOD-BYE TO BROADWAY"
With DUDE's spatial reorganization, it is clear that the
New Theatre has arrived in a full scale, commercial production on Broadway. Th is new view of theatre, however
short-lived, proclaims that the rigid, static, axial, separatist
proscenium stage will no longer rei~n in solitary supremacy.
What the new school of Environmental Theatre posits
in place of the old Broadway convention is a more involved, commited, participatory theatre; an ail-encompassing mix of theatre with life. It attempts to break down all
boundaries between audience and actor, between seating
and stage, stage and setting, setting and the architecture
enclosing it. It aims to merge, meld and intermingle the
roles and the placement of audience and performer in
order to make them equal participants, partners in action.
So in DUDE, as performers used the crossways and aisles
of the audience area as acting space, the environmental
setting merged stage area with acting area. As Theatre
Crafts magazine has observed, "The settings in Environmental Theatre have expanded in scale to become the
total stage and acting area - to become the whole theatre."

THEATRE DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY

DECEMBER. 1972

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