Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1979 - 23

the bedroom where the young woman is going to sleep that
night. In the fifth scene the antagonist and the other woman,
who serves as her assistant or helper, have a scene together
in which we are led to expect that something terrible is going
to happen to the young woman. During the sixth scene, the
assistant comes into the young woman's bedroom and warns
her to leave. The dialog is exactly the same in the sixth scenes
of both stories, although the specific characters and situations
are, of course, different. Both of the young women say that
they are not going to leave, that they want to find out what's
going on in the old house. They have premonitions of danger,
of trouble, and they begin to look for the source of danger.
One carrying an oil lamp, the other a candelabra, they begin
to wander and search-simultaneously now-through the
dark old houses to which they have come. Essentially that is
where we leave the narratives at the end of the play. We never
find out what the real danger is, and we never find out what
happens to the young women.
Thus there are two versions of the structural story which alternate. We have what I called an "A" and a "B" story. In
scene "A-1 ," for example, the young woman or heroine has
had an automobile accident-her car has run off the road at
night-and she is alone in the darkness. The other woman
who arrives is a mute. She gives the young woman a message,
inviting her to stay the night at a nearby house, and they set
off. In "B-1," the heroine has arrived at a small train station in
the middle of the night, and she is waiting there in the darkness expecting someone to meet her. In a moment, a blind
woman appears. She has been sent by a doctor to take the
heroine to their rest home. Because the blind woman obviously can't drive and there is no one to drive them, they set off
through the woods. The two stories progress in this way. They
are basically the same-they have the same narrative, or
story-structure-but the characters are different, the specific
places are different, and the details of the situations are different. Using Etienne Souriau's term, we could say there are
three character "functions" in the play-the heroine, the antagonist, and the helper of the antagonist---€ach embodied in
two different ways.

The Performance Space
M: How have you organized the performance space for
Double Gothic?
K: First of all, the audience is seated on two sides of the
space-they are really two separate audiences. They can't
see each other because they are on the opposite sides of a
black box. The playing space is enclosed at the top and sides
by sheets of black plastic. The floor is covered with black felt
paper. The side of the box facing each of the audiences is a
black scrim. When the spectators take their places, they can't
see the audience on the opposite side. Some never knew
there was another audience--or did not know until there was
laughter or applause from the other side of the black construction.
The box actually contains six scrims hung parallel to each
other. The audience is seated outside the first and the sixth
scrims. Inside there are five corridors, each four feet wide. A
light appearing in one corridor-let's say corridor number
one, close to the audience on the East-will appear bright to
that audience because it is seen through only one scrim. But
the audience on the West will see it through five scrims, and it
will appear very dim to them.
Once the performance begins, lights are turned on inside
the black box at different distances from the spectator. Each
of the corriders is lit by three lights pointed straight down, so
that the only light is coming from above. The lamps are blue
parabolic-reflector flood lights. Thus we have black scrims, a
black floor, everything enclosed in black, and blue lights shining straight down. When a scene is playing, only the three
lights in one corridor are lit.
Scene A-1 begins at the East side of the space. The scene
is fairly brightly lit, although it is night, and the lights are quite

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