Central and Flexible Staging: A New Theater in the Making

By Walden P. Boyle

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1956.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520345966

Book preview

Central and Flexible Staging

Central and Flexible Staging

A New Theater in the Making

by Walden P. Boyle

drawings by John H. Jones

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES • 1956

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press • Berkeley and Los Angeles Cambridge University Press • London, England

Copyright, 1956, by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 56-5301

Designed by John B. Goetz

Foreword

This book by Walden Boyle carries me back to another one, Continental Stagecraft 9 in which I shared the authorship with Robert Edmond Jones. I’m afraid we never put the case against the peepshow stage, the fourth-wall theater, as well as Brooks Atkinson did at the time when Margo Jones’s polemic Theatre- in-the-Round appeared: "How did we ever get saddled in New York [he might have said in the whole Occidental world] with the rigid proscenium stage which assumes that everyone is going to write like Ibsen and Pinero, and that Romeo and Juliet cannot be staged without $60,000 worth of scenery and twenty-four sweating stagehands? Oppressed, perhaps, by a feeling that we were dangerous radicals, we came out with no such blast as Atkinson’s with its description of Broadway stages as merely holes in the wall of an auditorium."

Of what we saw in Europe and in our mind’s eye, Jones and I liked best the curtainless stage of Copeau and the arena playhouse that, in our imagination, we made out of the one-ring Cirque Medrano, also in Paris. In that same year of 1922, T. Earl Pardoe, according to Margo Jones, created a theater-in-the- round at Brigham Young University, and she traces the idea further back to a production by Azubah Latham in a gymnasium of Teachers College, New York, in 1914. Norman Bel Geddes drafted the plans for an arena theater in 1930, and Glenn Hughes brought one into active being for the University of Washington two years later. By the time Miss Jones had created her own version at Dallas in 1947, central staging had become a reality in perhaps fifty or sixty cities.

Today the idea of the theater-in-the-round has become so familiar that Boyle feels little need to attack the playhouse with a proscenium arch. Rather, he explains how small community groups can make a less expensive stage for themselves, and goes on to develop and document something that Atkinson pointed to in his review of Margo Jones’s book. Much as that critic seemed to prefer the theater-in-the-round to the stage in the hole, Atkinson was rightly critical of the new form: Wouldn’t it be more practical if it ceased being arena staging and reverted to the classical forms in which the audience was seated on three sides.

The arena theater has many virtues, as Boyle explains, but it has a weakness, too. It can become quite as stiff and limiting as the peephole playhouse. We are in danger of leaping from one frozen form to another. Between them lies a better concept—the flexible theater.

The flexible theater came into being in 1924 when Gilmor Brown and Ralph Freud turned a room in a California house into the prototype of the present Playbox in Pasadena. Okhlopkov gave Moscow a flexible theater in 1932. In 1942, when Freud was building up the drama curriculum of the University of California, Los Angeles, and found himself saddled with a 2,000-seat auditorium, he created out of a classroom a theater that could provide central staging and yet could be made over into half a dozen different forms. These ranged from end-staging, with or without a curtain, to the horseshoe-type that Atkinson suggested. And, as Freud’s colleague at UCLA, Boyle had a great deal to do with exploring and developing the possibilities of this kind of theater.

Central and Flexible Staging may do three things for producing groups that cannot find or cannot afford a conventional theater. It shows how they can make their own playhouse quite economically; it shows, through a carefully developed and thorough text, well illustrated, how they can use such a playhouse; and thirdly—and perhaps this is even more important—it places the proper emphasis on the virtues of the flexible theater as against central staging. This very necessary book makes it clear that the permanent arena narrows the choice of dramatic material, renders the production of many fine plays ineffective or impossible, and finds its best fare—ironically enough—in the peephole dramas of Ibsen and the narrower realists. I hope that the people who may now be turning toward the creation of theaters-in-the-round will read this book before they freeze their new playhouses into a form as rigid as the structures that for three centuries have divided the actors from their audiences.

Kenneth Macgowan

Contents 1

Contents 1

Chapter I Views and Backgrounds

Chapter II The Adaptation of a Space

Chapter III Choice of