For a new commercial production, the producer contracts with a playwright for a script; raises funds from private investors called “angels” (who may invest after seeing a fragment of the play at a special staging known as a backer’s audition); hires the artistic and technical staffs; rents a theater and all the necessary equipment for the stage; and oversees publicity, ticket sales, and all the financial aspects of the production. Box-office operations are handled by a general manager. In theater companies that do repertoire, a season of several plays, the producer may be responsible for selecting the repertoire, although this is often the task of the artistic director. The producer also arranges tours, subsidiary productions, and the sale of subsidiary rights, including film, television, and amateur production rights. Most theaters also have a theater or house manager, responsible for theater maintenance and audience control.
Director
The director makes all artistic or creative decisions and is responsible for the harmonious unity of a production. The director, usually in conjunction with the designers (and perhaps the producer), determines a concept, motif, or interpretation for the script or scenario; selects a cast, rehearses them; and usually has a deciding role in scenery, costumes, lights, and sound. Movement, timing, pacing, and visual and aural effects are all determined by the director; what the audience finally sees is the director’s vision. From the time of the ancient Greeks until the 17th century this role was generally fulfilled by the playwright, and from the 17th to the end of the 19th century directing was the function of the leading actor of a company. Under such conditions, however, ensemble performance was rare.
The concept of the modern director can be traced to the 18th-century English actor-manager David Garrick, although George II, duke of the German principality of Saxe-Meiningen, is generally referred to as the first director; touring Europe with his theater company in the 1870s and ’80s, he exercised absolute control over all aspects of production. In the 20th century there has been a recurring tendency for directors to use a script simply as a starting point for their own theatrical visions, resulting in unorthodox and frequently spectacular productions often called “theatricalist.” Such productions often achieve clarification or emphasis of themes or images in the text, or a new relevance for classic scripts, sometimes—admittedly—at the expense of the integrity of the original. Some notable directors of this type were Vsevolod Meyerhold, Max Reinhardt, Jean Louis Barrault, and, more recently, Peter Brook, Peter Stein, and Tom O’Horgan.
The director usually selects the cast through auditions in which performers read sections of the script to be produced, present prepared scenes or speeches, or, when appropriate, sing and dance. The director of a musical production is aided in the auditioning process by the musical director and the choreographer. Although auditioning is acknowledged to be a flawed method, it does allow the director to judge the talents and qualities of potential performers. Actors may also be hired on the basis of reputation, recommendation of agents, or simply for physical appropriateness.
Performers.
Acting implies impersonation, and most plays require the creation of complex characters with distinct physical and psychological attributes. In the broadest sense, however, a performer is someone who does something for an audience; thus, performing may range from executing simple tasks to displaying skill without impersonation, to believably re-creating historical or fictional characters, to exercising the virtuosic techniques of dancers and singers.
The director and cast of modern productions generally rehearse from two to six weeks, although certain European subsidized theaters have the luxury of several months’ rehearsal time, and certain types of Asian theater require several years of formal training (the bunraku puppet theater of Japan and the kathakali dance theater of India are notable examples). During rehearsals, blocking (the movement of the performers) is set, lines are learned, interpretations are determined, and performances are polished. If a new play is being rehearsed, the playwright is usually present to change lines and to rearrange, add, or delete scenes as necessary. In the case of musicals, songs and dances may be added or dropped; the choreographer rehearses the dancers, and the musical director rehearses the singers.
Most professional actors in the U.S. belong to Actors’ Equity Association, a labor union. Canada and Great Britain also have equity associations, and equivalent unions exist in other countries. Virtually all commercial theaters, most regional and dinner theaters, and many summer-stock theaters in the U.S. are union houses; therefore, they may hire only Equity actors except under special conditions. The union determines salaries, length of rehearsals, number of performances per week (normally eight), working conditions, and benefits. Although acting is often thought to be a lucrative profession, it is so for only a very few—the stars. Base salaries for actors and dancers are lower than in most other trade professions. Moreover, theater does not provide steady employment or job security. Of the more than 20,000 Equity members, some 85 percent are unemployed at any one time.
Set Design
In Europe, one person, frequently called a scenographer, designs sets, costumes, and lights; in the U.S. these functions are usually handled by three separate professionals. Set design is the arrangement of theatrical space; the set, or setting, is the visual environment in which a play is performed. Its purpose is to suggest time and place and to create the proper mood or atmosphere. Settings can generally be classified as realistic, abstract, suggestive, or functional.
Realistic
A realistic setting tries to re-create a specific location. During the height of naturalism at the end of the 19th century, directors strove for total verisimilitude, leading to such practices as purchasing real meat to hang in a butcher-shop scene or transferring a complete restaurant onto a stage. The American producer-director David Belasco’s insistence on realistic sunset effects and the like led to significant improvements in lighting design and equipment early in the 20th century. But naturalism is also illusionism; such settings are designed to fool the audience. Walls of a stage set are usually not made of wood or plasterboard, as they would be in a real house, but are constructed from flats—panels of canvas stretched on wooden frames—supported from behind by stage braces. Flats are lightweight and thus easy to move and store, and they are reusable. Trees and rocks may be constructed from papier-mвchй; elaborate moldings are made from plastic; wallpaper, shadows, and inlaid woodwork are more often painted than real; false perspective may be painted or built into the set. The stage floor may be raked—inclined upward from the front of the stage (downstage) to the back (upstage)—and furniture appropriately adjusted to compensate for audience sight lines or the normal effects of perspective. The result is the illusion of a room, or park, or forest, but the reality may be a carefully distorted conglomeration of canvas, glue, and paint.
From the Renaissance to the mid-19th century, realistic settings generally consisted of a painted backdrop and wings—flats placed parallel to the front of the stage to help mask the offstage space, and often painted to enhance the scenic illusion. Some furniture or freestanding set pieces were sometimes placed on the stage, but generally it was an empty space for the actors. The settings were “stock,” consisting of an interior set, an exterior set, and variants that sufficed for all performances. Most interior scenes since the early 19th century have utilized a box set—a room from which the fourth wall (the one nearest the audience) has supposedly been removed, leaving a room with three walls, a ceiling, and three-dimensional furniture and decor. Such an arrangement posits the spectator as voyeur. In actuality, the setting is once again illusionistic; the arrangement of furniture and the positions and movements of actors are designed for audience convenience.
Even in the most realistically detailed setting, the designer still controls much of the setting’s effect through choice of colors, arrangement of props and set pieces (is the room sparsely furnished or cluttered, spacious or claustrophobic?), and placement of entrances. All this has a profound, albeit subtle, effect on the audience.
Abstract
The abstract setting, most popular in the early 20th century, was influenced largely by the Swiss designer Adolphe Appia and the English designer Edward Gordon Craig. The theories of these two men have influenced not only design in general but much contemporary theater. An abstract set does not depict any specific time or place. It most often consists of platforms, steps, drapes, panels, ramps, or other nonspecific elements. Most common in modern dance, abstract settings work best in productions in which time and place are unspecified or irrelevant, or in which the director and designer want to create a sense of timelessness and universality. This is common, for instance, in Shakespearean productions, in which locale may alter rapidly, is frequently not indicated by the script, and may be suggested adequately by a few props and by the poetry itself. Abstract settings place more emphasis on the language and the performer and stimulate the spectator’s imagination. Costuming thus becomes more significant, and lighting takes on great importance.
Suggestive
Most settings in today’s commercial theater are suggestive, descended from the so-called new stagecraft of the first half of the 20th century. Sometimes called simplified realism, its scenic effect is achieved by eliminating nonessential elements—an approach championed by the American designer Robert Edmond Jones—or by providing fragments of a realistic setting, perhaps in combination with abstract elements, such as a window frame suspended in front of black drapes. Universality and imagination are encouraged through the lack of detail; yet some specificity of time, place, and mood is achieved. Such sets may appear dreamlike, fragmentary, stark, or surrealistic.
Functional
Functional settings are derived from the requirements of the particular theatrical form. Although they are rarely used in dramatic presentations, they are essential to certain kinds of performance. An excellent example is the circus, the basic scenic elements of which are determined by the needs of the performers.
Stage Facilities
The use and movement of scenery are determined by stage facilities. Relatively standard elements include trapdoors in the stage floor, elevators that can raise or lower stage sections, wagons (rolling platforms) on which scenes may be mounted, and cycloramas—curved canvas or plaster backdrops used as a projection surface or to simulate the sky. Above the stage, especially in a proscenium theater, is the area known as the fly gallery, where lines for flying—that is, raising—unused scenery from the stage are manipulated, and which contains counterweight or hydraulic pipes and lengths of wood, or battens, from which lights and pieces of scenery may be suspended. Other special devices and units can be built as necessary. Although scene painting seems to be a dying art, modern scene shops are well equipped to work with plastics, metals, synthetic fabrics, paper, and other new and industrial products that until recently were not in the realm of theater.
Lighting Design
Lighting design, a more ephemeral art, has two functions: to illuminate the stage and the performers and to create mood and control the focus of the spectators. Stage lighting may be from a direct source such as the sun or a lamp, or it may be indirect, employing reflected light or general illumination. It has four controllable properties: intensity, color, placement on the stage, and movement—the visible changing of the first three properties. These properties are used to achieve visibility, mood, composition (the overall arrangement of light, shadow, and color), and the revelation of form—the appearance of shape and dimensionality of a performer or object as determined by light.
Until the Renaissance, almost all performance was outdoors and therefore lit by the sun, but with indoor performance came the need for lighting instruments. Lighting was first achieved with candles and oil lamps and, in the 19th century, with gas lamps. Although colored filters, reflectors, and mechanical dimming devices were used for effects, lighting served primarily to illuminate the stage. By current standards the stage was fairly dim, which allowed greater illusionism in scenic painting. Gas lighting facilitated greater control, but only the advent of electric lighting in the late 19th century permitted the brightness and control presently available. It also allowed the dimming of the house-lights, plunging the auditorium into darkness for the first time.
Lighting design, however, is not simply aiming the lighting instruments at the stage or bathing the stage in a general wash of light. Audiences usually expect actors to be easily visible at all times and to appear to be three-dimensional. This involves the proper angling of instruments, provision of back and side lighting as well as frontal, and a proper balance of colors. Two basic types of stage-lighting instruments are employed: floodlights, which illuminate a broad area, and spotlights, which focus light more intensely on a smaller area. Instruments consist of a light source and a series of lenses and shutters in some sort of housing. These generally have a power of 500 to 5000 watts. The instruments are hung from battens and stanchions in front of, over, and at the sides of the stage. In realistic settings, lights may be focused to simulate the direction of the ostensible source, but even in these instances, performers would appear two-dimensional without back and side lighting.
Because so-called white light is normally too harsh for most theater purposes, colored filters called gels are used to soften the light and create a more pleasing effect. White light can be simulated by mixing red, blue, and green light. Most designers attempt to balance “warm” and “cool” colors to create proper shadows and textures. Except for special effects, lighting design generally strives to be unobtrusive; just as in set design, however, the skillful use of color, intensity, and distribution can have a subliminal effect on the spectators’ perceptions.
The lighting designer is often responsible for projections. These include still or moving images that substitute for or enhance painted and constructed scenery, create special effects such as stars or moonlight, or provide written legends for the identification of scenes. Images can be projected from the audience side of the stage onto opaque surfaces, or from the rear of the stage onto specially designed rear-projection screens. Similar projections are often used on scrims, semitransparent curtains stretched across the stage. Film and still projection, sometimes referred to as mixed media, was first used extensively by the German director Erwin Piscator in the 1920s and became very popular in the 1960s.
The lights are controlled by a skilled technician called the electrician, who operates a control or dimmer board, so called because a series of “dimmers” controls the intensity of each instrument or group of instruments. The most recent development in lighting technology is the memory board, a computerized control system that stores the information of each light cue or change of lights. The electrician need no longer operate each dimmer individually; by pushing one button, all the lights will change automatically to the preprogrammed intensity and at the desired speed.
Costume Design
A costume is whatever is worn on the performer’s body. Costume designers are concerned primarily with clothing and accessories, but are also often responsible for wigs, masks, and makeup. Costumes convey information about the character and aid in setting the tone or mood of the production. Because most acting involves impersonation, most costuming is actual or re-created historical or contemporary dress; as with scenery, however, costumes may also be suggestive or abstract. Until the 19th century, little attention was paid to period or regional accuracy; variations on contemporary dress sufficed. Since then, however, costume designers have paid great attention to authentic period style.
As with the other forms of design, subtle effects can be achieved through choice of color, fabric, cut, texture, and weight or material. Because costume can indicate such things as social class and personality traits, and can even simulate such physical attributes as obesity or a deformity, an actor’s work can be significantly eased by its skillful design. Costume can also function as character signature, notably for such comic characters as Harlequin or the other characters of the commedia dell’arte, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, or circus clowns.