Theater Planning

Facilities for Performing Arts and Live Entertainment

Gene Leitermann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138889002
• eBook ISBN: 9781317496878
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book introduces the concepts of theater planning, and provides a detailed guide to the process and the technical requirements particular to theater buildings.

Part I is a guide to the concepts and practices of architecture and construction, as applied to performing arts buildings. Part II is a guide to the design of performing arts buildings, with detailed descriptions of the unique requirements of these buildings. Each concept is illustrated with line drawings and examples from the author's extensive professional practice.

This book is written for students in Theatre Planning courses, along with working practitioners.

Part I
Context and Process

Chapter 1
Theater Buildings

This is a book about the planning and construction of buildings for live entertainment. It’s about how theater buildings come into being. But not just theater buildings—also concert halls, opera houses, casino showrooms, and other related building types.

If we are part of a theater company—a manager, director, technician, or actor—we go to the theater to prepare a performance. If we are members of the public, we go to experience the performance. A theater is animated by its inhabitants and truly comes alive in performance. But theater buildings have an existence separate from their inhabitants—before they are occupied and even before they are built. Long before the first performance takes place, an owner decides to build a theater, an architect undertakes the design, and a builder makes it real. This book is about that part of a theater building’s story.

The owner, the person or organization commissioning the theater, expects a well-functioning building serving their specific needs. Fortunately, most architects share this view of the theater building as a functional response to a need. Architects also view theater buildings as aesthetic objects in their own right. Since architecture and theater are both arts, then theater buildings are works of art that serve as vessels for art. The builders the owner hires to execute the architect’s design are exercising craft, but they probably aren’t focused on making a work of art. They’re simply tasked with building a surprisingly complicated building.

A theater building is ideally all of these—a functional response to a need, a work of art, and (we hope!) a routine construction project. On a truly successful building these potentially conflicting objectives are kept in balance. Emphasizing only art may result in a stunning architectural achievement that is unworkable as a theater. Emphasizing function and craft without art may result in a serviceable but utterly uninspired and uninspiring theater. Striving for this balance is one reason why theater design and construction is such an interesting and challenging endeavor.

Another reason for the interest in theater design and construction is the fascination that the theater building itself elicits. Foucault cited the theater as an example of a heterotopia—a space that is simultaneously both mythic and real. The overlapping of real and mythic space within a theater can be expanded upon: the theater building exists, in physical space, in relationship to a city or landscape. The stage (or performance area) is a physical space in which the actors move; it exists within the theater building and in relationship to the audience area. The scenographic space occupies the physical stage space and suggests a fictional space in which the characters of the play live. Layered on the scenographic space is the dramatic space created by language and theater craft. This dramatic space encompasses both the space in view of the audience and the fictional world “off stage.”

Let’s consider a specific example. An audience member sits with 490 fellow patrons in the Yale Repertory Theatre, a converted Baptist church in the center of a college town on the East Coast of the United States, for the American premiere of A Lesson from Aloes. On the stage, the scenogra-phic space suggests “the backyard and the bedroom of a small house in Algoa Park, Port Elizabeth, South Africa in 1963.” Actors James Earl Jones, Maria Tucci, and Harris Yulin occupy the stage. Their characters—Steve, Gladys, and Piet—sit or stand in the backyard of Gladys and Piet’s home. Offstage are Port Elizabeth and South Africa, the prison from which Steve was just released, and a society still under government repression. The audience is aware of each other’s presence and their own physical reality. They’re aware that James Earl Jones is on stage, but they’re also aware of Steve sitting in his friend’s backyard. The actor/characters and audience are simultaneously in two spaces—in a theater and in South Africa, an ocean away.

We may never articulate this overlapping of real and fictional space, but we are instinctively aware of it. And we understand that somehow the fictional space is always a latent presence. Perhaps that’s why even an unused theater building anticipates the performances that could take place. And why, once occupied, a theater is changed by the performances it houses.

Theaters as a Building Type

The heterotopic quality is one of the ways in which theater buildings are a distinct building type. In fact, theaters possess multiple characteristics that make them an extraordinary building type. And these characteristics are additional reasons for the fascination they hold for both architects and the public.

Theaters Have a Limited Function

Theater buildings exist for the preparation and presentation of live performing arts. A theater can also be used as a lecture hall, cinema, or meeting place, but its range of uses is limited. This lack of versatility reinforces the perception of the theater as a separate space with a quality of “otherness.”

Theaters Are a Persistent and Consistent Building Type

With the exception of the Middle Ages, the theater has been a persistent architectural type from ancient Greece up to the present day. Places of worship and dwelling places have been as persistent, but have not maintained the remarkable consistency of form that theater buildings exhibit. The historic context is part of what makes a theater building such an appealing design commission. It probably also explains the desire of some architects to break free of convention and invent new theater forms.

Multiple and Varied Meanings Are Attached to Theater Buildings

A theater building can be a showcase for the ruling or moneyed classes, a monument to civic pride, or a locus of social and political change. Theaters can be perceived as churchy—in both religious and secular senses—and as places of debauchery.

The social meanings attributed to theaters vary over time and place, and between the types of theater building. In the cities of ancient Greece and Rome, the theater was a civic monument and central to communal life. The Greeks used the natural shape of hillsides for their theaters, and often them integral parts of the city plan, emphasizing their monumentality and centrality. In contrast, the playhouses of Elizabethan London were located on the margins—on the South Bank of the Thames or to the north of the city, not within the city walls. This was reflective of the marginal and ambiguous social position of theater and actor. It hadn’t improved a century later when Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson declared the playhouse “the temple of the devil.”

In yet another contrast, Haussman made the Palais Garnier (1875) a centerpiece of his ambitious plan for the urban renewal of Paris. Indeed, an opera house was seen as both a monument and a necessary credential for any cultured city, an idea that prevailed well into the twentieth century. The Sydney Opera House (1967) was described by one of its designers as “a civic symbol for a city which seeks to destroy once and for all the suggestion that it is a cultural backwater.” In the mid-twentieth century, monumental performing arts centers (not just opera houses) were still seen as a means of urban renewal—in London the Royal National Theatre (1976) was sited on the South Bank of the Thames not to marginalize it, but to lay claim to the South Bank as a place of culture. Similarly the Lincoln Square neighborhood in New York was razed to accommodate the construction of Lincoln Center (1962–1969) as part of that city’s revitalization of the area. And the idea of civic pride persists. The lead donor for the Segerstrom Concert Hall in southern California (2006) described it as the “symbol of Orange County’s pride and self-esteem.”

By the early twenty-first century, all but a handful of cities in the United States had erected some form of performing arts center. Construction of monumental theaters has all but stalled in the United States, but the “prestige” performing arts center is still popular elsewhere in the world. In the United States, the current trend is on regional playhouses, school facilities, and smaller community centers that emphasize the particip...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Context and Process
• Part II Planning
• Selected Bibliography
• Index