The Theater: Down with the Proscenium!

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"To see Shakespeare plain, you have to see him on a platform stage," said Brooks Atkinson, venerable drama critic of the venerable New York Times, last week after watching the production of seven Shakespearean plays at the Theater Festival of Ohio's Antioch College. The plays were all minor (e.g., Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens), the actors were hardly more than adequate, the productions unfinished. But even so, the performances on Antioch's open-air platform stage were, in Atkinson's opinion, proof that "the sort of marshmallow Shakespeare represented by the Katharine Hepburn As You Like It a few seasons ago ... is obsolete today. For it is time we pulled loose completely from the grandiose pretensions of the 19th century style of Shakespearean producing. It is time we came face to face with the plays."

Atkinson was not urging a return to the primitive conditions of the Globe Theater ("It would be sentimental buncombe not to use the advantages that have accrued to us"). But he insists that "it is the essence of Shakespeare that today fascinates audiences, who, for the first time, are getting through the polite surface of 19th century showmanship into the heart of the dramas." Convinced that the whole theory of the proscenium arch that has dominated the English-speaking stage since the Restoration is beginning to crumble, Atkinson urges that "not only Shakespeare but modern playwriting needs the poetic freedom of some sort of platform stage." He warns: "Anyone who now builds a theater tied permanently to a proscenium stage is likely to find himself with a mausoleum on his hands before he has amortized the mortgage."