Openings: The Collaborators

It was the inaugural gala and they were all there, from a pride of Rockefellers to Mrs. Fred Eberstadt in her Yves St. Laurent black mink-and-vinyl coat. And loving it. "Beautiful," exclaimed Saks Fifth Avenue President Adam Gimbel. "Glorious," said onetime White House Arts Adviser August Heckscher. "The most beautiful theater," exclaimed Hollywood Producer Otto Preminger. "Marvelous and effective," said Playwright Alan Jay Lerner. So, last week, with a popping of flashbulbs and champagne corks, the Vivian Beaumont Theater, latest unit to join Manhattan's Lincoln Center, swung into orbit with its opening production, Georg Buechner's 130-year-old Danton's Death.

Some of the celebrities had come to see the play—3-D electronic music, cast of 43, four beheadings—but most had come to glory in the building, the first new legitimate theater to rise in Manhattan for 38 years. There was nothing automatic about its success; no theater has had a more troubled past or has required more midwives to officiate at its birth. In the first place, the $9,600,000 structure is not one building, but two. The theater core and lobby were designed by the late Eero Saarinen; the exterior, which serves as a library, is the work of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Gordon Bunshaft. "This is the least likely marriage I have envisioned," Saarinen wrote his staff. "But it might be very interesting. We can at least call it an affair."

Sets Overhead. The end of the affair did not come until Saarinen's premature death in 1961, but by then final plans were all but complete. Bunshaft, as Mr. Outside, had given the theater a mighty proscenium entrance with a towering concrete truss that spans 150 ft., yet rests on only two columns. Fronting it is a shimmering reflecting pool, set off by British Sculptor Henry Moore's Reclining Figure (see color).

As Mr. Inside, Eero Saarinen teamed up with Broadway Set Designer Jo Mielziner; the two men set out to design the most modern and flexible theater that they could conceive of, including an automated console programmed to control the saturation lighting for a three-hour show, a stage containing a motorized turntable, 36 ft. in diameter, large enough to handle an entire production, with an independently rotating 5-ft. outer ring left over. And tucked away overhead was space for the sets of five shows.

Actors from the Audience. To see how the ideas would work out, Saarinen took over an abandoned movie theater in Pontiac, Mich., built a full-scale mockup. To find out what was needed, Mielziner plotted out 150 plays that he had designed (among them Death of a Salesman, The King and I, South Pacific), discovered that the main action in almost every play took place in a triangle whose base rested on the footlights. Mielziner and Saarinen boldly flipped the triangle so that it was pointing out into the audience, thus doubling the prime acting area available. When the extra thrust stage is not wanted, it can be lowered into the pit so that the theater reverts to traditional form.