Figure 8—Plan of the Beechwood Theatre and Scarborough School. The entire space under the stage is given up to a workshop, and over the vestibule and lobby is a library. Additional dressing-rooms and a property-room are over the stage-level dressing-rooms shown here. The building is practically a complete theatre with two school-room wings. Welles Bosworth, Architect.
Hardwood should never be used for the stage floor. The architect of the excellent Arts and Crafts Theatre in Detroit, in his desire to use only the best of building materials, specified a stage floor of maple. As a consequence, it is almost impossible to support scenery by the use of stage braces, screwed to the floor with a stage screw or “peg.” Soft wood into which the pegs bite easily, is the only sort to use.
It is particularly important in small theatres that the stage walls be as unbroken by entrances as possible. At least two there must be: a large high door, opening to an alley or street, by which scenery may be brought in and taken out, and a small one, a stage entrance for the people of the theatre. It is well so to contrive the building that this one door gives access to the stage from the dressing-room corridors, shops, cellar, stairs, street and front of the house. With many doors opening on the stage, it is difficult to find space for the stacking of scenery without blocking them. It is often desirable to have one dressing room very near the stage or opening immediately upon it, not for the use of the star, but for the player who may happen to have the quickest change of costume.
Stages intended for the housing of large productions and traveling companies should include also a fly gallery, built out from one of the side walls of the stage at a height of not less than twenty feet from the floor. The ropes by which drop curtains, ceilings, and “frame-pieces” of scenery are raised and lowered are operated from this floor and are tied off to pins fastened in the gallery railing, technically known as the pin-rail. In smaller stages, of no great height, it will save space, construction costs and operating expense to have the pin-rail at the floor level.
Before discussing the equipment of the stage in detail, I wish to digress for a moment and consider the provisions to be made for the work that is done out of sight of the audience,—by the carpenters and property men, the seamstresses, the electricians, and the actors before they are ready to appear before the footlights.
Auditorium of the Munich Art Theatre. The plates on this and the following three pages, and the plans on pages 30 and 31 illustrate the interior and exterior appearance, as well as the structural features, of a modern European theatre which comes close to being a model for architects everywhere. Above is a view of the auditorium as seen from a point near the boxes at the back. The decoration in paneled wood (for acoustic reasons), the absence of proscenium boxes, the uniform slope of the auditorium, and the simple decorative curtain, are characteristic of the best contemporary European practice. (The photographs are reproduced by courtesy of the architect, Prof. Max Littmann.)
Exterior of the Munich Art Theatre.
