One more thing should be provided for the actor, not indispensable, but making for fellowship and comfort—the feature known in German theatres as the Konverzations-Zimmer and in older English and American theatres as the Green Room. This should be a comfortable lounge, furnished more as a room in a home or club, than in a theatre, and stocked with books and periodicals relating to the theatre.
With the actor carefully considered in the matter of cleanliness and cheerfulness backstage, a new pleasure will come into his work. Likewise, with the other workers of the theatre. Closest to the actor, perhaps, the wardrobe people. In the ideal theatre two rooms should be set aside for the wardrobe, one for the making of clothes and another for their storage. The sewing room, needless to say, should be well lighted, should have a space partitioned off as a fitting room, should be provided with proper closets in which to hang dresses in the process of making, and should be large enough to allow for a number of seamstresses and a large cutting table. There should be a built-in closet equipped with shelves and drawers in which to store cloths, trimmings, findings, etc., for the making of costumes. For the costume storage room, a loft space that might otherwise go to waste can often be utilized. This room should have long closets, fitted with bars on which dresses can be hung, and should have drawers in which other items of dress can be packed—hats, shoes, wigs, stockings, tights, etc. These drawers should be numerous enough to allow for the sorting out of costumes by colors or periods, and should be properly labelled.
Each of the mechanical departments should likewise have its two rooms, one a shop and the other for storage. The carpenter, if the scenery is built in the theatre, often can use the space under the stage for building. If he cannot build his scenery there, either another place should be set aside or the scenery should be built outside the building. He should not use the stage. It must be kept free for rehearsals. He should have, however, a room in which to keep his tools, draw his plans, and file his ground and framing plans, bills, time-sheets, etc.
The matter of storage space for scenery is to be determined wholly by the amount of space at the builder’s disposal and the use to which the theatre is to be put. If many productions are to be made, a space should be provided for a scene-dock, adjacent to the stage but separate from it, unless the building is small, in which case a storehouse elsewhere may be used. Scenery should not be allowed to accumulate on the stage. The theatre of the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburgh has an excellent dock, shown on the ground plan, Figure 4.
The property department needs a shop for the making of furniture, papier mâché work, etc., and a storage room in which furniture and other stage furnishings can be stored. Often one large room can be made to do for both.
The electrical department likewise must not be overlooked. There must be closets for the keeping of incandescent bulbs, lamp dyes, plugs, connectors, cable, wire, and other electrical hardware, gelatines, color frames, etc. There must be provision in the shop for the dyeing of lamps, testing, repairing, etc.
The property and electrical departments, like the carpenter’s, must also be fitted in a sense as offices, for the keeping of electric and property plots, full records relating to past and coming productions, bills, orders, receipts, time sheets, and like data.
It may be objected at this point that these various demands presuppose a large-sized plant with elaborate equipment. As a matter of fact, they apply quite as much to the tiniest of little theatres—even more so, for in such, proper ordering of space and isolation of separate activities is equivalent, in getting efficiency, to more ample space less carefully sub-divided. For, inevitably, these various kinds of work must be done in the theatre, and the people who do them must find space here or there for their work, and the things they make must be kept somewhere. Unless each job and each product is assigned its proper corner, the building is soon a clutter of stuff, accumulating dust, getting jostled about and broken. Then we are back at the old, dark, dirty theatre we are trying so hard to improve upon. The provisions discussed above, though they are not on the stage, are very much a part of it, and go far toward making it an instrument of precision.
In community buildings and schools, the various workshops, rehearsal room, etc., can often be combined with rooms serving other purposes. In any case some provision for them is quite as important as the open stage itself.