Othello: act III, scene 3. A towering column, with its lower end sharpened like the point of a lead pencil, is seemingly driven into one end of the central platform. Othello and Iago stand at the base.
IAGO: Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief
Spotted with strawberries in your wife’s hands?
Jessner fills his stage with steps. He seems unable to get along without them. He must have platforms, levels, walls, terraces. They are to him what screens, towering shapes, great curtains are to Gordon Craig. In every production Jessner, through his artist, Emil Pirchan, provides some permanent foundation besides the stage-floor for the actor to play upon, some arrangement of different levels. In his Richard III it is a wall all across the stage, with a platform along the top at the base of another wall, and for certain scenes a flight of steps like a pyramid placed against the lower wall. In Othello Jessner uses two platforms, one on top of the other, each reached by two or three steps, the lower a long ellipse almost as large as the stage, the upper one smaller and proportionately broader; upon the upper platform Jessner places certain indications of setting. For Grabbe’s Napoleon he uses four or five steps rising sharply to a platform perhaps four feet high. Sometimes this platform is supplemented by a high one pulled apart in the middle to make opposing hills, redoubts, vantage points in the battle scenes.
The Jessnertreppen are the key to the physical things in this director’s productions. They give the stage one general shape for each play. They establish a formal quality. They tend to banish representation in scenery, since only indications of setting harmonize with their frank artificiality. And—their main purpose—they provide the director with most interesting opportunities for manœuvering his actors.
One of the simplest and most obvious of these is a new way of making entrances. Such steps as are used in Othello and Napoleon go down at the back as far as they rise in the front, and below that the director opens a trap or two in the floor. Thus he is able to have an actor walk straight up out of the back of the stage, and appear in a dominating position in the middle of the action. Jessner uses this novel means of entrance again and again in Othello, and it is always fresh and effective. For the return to Cyprus the Moor marches triumphantly up these steps, to the welcome of his wife.
Far more important, however, is what Jessner does with the front of the steps. They may be there to help a formal stage with very little scenery to seem steadily interesting even to audiences that expect the conventional gauds of the theater. But their true office is to make possible a sort of three-dimensional direction for which Jessner has become renowned. Ordinarily the actor moves in only two directions upon the stage—right and left, and towards the footlights and away from them. As a matter of fact, the latter movement is so unsatisfactory from the point of view of any spectators except those in the balconies, that the actor really has only one plane in which he can move visibly and expressively. Jessner does more than add a third dimension when he sends his actors up and down the steps. He also gives a great deal more significance to the movement towards and away from the audience.
Othello: act 4, scene 2. Cyprus. The castle. On the central platform are set two curved screens of dull salmon pink. Behind, the quivering darkness of the unlighted cyclorama. Emilia, dressed in deep crimson, stands in the foreground.
Beside the sense of movement—always an intriguing thing in the theater—Jessner provides in his steps a mechanism for solving many dramatic problems. His actors do not spend their time getting out of the way of the actors behind them. They are not shuttling back and forth in an effort to let the audience see all the players at the same time. One actor cannot “cover” another if he stands on steps. Even a very large crowd can appear on such a stage without the individual speakers being lost. As Lee Simonson showed in his use of different levels for the Theater Guild’s production of He Who Gets Slapped, with the proper sort of elevations on the stage a large number of actors can play a very complicated scene without confusing their relationships or assuming awkward positions.
But a great deal more important than this negative virtue is the positive contribution of steps in permitting many more and much finer compositions than the flat floor permits. Jessner composes freely in three dimensions. He composes both for esthetic and for dramatic effect.