WELCOME HOME

IRA WEITZMAN

WHEN YOU FIRST ENTER the Lincoln Center Theater stage door and pass through the narrow hallway of crowded administrative offices, you might not realize how much activity is going on two floors beneath the ground level and on the roof above the main building structure. There are the three theater spaces: the 1,080-seat Vivian Beaumont Theater, its smaller sister the 299-seat Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, and above it all is the relatively new 112-seat Claire Tow Theater, home of LCT3, which opened in 2012. Though this season celebrates LCT’s 40th anniversary in its current incarnation, the building itself, designed by the eminent architectural innovator Eero Saarinen and the legendary theater designer Jo Mielziner, opened in 1965. The Beaumont and Newhouse are both three quarter thrust configurations, i.e. stages surrounded on three sides by the audience. Thrust theaters go back to the 16th century, predating the now much more popular proscenium where the audience sits directly in front of the stage. In the 1960’s during the rise of the American regional theater movement, thrust stages were all the rage, such as Minneapolis’s famed Guthrie Theater, which was built in 1963. The Beaumont was meant to be a flexible space that could convert from thrust to proscenium with the help of a hydraulic lift that raised and lowered part of the orchestra section of seats whenever desired. Turns out, that idea was ill-conceived and never worked satisfactorily. The actual hydraulic mechanism sat dormant for decades until it was removed in the early 1990’s, replaced by a much-needed orchestra pit. The thrust stage is not a popular configuration in America, particularly in NYC where you can count the number of such theaters on one hand. For years, at the beginning of the history of our building, the Beaumont and Newhouse (first called the Forum) were considered unworkable, and indeed, using the thrust stage effectively can be difficult to say the least; but more about that in a bit.

In the two floors below ground in the LCT building are dressing rooms, offices for artistic and production staffs, shops for prop building and wardrobe, storage space, green rooms with kitchens, and rehearsal studios, not to mention the mechanics for operating the building in the sub-subbasement. All the walls are lined with the original poster art from each play or musical produced here. On top of the building, the Tow Theater level encompasses even more facilities mimicking those below ground. When I first came to work at LCT in 1992, it took me weeks to figure out how to maneuver around the labyrinth of floors, but once I did, I was struck by the miraculous idea that the entire creation of a play or musical could happen within the confines of this building. Meetings, readings, and workshops are held downstairs or upstairs, auditions in the specially designated Shiki Room (named in honor of a generous contribution from the world-renowned Japanese Theatre Company) and rehearsals in the appropriately labeled Large and Small Rehearsal Rooms. There is also a medium-sized rehearsal studio, as legend goes dubbed by Jerome Robbins as the Ballet Room when he was rehearsing an experimental theater project here in the early days. The only things that must be done offsite are the construction of the sets and costumes. Each of the essential activities for almost all plays and musicals produced in NYC, particularly on Broadway, happens in various places, with only the final production in the theater building itself. The wonder of being self-contained has inspired a vast community of writers, directors, actors, designers, technicians, ushers, and administrators to feel that LCT is an artistic home.

The ease and comfort of an all-encompassing building is contrasted by the physical challenges of staging a play or musical in the Beaumont and Newhouse Theaters. Thrusts require a completely different set of staging techniques than those used directing in a proscenium set up. Directors and choreographers know (or quickly realize) that wherever an actor stands on the thrust their back will be to someone in the audience. Constant movement of the cast is necessary to share everything with the whole audience. Counterintuitively, the “power position” in the center of the proscenium stage is probably the weakest place on the thrust. The sweet spot is usually in the corner of the stage in front of the voms (aka vomitoria: entrance or exit passageways derived from Roman amphitheaters) where everyone can see the actor’s face. Performers standing in straight lines are almost never a good idea, but diagonals are our friends. Because the audience seating is steeply raked looking down at the playing area, directors and designers must also pay close attention to the stage floor which is always in view. Veteran directors such as Bartlett Sher (The Light in the Piazza, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, Oslo, Intimate Apparel) who trained at America’s original thrust stage theater, The Guthrie, and Graciela Daniele (Marie Christine, A New Brain, The Glorious Ones, The Gardens of Anuncia) have mastered the tricks of the thrust. Other notable directors have conquered these spaces over the years including Jerry Zaks (Anything Goes, Six Degrees of Separation), Jack O’Brien (The Coast of Utopia), Susan Stroman (Contact), and Lileana Blain-Cruz (The Skin of Our Teeth, Flex) among many more. Of course, there is the occasional production that succumbs to the pitfalls of the thrust leaving some of the audience frustrated, but those shows are, thankfully, in the minority.

To me, the best thing about the Beaumont, Newhouse, and Tow Theaters is the intimacy of seeing a play or musical here. You feel embraced by the action since all the seats are near the stage. As a teenager in junior high school during the first incarnation of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, I used to impersonate a high school student to procure “rush tickets” at a reduced cost. I would sit way off to the side of the Beaumont Theater in the really cheap seats. During a performance of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, I had a premonition that someday I would work in this building! My proximity to the stage moved me. I felt the thrill of immersion in the theatrical experience, and it awakened what would become my lifelong passion for making live theater. Fortunately for me, my premonition came true. I owe it all to the stages here at Lincoln Center Theater, my artistic home.

Photo: Lincoln Center Plaza North, May 22, 1970. Courtesy of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Copyright Bob Serating.