Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

I’ve been harboring the speculation for some time now that we’re in a golden age of theatre design. What gives me that idea? What I see on stages, mainly—tiny, design-on-a-dime stages as well as big, well-appointed ones.

There’s a moment I distinctly remember, for example, in director Lou Jacob’s modestly conceived Off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard’s The God of Hell a few years ago when Randy Quaid, playing a good-natured Midwestern galoot, swung open the front door of the shabby farmhouse David Korins had designed to perfection to represent incipient heartland Republicanism, and we in the audience could hear the ambient sound of the windswept prairie rush into the room. For me, that sound cue, at once scrupulously naturalistic and ominously symbolic—it was created, along with original music, by an artist named Lindsay Jones—did as much to drive home Shepard’s point about a runaway government’s Orwellian threats to American hearths and homes as did the script or the performances.

When I see shows like Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Poetics: a ballet brut—an irresistible, wordless concoction of movement and attitude, which I caught at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar festival in early 2008 (it premiered two years prior at Portland, Ore.’s TBA Festival)—it makes me think design has gotten so good that designers don’t even need materials anymore to knock the socks off an audience, just an indelibly apt scenographic concept. That set-free (but brilliantly designed) show began with performers and spectators confined nose-to-nose behind a curtain on the stage of the Public’s Newman Theater, then expanded away from the stage-bound audience onto a conventional-sized thrust, and finally exploded into the big rectangular house’s 300-seat auditorium, to exhilarating effect. Nothing changed but the volume of the space—reverse space, you might call it, given the performance layout—but that was enough to make the Aristotelian reference in the show’s title buzz with delicious implications.

Preparing this special Approaches to Theatre Training issue, dubbed “All Eyes on Design” and devoted to the latest developments in design training, has done nothing to disabuse me of the golden-age notion. Listening to the voices represented in these pages—not only those of the most accomplished American design professionals of recent generations but of such international figures as France’s master of environmental design Jean-Guy Lecat and Russia’s iconoclastic innovator Dmitry Krymov—can be as inspiring as it is informative.

Theatrical design is a field not without its problems and its challenges, some of which are explored in depth here—but it is also, I’m convinced, an arena awash in unequalled creativity, a commodity that the likely budget crunches of coming seasons will make even more essential. Keep an eye out and prick up your ears: Designers have a lot to say.