II. How to Identify a Theatre

Now that you have some sense of how dramatic theatre started at Athens thousands of years ago, it might be useful to understand how to recognize a theatre if you actually stumble across one in everyday life. We’ll start with the buildings.

Theatres are distinguished from other buildings by being very shiny and having awkward bulges in strange places. In the age of Gehry, this isn’t always a surefire way of identifying one, but it can sometimes be helpful. Let’s start with the bulges. Sometimes, when you walk around a small town or the theatre district of a larger one, you’ll see a building that has a boxy extension to the top of the back of the roof. The reason, for this, obviously, is the “fly-space” underneath, where scenery and curtains can be kept above the stage before they’re lowered in. You can’t have a modern theatre without it, so the architects generally just stick it on top like a water tower or a million-dollar penthouse. When the multipurpose rooms of the Restoration started to turn into proper theatres, they needed people who knew how to work ropes and tie knots, and out-of-work sailors were drafted into running “the flies.” The sailors used low whistles to signify the raising and lowering of the scenery; this was the origin of the superstition that it’s bad luck to whistle in the theatre. Soldiers and sailors were closely associated with the theatre of the 18th and 19th centuries, not least because they could easily be rounded up from the pubs and alleys nearby and put into service as extras or “supernumeraries.”

Now that you’ve identified a likely theatre by the big box on the top, you should investigate the front door, where you’ll likely find the “marquee.” Performance studies scholars sometimes call this the first important location of the performance event. Under the brightly lit sign above the door, you’ll find people out for a smoke or some fresh, non-lethal air before the show and between acts. If you frequently attend theatre, you’ll notice that experienced theatregoers usually linger a moment here. It’s where the theatre meets the city.

Walking into the lobby (this would be the point at which, before going any further, you should ensure that it is actually a theatre), you’ll likely notice a small window or two off to the side. In recent years, large flat-screen monitors have popped up alongside the window to prepare you for the ticket price shock at the window. Commercial theatre is very big business — you can check out the weekly numbers here [Playbill.com] and here [Variety.com]. This business changes slowly. Fifteen years ago, tickets on Broadway were still being torn by hand, and not long before then, vans would drive around the theatre district late at night collecting bags of stubs to be manually tallied by the theatre owners and producers in their hidden lairs above midtown. (Where there’s big business and hot tickets, there’s also the chance for corruption, and the New York Attorney General has sometimes cracked down on the “ice” — box office chicanery.) Finally, if you’re looking to buy a full-price ticket (hint: there are almost always online coupons/codes or discount purchasing options), you can save a lot of money in fees by buying directly from the box office.

Having somehow negotiated your admission, you then enter the room itself. At the door, you’ll be met by an usher who scans your ticket, and a little further in, another usher will hand you a program. In the larger theatres of New York, these are union professionals, and in the smaller spaces they’re usually volunteers bartering their labor for the chance to see the show. In either case, be kind, though it’s no longer considered necessary to tip them. The room that you enter hasn’t changed much in the last two hundred years. All those rows of seats in front of you are called the orchestra seating, the same name given to the round space on the ground 2500 years ago. The orchestra made up of musicians, if there is one, is probably hidden in a pit underneath and in front of the stage. This was an innovation of a nineteenth century opera composer named Wagner, who envisioned the music coming from a “chasm of sound.” If you had to take a really long path to your seat because there was no center aisle, you can also thank Wagner for that innovation, though it’s increasingly rare. If you look behind you, you might see a few levels of seating. Conventionally, the top one is called the Balcony, and the small one in the middle is the Mezzanine, which is Italian for “the small one in the middle.” In some older theatres, you’ll notice a separate entrance for the Balcony — you can likely guess why.

Before you, you see the stage. We’ll get to that later.

All around you, you’ll likely see lighting instruments pointing at the stage. These are powerful lights, usually about twenty or forty times as powerful as the lamp on your desk. Strangely, although commercial theatre producers bend over backwards to keep almost every other “backstage element” from view, the lights and cables seem to be the exception to this rule.

As you crane your neck and look above the stage, you can make out the scenery hanging from ropes in the darkness. (Steel cables are more likely, though some old “hemp house” theatres still have counterweight systems constructed entirely from rope.) The folks at the “fly rail” who raise and lower things are probably no longer sailors, but members of IATSE, the professional stagehands’ union. In fact, in the commercial theatre, everything has been designed so that a good proportion of the folks involved can make a living at the work that they do. But that doesn’t mean that theatre is the thing at the center of that large machine. That would be like saying that mathematics is defined as being the thing that professional mathematicians with adequately funded pension plans do. The workers, the stage, the building and everything in it make a single jewel-case for the thing that we’re talking about here — theatre.

And that can happen anywhere.