STAGE : ‘Doing the Play’ Isn’t All That Easy

There’s a time to acquire and a time to divest: to strip down to the basics and begin again. Critic Richard Gilman suggested the other day in the Village Voice that this moment had arrived for the American theater.

Not the American musical theater. In musicals, you want lots of “production”--sets, lights, costumes. In fact you need them. Imagine a bare-stage production of “Starlight Express.”

But the spoken theater, Gilman suggested, should try a season or two of austerity. Store the gels, strike the sets, put everybody in simple costumes and just do the play. This will save on the design budget and remind everyone that the play, after all, is the thing.

Having recently returned from the O’Neill Center, I was sympathetic to Gilman’s suggestion. O’Neill plays are performed on a bare stage, with improvised costumes and props, and no cadenzas from the lighting booth. The actors even carry their scripts, which ought to kill the illusion completely.

But if the script is good enough, you buy into it. “Terra Nova” was first performed on a sweltering July night in the O’Neill barn. A handful of actors pulling metal modules across the linoleum floor made the audience “see” a crew of Antarctic explorers dragging their sleds over the ice.

See them where? In the mind’s eye, Horatio--the place where a theater performance really gets imprinted. The Taper later did “Terra Nova” with real sleds and parkas, but I never believed the play more than that night in the barn.

A second reason for approving Gilman’s suggestion was that I had just seen the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s production of “The Inspector General,” in which a troupe of fine comic actors had to negotiate a set with a soft floor and an uphill rake in order to make a point about the play being a nightmare. Better no set at all than a set that gets in the actor’s way.

Yet there was something bothering about Gilman’s suggestion. It seemed to discount the visual side of the theatrical performance; to suggest that when you came down to it, a play was basically a collection of well-spoken words. If so, then plays wouldn’t need to be done on the stage at all. Their real home would be radio.

But playwrights write for the eye as well as the ear. Take the last moment in “The Sea Gull.” Over there: the family playing Lotto under the lamp. Over here: the doctor whispering to the visitor that the son has just shot himself.

Clearly Chekhov wants a double image here, of one life ending, and life going on. The director will decide whether the image is cruel or kind, but he will make the most of the eye’s ability to process two things at once.

Plays in the theater happen in space, which has to be accounted for, no matter how austere the production. In fact, the more austere it is, the more crucial each design choice will be. Where should the tree stand in “Waiting for Godot,” and do we move it in Act II?

And what will it look like? Will it be a real tree, blasted in a nuclear holocaust, or will it be a symbolic tree? If symbolic, what will it make the audience think of? Will your “tree” be a hat-rack or a stepladder? Hat-racks are for hanging things on. Stepladders point up.

“Doing the play” turns out to be not that simple. Your production will have a look, whether you want it to or not, and that will affect the audience’s reaction to the play. One has seen bare-stage productions as dreary as if they were set in a basement. One has seen other such productions where the “empty” space came alive and where the “simple” costumes were a joy to the eye.

In such a case, it’s a good bet that there was a designer backstage. To be simple without being boring takes expertise. It also can cost money. Harold Prince once thought he could save a bundle by dressing the Jets and the Sharks in “West Side Story” in ordinary blue jeans--what real street kids would wear, after all. When he saw how dull blue denim looks under the lights, he understood why his designer, Irene Sharaff, had insisted on hand-dyed jeans at $75 a pair.

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,” says Shakespeare’s narrator in “Henry V.” That sounds like the audience has to do all the work. Not at all. The visual cues from the stage have to be right, or the audience may see zebras instead. What lands on the inner eye depends on what passes through the physical eye.

How, for instance, to suggest the horses in “Equus”? It was a real question when “Equus” was just some words on paper. Actors in horse suits? Never--that was vaudeville. What about putting the actors in rehearsal clothes and just having them mime horses? Better, but you also needed a sense of size and mystery.

Designer John Napier put the actors on elevated shoes, suggesting the boots that Greek tragedians wore, and gave them ribbed silver cages for their faces. Suddenly the “horses” were there, much more powerfully than when actual horses were used in the movie version. Napier’s solution looked absolutely simple. But it took a craftsman to hit upon it.

Gilman knows, of course, that theater productions are meant to be seen as well as heard. Other theater lovers don’t think about this enough, particularly those based in that bastion of the text, the university. (Particularly the English department.)

They still think of the physical apparatus surrounding a play as a rather tiresome impediment--and when it comes comes to Shakespeare, they often have a point. The funniest, and certainly the swiftest, “Twelfth Night” that I’ve ever seen was presented on a bare stage at UC Santa Barbara by a handful of British actors who handled all the roles, plus the birdcalls.

This is much wittier than doing “Antony and Cleopatra” with real sand and real snakes, as the L.A. Theatre Center did a couple of seasons ago. No, by all means, don’t drown the actors in clutter. But if you’re directing a Chekhov, don’t you want to convey a sense of his world--the lamp over the Lotto table, the fringe on the tablecloth, the wicker chairs, the long dresses?

Maybe you don’t. Maybe you want to sweep out all that evocative rubbish and start from ground zero. But having swept it all away, you may decide to put some of it back. Chekhov’s people do live in a world of furniture, and it’s usually to the point to show it. (It’s also comforting to the actors, who like to have things to touch.)

How barren do we want theater to be? Even at the O’Neill, a considerable amount of thought goes into the placing of those modules. Some directors have even slipped in a gel from time to time. The vigilance that has be kept up against excessive “design” at the O’Neill suggests that there’s something natural in the impulse to dress up a stage. When we see an empty space, we want to adorn it.

Consider, too, that theater has its roots in religious ritual--events where the gods supposedly came down to earth. When Oedipus came on at the Theatre of Dionysus, he was not in his work clothes. He was wearing a magnificent robe. Shakespeare’s theater also spent a healthy amount of money on “production,” as can be seen from the accounts book. Theater has always suggested masks and costumes. Do away with that, and you do away with the mystery. And maybe the audience.

One or two bare-bones productions might be refreshing. But by the third show, the eye would be ready for something to look at again, and why not? The play’s the thing, but when we go to the theater we also go to see a show . Not necessarily by Andrew Lloyd Webber.