Designing Theaters for All Seasons

Jules Fisher knows his way around theaters, having won a rich share of Tonys honoring his lighting designs for “Jelly’s Last Jam,” “Grand Hotel” and “The Will Rogers Follies.” He also won praise for lighting the outdoor setting at last week’s pre-inaugural concert.

But ask him about the little-known Modular Theatre at CalArts in Valencia and he makes an unchallenged claim: “There is no theater like it.”

Richard Pilbrow works for Theatre Project Consultants, which has offices in Connecticut and England. The firm is currently involved in Los Angeles’ Disney Hall and is responsible for the moving walls and flexible interiors of the just-opened Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, where truly one room fits all.

What you see in Cerritos, he says, could very well be what you’ll see more of in the future--the all-purpose, changeable, flexible, almost-anything-goes performance hall.

In Cerritos and Valencia, it’s the search for the perfect space. Seventy miles and 21 years separate the CalArts and Cerritos theaters. But they share a common hope--to be a room for all seasons.

CalArts’s Modular Theatre reopened Thursday after seven months of refurbishment with a performance of Carlo Gozzi’s 18th-Century play, “King Stag.” It was one of those events fund-raisers dream about, especially those at CalArts who are wrapped up in a $60-million endowment and gift-raising campaign. Big-name guests were on tap and champagne was on the rocks at the school Walt Disney started and where his widow, Lillian, provided the $1.3-million gift that got the theater dusted off, repaired, repainted, and a new lobby attached. It’s a mark of time and of economics that the cost of building the theater in 1972 was about half of what it cost for the refurbishing.

The Modular--designed in the early ‘70s by Jules Fisher and the school’s first provost, Herb Blau--is a theater unlike any other, capable of performing incredible feats and daring changes.

The entire hall’s floor is made up of more than 100 4x4-foot platforms, each able to be raised and lowered in six-inch increments by pistons or columns. Raised, they resemble a flock of service station car lifts, a pneumatic Stonehenge. The audience can be seated anywhere--surrounded by, above, below, around or dead-level eyeball-to-eyeball with the performers.

Side walls are also 4x4-foot waffle-like plastic panels that can swing open to suggest a window, door, entry or exit. At last count it is capable of providing 320 openings. Panels can be acoustically adjusted for recitals, concerts, plays, readings, dance and the multidisciplinary performances that regularly roll out of CalArts.

The swivel seats snap in and out of place on each floor platform, providing seating patterns never imagined by any Ticketmaster floor chart.

The entire room can be refigured in eight hours as long as there is air to pump up the pistons. The Modular has been variously called an adult Tinker Toy, a theatrical Legoland and a graduate school Erector set.

Originally, Herb Blau thought of designing a theater that would resemble a massive filing cabinet where seats and sets would roll out on different levels. He settled for a room of many lifts.

Blau never used the Modular nor has he ever been in it. He left CalArts in an early stormy season before the theater was completed. He’ll return, though, next month as he joins CalArts’ electronic-music pioneer, Morton Subotnick, in a Modular Theatre presentation of “Jacob’s Room,” a mixed-media, operatic work-in-progress by Subotnick.

“People in theater tend to be conservative,” Blau says. “They want to keep the theater as it always has been. When we designed the Modular, we thought of being able to put a performer at any place in the room and to be able to place the audience at any location.”

The Modular Theatre hasn’t exactly caught on. At various times in the school’s history it has either been overused or ignored, abandoned or considered for remodeling. Now it’s ready to come up for a second time. Beyond the college, the modular idea has not been imitated, despite some similar attempts at visionary theater building by European and Japanese designers. Occidental College’s 2-year-old Keck Theater came close. It was designed for multipurpose use and at one time its floor was engineered to rise and fall, but that plan crashed.

The CalArts Modular, even after 20 years, may be the only theater of its kind. Blau claims it is no more expensive to build this sort of theater than the conventional kind.

Economics of another sort became a major factor in the design of the Cerritos Center.

The Great Rage of the ‘60s to build civic complexes with specialized halls for concerts, operas and performances--the Music Center in Los Angeles, the Lincoln in New York, the Kennedy in Washington--may, in this waning century of diminished expectations, not come our way again.

When Cerritos set out on its civic and cultural quest, the hope was for one main hall capable of a fast-turnover schedule of symphony orchestras, chamber groups, ballet companies, cabaret singers, touring musicals and even some arena sporting events.

“It’s a great problem to do all of this,” says Richard Pilbrow. A full symphony requires 65-70 feet of stage width while a theater’s proscenium opening is 40-45 feet across. An orchestra needs to be surrounded by solid construction for good acoustics. Plays require open space to fly scenery and sets.

The Cerritos solution was as creative, if not as uplifting, as the solution for the Modular. At CalArts, floor sections move. At Cerritos, the walls and the stage move on what Pilbrow calls “air pallets,” a system developed by Boeing to move airplane parts effortlessly. Almost all interior elements of the theater--walls, floors and overhead elements--can be shifted into five different configurations.

The interior plan for the Cerritos is based largely on work done 10 years ago by Pilbrow at the Derngate Center in Northhampton, England, where the hall is often reconfigured 3 to 4 times in a week and where in any year up to 370 performances are offered.

“Derngate and Cerritos have the same concept. They are attempts by communities that can’t afford to build several theaters for specialized purposes, but who want in one envelope something that has exceptional flexibility without compromising performance.”

At CalArts, flexibility of another sort is still the major virtue of the Modular. “It is,” says Martha Ferrara, interim dean for the theater school, “the most flexible theater space in the world.”