Arena‐Style Theatre

Arena‐Style Theatre (Theatre‐in‐the‐Round). Although some hailed the proliferation after World War II of arena‐style playhouses, in which audiences surround the stage, as a revolutionary departure, others saw it as the extension of the more open, thrust‐stage playhouses that had characterized many Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres before the proscenium‐style auditoriums took over at the time of the Restoration. Still others saw such staging merely as an adaptation of standard circus practice to the presentation of more traditional drama. Advocacy of such staging had arisen earlier. Surprisingly, none of the great artists, such as Mrs. Fiske and Sarah Bernhardt, who were forced by their rejection of the Theatrical Syndicate, or Trust, to perform in circus tents at the turn of the century, apparently carried the opportunity to its logical conclusion, preferring to convert the tents into something resembling proscenium auditoriums. In this they were following the practice of most tentshows that were long popular in American backwaters. But by the 1920s such progressive designers as Robert Edmond Jones were toying with the idea, which began to achieve worldwide testing a decade later. A major American experimenter was Professor Glenn Hughes of the University of Washington. In 1932 he converted the penthouse of an old hotel into a theatre‐in‐the‐round seating sixty patrons. His success was such that by 1935 his “Penthouse Theatre” had moved to larger quarters in a lodge near the campus, and in 1940 he built a more permanent, somewhat elliptically shaped arena theatre on campus. By that time other cities ranging in size from St. Paul to Lewistown, Montana, had tried similar enterprises with varying success. World War II temporarily halted the spread of the movement, but with peace, arena stages began to appear in many places. Some of the first were the summer stock tents, cheaper and easier to erect than standard playhouses. Regional theatres were also in the vanguard, with Margo Jones's Theatre 47 in Dallas, Washington's Arena Stage, and New York's Circle in the Square among the most noteworthy. Except for this last space, Broadway theatres are all proscenium and retain the traditional audience‐actor spatial relationship. Yet on occasion efforts have been made to turn a Broadway proscenium stage into arena, as witnessed by the productions of Candide (1974), Equus (1974), and Copenhagen (2000), which put part of the audience onstage.