Theatre in the round
Theatre space in which the audience surrounds the stage / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A theatre in the round, arena theatre, or central staging is a space for theatre in which the audience surrounds the stage.
Theatre-in-the-round was common in ancient theatre, particularly that of Greece and Rome, but was not widely explored again until the latter half of the 20th century.
The Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre in Seattle, Washington was the first theatre-in-the-round venue built in the United States. It first opened on May 19, 1940 with a production of Spring Dance, a comedy by playwright Philip Barry.[1] The 160-seat theatre is located on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1947, Margo Jones established America's first professional theatre-in-the-round company when she opened her Theater '47 in Dallas. The stage design as developed by Margo Jones was used by directors in later years for such well-known shows as Fun Home, the original stage production of Man of La Mancha, and all plays staged at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre (demolished in the 1960s), including Arthur Miller's autobiographical After the Fall. Such theatres had previously existed in colleges, but not in professional theatre buildings.
Theater in the round is a particularly appropriate setting for staging of dramas using Bertolt Brecht's alienation effect,[2] which stands in opposition to the more traditional Stanislovski technique[3] in drama. Whereas the Stanislovski school of acting attempts to immerse the audience so deeply in belief of its characters that they can imagine themselves as the character, the Brechtian alienation effect deliberately tries to remind the audience that this is a fictional representation. Alienation techniques include tactics as obvious as displaying placards or posters around the set and visibility of lighting fixtures. In round theatres, alienation may be achieved by partially lighting the audience so that people are always reminded that they are in a theatre watching a drama.