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University Daily Kansan Supplement
Experimental Theatre At
"Let us have a free theater where there is room for everything but incompetence, hypocrisy, and stupidity! . . . where we can be shocked at what is horrible, where we can laugh at what is grotesque, where we can see life without shrinking back in terror if what has hitherto lain veiled behind theological or aesthetic conceptions is revealed to us." August Strindberg
By Tom Winston
KU is contributing to healthy change and development in theater through the KU Experimental Theatre series, which offers seven plays each season in a variety of categories.
Experimental Theatre has become a favorite of many KU drama patrons because of the close relationship which exists between the actors and the audience. The audience is surrounded on three sides by the stage, making audience-in-the-round theater instead of theater-in-the-round, in which the players are encircled by the audience.
In addition, the seats are swivel chairs, making it possible for a director to abruptly change a setting from one stage leg to the other without losing his audience. The patrons have only to swing around and watch another part of the stage. For similar reasons, a director can have things happening in more than one part of the stage, circus fashion.
The stage is never more than about four feet from the audience. There is no proscenium or other hanging to restrict one's view or to separate the actor from the audience. The action on the stage is almost in the audience's lap, making it possible for the actor to play to the audience in a personal manner not possible in a larger playhouse.
likely to feel it is part of the action on the stage than in a less intimate setting. The communion between audience and actor can be so successful that it is difficult to tell who is actually a member of the audience and who is planted there as part of the action.
There are special problems which accompany such close surroundings. Makeup, costumes and sets must be especially realistic to be effective. Lighting effects also must be more carefully concentrated and calculated. A new sound and lighting booth was installed in the KU Experimental Theatre recently to make the facilities more flexible.
or possible in a larger purpose.
An audience, therefore, is more
KU's 80-seat Experimental Theatre, located in back of the University Theatre on the third floor of Murphy Hall, was an afterthought. Original plans called for the area to be used as scene storage space. However, the small playhouse was included in revised plans at the suggestion of Lewin Goff, chairman of the University Theatre program now on leave in Austria.
Plans are being made to make the theater area itself more flexible within its architectural limitations, according to William L. Kuhke, instructor in speech and drama and director of the Experimental Theatre. The Theatre already can do "open" staging, and it has portable
Communion between stage and audience is intimate —
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prosceniums which can be hauled out for conventional use if desired
"We hope sometime to be able to remove the seats and put bleachers on the stage, and have theater-in-the-round as well as audience-in-the-round." Mr. Kuhlke said.
The Experimental Theatre has flexibility in three arbitrary areas: relationship of actor to audience, scenery systems, and purpose.
Currently possible or in the planning stage are productions in the round, encircling the audience, proscenium stage, and split level staging with simultaneous fronts of action. Sets of blocks may be used to suggest a scene, or an entire building or several buildings may be used on various parts of the stage. For example, in O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" and Robert Anderson's "Tea and Sympathy" a house-minus appropriate walls—was built onto the stage.
The theater can easily handle a full-scale play or a concert reading, or a combination of these, as it did last May during its drama symposium productions of new and unpublished plays. The actors moved in character, but costumes and properties were merely suggested and the actors carried their scripts.
"Much of the work we do with scenery concerns the finding of simplified and cheap scenic systems," Mr. Kuhike said. "We do quite a bit of formal staging—such as last season's 'Antigone' by Jean
Anouilh—with blocks and levels designed to provide places for actors to walk and sit, but not designed to designate a particular place, an aesthetic arrangement of blocks, and so forth. 'Antigone's staging was no more like the palace of Thebes than the rings of Saturn
"We have a permanent set of blocks, screens, levels and furniture, all designed to be used for any shows to suggest a location, but not to represent a specific locale," he added.
Experimental productions are presented in Swarthout Recital Hall in addition to the Experimental Theatre. Swarthout has a seating capacity of 400, five times that of the Experimental Theatre, but the Recital Hall's atmosphere still is intimate and its acoustics, planned for music, are exceptionally live.
Swarthout Recital Hall also makes possible the use of techniques which are generally unworkable in the Experiment Theatre itself. A director, if he desires, can plant more people in one place
In Swarthout, as in the Experimental Theatre, the audience may be drawn into the action of the play by having actors in the audience at strategic places. In fact, the play frequently is "staged" all over the hall. It does not take too many actors bobbing up out of nowhere to make a patron distrust the friend he came in with.