There would not seem to be a more flagrant violation of dramatic immediacy.Īnd yet the design is, as of late, ubiquitous. Even before Covid-19, many ambitious productions had been taking place not in the three-sided black boxes that defined the experimental zest and emerging punk of the late 1970s, or the crowd-pleasing theater-in-the-round pioneered in ancient Greece and Rome and revitalized in the mid-20th century, but in elaborately engineered glass cubes that evoke the International Style’s high Modernism and the minimalist penthouses of the contemporary metropolis. The actors may not literally be within our grasp, but the lack of a barrier between them and us, the illusion that we are, for once, actually in the room - the sound of the human voice in anguish or joy, a carafe of water crashing to the floor - has never seemed more stirring and essential. IN A WORLD filtered through screens, a condition made even more acute during pandemic lockdown, the theater’s most anachronistic thrill would seem to be watching lives unfold before us.
