Please note that this entry is cross-posted from the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company’s production blog at http://www.pcshakespeare.com

Before the pandemic closed it semi-permanently (it will be coming back in a new location later this year!), the Dog Story Theater was Pigeon Creek’s Grand Rapids home.  The space was a small storefront theater, which in our thrust stage configuration held about 65 audience members.  I often hear both theater practitioners and audience members talk about spaces like this as if they are something that a producing organization settles for, as if everyone’s ideal choice of theater space would be a huge proscenium stage with a 1700 seat auditorium.  Ever wondered why Pigeon Creek specifically seeks out spaces like the Dog Story Theater and our other touring venues?  Let’s talk about why a performing organization like Pigeon Creek would seek out smaller, unconventional performance spaces.

1. Proscenium stages create a distance and a division between the actors and the audience.  If you don’t know the term “proscenium,” it refers to the archway like a picture frame that you see in what we in the modern US think of as a conventional or traditional theater.  This type of theater has audience seats which all face the stage from the same side, this physical archway that separates actors and audience, and often a long distance between audience seats and the stage.  These stages have really only been standard theater architecture since the mid to late 1800s, and earlier forms of plays like ancient Greek theater or Shakespeare were actually performed in theaters where the audience was on multiple sides of the stage.  Proscenium stages became the standard because they contain wing space (at the sides of the stage) and fly space (at the top of the stage) where technological elements are hidden from the audience.  They also became standard around the time that electrical lights were starting to be introduced into theater spaces and it became possible to turn the lights off in the audience’s part of the theater while leaving lights on on the stage.  Proscenium stages are excellent for theater productions with large scale spectacle such as very large casts, dance choreography that uses a lot of space and large patterns, epic sets that need to change quickly (think Les Miserables), and lighting design that requires a large number of lighting instruments.  That does not mean, however, that proscenium stages are the ideal physical space for all kinds of theater.

2.  Storefront theaters and other smaller, non-proscenium spaces create an intimate relationship between actors and audience.  Play productions that focus on intensity of character relationship and seek to put the audience right up close to the action work extremely well in storefront spaces,  If a production uses direct audience address and wants to blur the line between the audience’s space and the physical space of the play (as all of Pigeon Creek’s productions do!), then a space that is flexible in terms of its set-up is an added bonus.  In a storefront space, we can put the audience on multiple sides of the playing space, giving everyone a vantage point in which they can notice fine details of the actors’ performances.

3.  Storefront theaters and other smaller, non-proscenium spaces create an intimate relationship between audience members.  A recent article in Virginia Living described performances at the American Shakespeare Center (where audiences sit in a thrust configuration and are in the same light as the actors) as “A community immediately made, all part of the same conversation.”  In unconventional theater spaces, audience members can often see the faces of other audience members across the way.  Vocal responses like laughter and gasps ripple through the audience because they are in such close proximity to  each other as well as to the actors.  That feeling of immediate community who are all sharing this one, unique performance experience is heightened in a storefront theater space.

4.  Non-proscenium spaces give every audience member a unique view of the stage.  A proscenium stage is configured to make sure that every audience member sees the same thing.  A non-proscenium space gives every audience member a slightly different view of the stage.  You could attend the same play 5 different times in a small storefront theater, and see a slightly different story depending on where you are sitting.  At Pigeon Creek, our actors and directors have special training in staging scenes for an audience who sees the action from multiple sides.  The goal isn’t to give everyone the same view, but to make the view interesting from every vantage point.

5.  Storefront theaters make designers and directors get creative. Theater artist Orson Welles famously said “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” In other words, having to work within constraints fosters creativity and innovation.  The limitations of a smaller space which may not have been originally constructed for theatrical performance make set and lighting designers, fight and dance choreographers, and directors come up with ideas that they might never have conceived if they were working within the seeming comfort of a conventional proscenium space.  These artists are less able to rely on conventional theater wisdom about how to design or create stage pictures and movement.

6.  The transformation of space is delightful.  There is something wonderful about seeing a space used in an unexpected way, with walking into something that was once a storefront, or is usually a classroom or a library or a restaurant or a park, and seeing it transformed into  the setting for a play.  It engages a sort of double-consciousness in us as audience members, where we can see the magic and the thing underneath it at the same time.

The next time you come to one of our performances at what seems like an unconventional space, maybe you will notice some of these features that make those spaces our first choice for how people experience our shows!