Found Space

This question is really exciting to me because I’m always looking to choose pieces that push conventions into a realm of accessibility for audience members who wouldn’t typically want to go to the theatre. As a director, I often search for site-specific and found spaces because I love the challenge of repurposing something into a venue where magic can happen and where the setting has a role of its own without needing to be created for the production it holds. A few plays come to mind when I first read Amar’s question, but one that I’ve been interested in exploring most is adapting Dante’s Inferno into a staged production but placing it in an underground parking garage that has nine levels.

The audience would enter from the ground floor through the “gates of hell” as Dante does in the novel, and pass under the inscription that translates to “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” before the play begins. Once entering through the passage on the first floor, Virgil and Cheron would introduce the audience, who take on the role of Dante, to the levels of hell, each movement coinciding with a deeper floor of the underground parking garage. There are actors who are employed on particular levels that tie to the descending circles of hell, and a new guide in each circle tells his/her story through the journey down to the next ring below, until getting to the River Lethe at the 9^th circle and back up to earth and the light of day. (I’m banking on there being an elevator that can hold a small audience and a couple actors back to the ground floor)

The most interesting quality that feels like it could potentially be affective with this production is the physical descent with the actors through each circle, one because of the spiral journey down each level the audience physically has to go on with the actors, but also because it takes the group further and further down below the ground and comfort of the outside world. It would work during the day for this reason, and the return to the world above might be more rewarding if it were produced on a sunny afternoon rather than a dark and scary evening just for the juxtaposition of light and dark.

However, this is a grandiose idea that has a lot of good intentions and not a lot of thought into the problems, and while I think it has the potential to bea really exciting use of space, it would most likely be a fucking nightmare. Without taking into consideration the issues of permits, outside interference (because we probably couldn’t shut down the parking garage for art, I mean COME ON) and the sounds and safety hazards cars and inattentive humans create, a parking garage isn’t the most acoustically pleasing space to work in, so it would be incredibly difficult to work against that challenge for an actor. There’s also the issue of lighting- to use the space as it is, I wouldn’t want to bring in outside sources because it isn’t the safest environment for expensive equipment, but the dull green fluorescents don’t particularly highlight an actor. It could potentially work in favor of the hellish quality Dante is going for in his novel and the hollow echo plus the awful lighting are some of the reasons a parking garage appeals to me, but by and large I think the challenges at this phase of brainstorming far outweigh the cool use of space with such a classic.

I don’t definitively agree with Kantor’s opinion, because I think there is a lot of opportunity to do good work in a theater. Do we sometimes need to think outside of the box and embrace using the space in an innovative way? Absolutely. But has our exploration of the art form up to this point lead us to a sterilized approach to the work? I don’t think so. It arguably has to adapt to the world since things are constantly changing, but the fact that even bad theatre creates a dialogue proves that we can’t always know what to expect.