Interview: Environmental Theatre

Interview: Jerry Rojo Environmental Theatre JerryRojo is a leading environmentaltheatre designer who has worked with The PerformanceGroup, the ManhattanProject, The Shaliko Company, and others. Among the productions he has designed are: Dionysus in 69, The Tooth of Crime, Mother Courage and Her Children (with James Clayburgh), Endgame, and Ghosts. He is also a professorof theatreat The University of Connecticut where he has staged many productionsin the Mobius Theater. This interview was conducted by the Editorsof PAJ on December30, 1975. PAJ: When did you first begin to think about environmental theatre? ROJO: I was trained as a traditional designer in traditional schools-in what I call the scene-painting school of design. I guess I'm a purist in many ways. I like to find what are the elements of something, and then go after those elements. To me the theatre is accepting living time and space. When I came to The University of Connecticut in 1961 to teach I began working with Mike Gregoric, a teacher there. He and I began playing around with different things in open space work. I was interested in the "Happenings" movement. Then I went back to school [Tulane University] to work with Richard Schechner because he was writing and teaching that kind of work there: I got turned on even more by his intensity in this kind of work. Then Richard asked me to come to New York and help him with Dionysus in 69. At that time, because there was so much attack coming at you from all corners, both from other theatre people, politicians, and what not, you really had to get your guns together and your definitions of the form. I began to study and understand it more and more because I was forced into a defensive position for working in this radical way. I had an art background, a lot of art training in working threedimensionally . That's where I think traditional designers go wrong. They're more concerned with painting, not the architectural space. I am interested in building. I love building sets of architecture and here I discovered this art form in the theatre. 20 PAJ: In his book Environmental Theater Schechner writes: "The first scenic principle is to create and use whole spaces." How do you as a designer put into practice that principle? ROJO: For me there are two basic directions: one is the space that is fixed, like the Mobius Theater; another is a space which is open. Every production works in different ways. In the Manhattan Project's Endgame, for example, there was an open room and we dealt with that room. I felt that the audience should sit in some kind of a rotunda situation and should somehow be insulated from the performers. That's how I came up with a lighted screen. The performers in effect couldn't see the audience but the audience could see the performers very well, but not other audience members. Out of that grew a kind of carnival effect-like a merry-go-round in a way-the image of a game, endgame. The image that when you come up against a void you no longer work but play games just to kill time. So the audience pays to see this game being played and they come to a kind of merry-go-round schema by buying their tickets, getting coffee and visiting the pop-corn stand. That added to the whole image of the production. It seems to me that in each case one should try to find a spatial metaphor for the play itself. PAJ: How is a play's content-value translated into spatial metaphor? Can you elaborate? ROJO: Now I'm working on Woyzeck with The Shaliko Company and we've been given the Martinson Hall of the Public Theater. It is an elegant 19th century room with a high ceiling, clear story light and fluted columns. So how do we deal with that room for Woyzeck which is brutal, bare and has to do with a class sytem? Well, in our idea we agreed that we would play against the room. The room has an elegance, so we thought we'd come...