Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity, and: Theater Design, and: Theater Technology (review)

With the republication in slightly expanded form of the 1977 Theater Design and the 1988 Theater Technology following the more recently published Roofed Theaters of Classical Antiquity, Yale University Press has made simultaneously available the three massive volumes that George Izenour has designated as his “trilogy” in the field. Any major study by Izenour, who is arguably the pre-eminent theorist, innovator, and practitioner in the world in the field of theatre design and technology, would be worthy of note. But these three volumes, in their ambition and achievement, must be acknowledged as one of the major contributions to theatre study of this era. They are among the very few books of my acquaintance that truly merit such adjectives as magisterial and monumental. In the eighteenth century, Dumont’s Parallèl de plans provided a comprehensive illustrated guide to international theatrical architecture and machinery, and his work was updated in the nineteenth century by Contant and de Filippi. In a sense, Izenour has provided the twentieth-century equivalent to these standard works; but his accomplishment is far greater—not only because his work subsumes such previous directories, but also because it covers in detail the enormous complexity of twentieth-century theatre technology. There is a vast amount of information in the discursive material in these volumes, which includes among other things theatre history, aesthetics, philosophy, autobiography, analysis, and technical explanation; but perhaps most stunning are the magnificent illustrations—120 in Roofed Theaters, 870 in Theater Technology, and 900 in Theater Design. Many of these illustrations are photographs of theatres or technical equipment, but more than half are astonishingly detailed drawings of cut-away interiors of representative theatres from Greek times to the present, all executed in the same style and 1/88 scale so that different features and areas of different historical theatres can be readily compared. Completion of these drawings took Izenour and his coworkers some thirty years, and it is difficult to imagine that another such set will ever be undertaken.

Although the three works are tied together visually and contain many cross references, each develops its own concerns; and although any student of theatre will find a vast amount of information in any one, each volume will probably more directly address the interests of different readers. The most focussed book of the three, and the one with the clearest specific line of argument, is Roofed Theaters. It is Izenour’s thesis that the true ancestors of the modern theatre, both architecturally and in terms of type of drama presented, were not the huge outdoor theatres invariably emphasized in the standard theatre histories, but rather the largely neglected roofed odea, designed as multi-purpose performance spaces. Izenour considers these the central spaces for the performance of classical theatre and the development of classical stage scenery. Whether this intriguing argument is accepted or not, his reconstructions of the design, engineering, and acoustics of twenty-four Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman odea offer a major contribution to classic studies.

The non-technical reader probably will find Theater Design the most generally useful of the three—especially in its lavishly illustrated second and third chapters, which provide a historical and graphical development of theatre design from 300 B.C. to 1977, and in the fascinating concluding chapter, which offers twenty-six illuminating charts superimposing floor plans and volumes of different historical theatres upon each other (so that one may instantly and graphically compare the “footprints” of, for example the theatre at Epidaurus, the Globe, the Großes Schauspielhaus, and the Guthrie). More technical but equally informative are a chapter tracing different seating systems and auditorium arrangements through history, a detailed discussion of twenty-five multiple use theatres in the United States and abroad that Izenour developed...