The old skylights of the gently curved ceiling have been cleaned and lit softly from behind. Red velvet curtains draw on motorized tracks backing the second level colonnades.
On the fourth side of the room, behind the stage, two of the classical columns have been stripped down to their iron shafts and made part of a supporting structure for lights, sound baffles, and a second-story catwalk.
All this ‘working equipment’ left bare and painted a deliberately contrasting black: modern structural ‘brutalism’ played against genteel Victorian propriety. It is a theatrical exercise in the esthetics of contrast, and it works. The theater has beauty and charm. It says a lot, in succinct architectural terms, of change and continuity in slightly more than a century - one of the most fascinating centuries in the history of the adventure called civilization.
From a New York Times feature by Ada Louise Huxtable, c. 1966-7
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Oldest stage at the Public, The Anspacher Theater used to be Central Hall of the Astor Library, first free library in New York City which contained the Delivery Desk & Catalogues, Basic References, Patents Collection, Ladies’ Corner, and showcase of rarities (including the Gutenberg Bible). The original plans for the Public had them demolishing the room for an 800-seat theater, but Joe Papp decided against that in the end, because the room was too good as it was.
I read once that the magic of those Stradivarius violins is partially the kind of wood and resin they’re made of and partly a self-fulfilling prophecy having to do with history. Fine players pass the instruments down, one to the next, and the body of the instrument holds all the notes that have been played in it over time. Those notes, being vibrations, after all, will make the most imperceptible channels in the body of the instrument, infinitesimal, but still real, so it becomes easier for the instrument to make beautiful music the older it gets.
Even when art is invisible, it makes a real change on the objects of the earth.
It leaves a mark.
The instrument & the music are inseparable.
I wanted to but couldn’t find a list of all the plays that have played in that space. I know the first show in there ever was Hair in 1967. I know the first show I saw there was only recently – last year, Passing Strange, and I remember walking in, and getting struck dumb by that amazing tall space, those columns, that ceiling like a fairy tale, like “the evening sky” as the historians have put it, strange and dark and high. You imagine a ceiling like that collects the dust of all the plays that have passed through the theater, all the actors who have breathed and cried in that room, forty years of laughter, all the words repeated over and over with the run of each show, must gather somewhere in the space.
I watched Green Girl from the balcony level next to the stage manager most nights, hiding with the wires and the light board, bird’s eye view of the audience and the actors, up in that evening-sky ceiling, could hear the dull muffled thump of Sam Shepard’s horse next door and our SM, Dee whispering lighting cues, sound cues. That was my play, on its feet in New York. That was amazing. What a pleasure and an honor it has been to borrow the Anspacher.
Posted by 49 at 12:44 PM. Filed under: General • Green Girl •
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