Sean K. Hardy ’16, director of the upcoming production “Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight,” shared his ideas for how the process might be revised. “I feel the way technicians are recruited needs to be something similar to the common casting process…I think it might alleviate some of the stress,” says Hardy. “Right now, it’s a lot for the board, and I appreciate immensely the job they do, and I think that a large vision of the board is to make sure that, as a theater community, with so many separate shows going up each semester, we stay one community.”

BRAVE NEW SPACE

Beyond the strain on the human capital of the theater, there is a second stress: the need for the raw physical resource crucial for every production, space. While it is true that there are more shows being put on this semester, a smaller proportion of proposed productions are getting space. This phenomenon is perhaps most noticeable at the Loeb Ex. Typically, six to eight shows apply for slots in the Ex. This semester, 22 applied. Even with the addition of the “zero-slot”—an extra slot that comes right on the heels of casting and requires shows to hold auditions before winter break—a much higher percentage of shows are being rejected. “It [comes down to] space, “ director of this spring’s “Penelope,” Jacob A. Brandt ’14 says. “There are only six or seven slots in the Ex and two on the Mainstage per semester, and you quickly run into problems with how can you do all this great theater with a limited amount of space and time.”

While there is no easy remedy for the tightness of actors and staff, one reaction to the tightness of space has been to seek less conventional venues for productions. This semester will see increased use not only of the smaller traditional stages on campus like the Adams Pool Theater and the Cabot House Theater, the latter of which is running a full schedule of five shows for the first time in memory, but also the use of stage spaces that are not designed for theater at all.

One such production is Hardy’s “Emilie.” This production will go up in one of the more daring spaces on campus, the so-called “SciBox”: a large-capacity physics lab on the third floor of the Science Center with movable seating. Knowing how tight space was this season, Hardy and his producer S. Jumai Yusuf ’16 had the SciBox in mind even as they applied for space in the Loeb Ex. “We really wanted to bring the audience into this weird, abstract place with ‘Emilie,’ the importance being that we are trying to bring theater to a larger community on campus, namely the scientific community. When envisioning that, we always envisioned ways we could incorporate the space to make it more inviting for people who don’t necessarily come out to see theater,” says Hardy. “It was my tech director, [Max B. Schaffer ’17], who stated that he didn’t think the Ex would be the right space for the play, and I kind of agreed with him, but we weren’t sure what to do.”  When asked if he regrets not getting a slot in the Ex, his answer was an unequivocal. “No.”

Hardy says he thinks that the use of nontraditional stages is critical to the mission of the Harvard theater community. “I’m aware that this is a project that could totally fall on its face, and I’m okay with that, because…there is a large debate in the theater community about what it means to have students putting on this art every semester. We know everyone in it, so why are we doing it? So for me, it’s about how you can stretch the confines of theater. And what safer place is there than a student setting, where we’re given all these resources and we’re allowed to fail? We’re trying to test out new questions and try out new boundaries.”

“La Ronde” is a second student production slated to go up this spring that plans to utilize an unconventional space. Directed by Julian A. Leonard ’15 and Daniel W. Erickson ’14, this version of the Austrian play will be sound-based, and will unfold not on a stage, but in a residential building: “Ideally a space with some kind of strong, singular connotation external to the university environment,” Leonard says.

Like Hardy, Erickson believes the use of nontraditional venues for theater enables productions to impact audiences in a unique way. "Bringing an audience into a residential interior, or the basement of a factory, or the backroom of a toy store gives [an] event a very specific framing apparatus to work with,” Erickson says.

The use of an unconventional space also allows a show to comment on what it means to experience theater in a given space. "Part of the appeal of a black box theater, the white cube of a gallery space, or the line of a proscenium is that in theory, these supposed blank slates allow for the world of a piece to be created from scratch,” Leonard says. “But no piece exists in isolation from its cultural contexts.”

CHANGES TO COME?

Of course, there is a second obvious response to the felt need for theater space: building or repurposing structures to meet that need.

“There just seem to be so many people coming into Harvard now that are interested in theater.... It makes sense that more and more people are applying to direct and produce plays,” says Brandt. “And I think that it’s sort of a double-edged sword because…[though] there isn’t great infrastructure for the people who want to do these plays...it’s telling the University that there’s something that needs to be done.”

Hardy agrees that while there is much benefit to using the smaller spaces on campus, infrastructure should be increased to accommodate larger shows. “Things need to change. There needs to be more on campus,” he says. “A limitation of doing shows in space like the black box at the Ex or [in] the Pool is that the seating capacity is smaller.... When you have a smaller seating capacity, and all the theater people want to go to see the shows that their friends are in, you don’t get to bring it to more people. That’s such a shame, because people put their hearts and souls into it.”