ARTicles vol. 7 i.3a: No More No Man’s Land

When he was visiting Moscow many years ago, Hungarian director János Szász saw a stage adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that changed his life. At the beginning of the production, director Yuri Lyubimov made the entire audience enter the theatre through a single door near the stage. To get to their seats, they had to walk right past the corpses of Alyona and Lizaveta – the two women Raskolnikov murders at the beginning of Dostoevsky’s criminal thriller. “You could barely make it to your seat,” Szász remembers, “without getting blood on your shoes. It was a very important moment in my life. Lyubimov made us active witnesses, bringing us right into the production as soon as we entered the theatre.”

Throughout his career as one of Eastern Europe’s leading theatre artists, Szász has made it his goal to eliminate what he describes as the “no man’s land” – the divide between the actors and the audience. All of the productions that he has staged at the A.R.T. over the past eight years have drawn audiences into the playing space in a variety of ways, making them part of the event rather than just spectators observing from a distance.

Szász made his directorial debut at the A.R.T. in 2001 with his monumental staging of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Like all of his work, the production was visually, aurally, and emotionally stunning, combining rigorous, athletic movement with bold sound and lighting designs. In the middle of the set, a train track extended out from the stage, over the orchestra pit, and directly through the first section of seats. The actors brushed up against the audience as they entered, exited, fought, screamed, sang, and marched on the track and through the aisles of the auditorium.

The following season, Szász teamed up with set designer Riccardo Hernandez, marking the beginning of one of the most successful artistic partnerships in contemporary theatre. Their production of Marat/Sade turned the theatre into a massive madhouse, surrounded on three sides by the audience. The set featured a huge metal cage that was pushed and pulled by the inmates of the Charenton Asylum back and forth from the upstage wall right up to the first row of seats, bringing them face-to-face with the audience.

Szász and Hernandez’s next collaboration, a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, completely transformed the A.R.T.’s Loeb Drama Center. The centerpiece of the design was an enormous wooden roof that extended out from the stage to the middle of auditorium, situating the audience inside the dank barroom where Szász set his production. While audience members entered the theatre, the smell of cooking onions wafted through the air and the sound of water dripping from a leaky ceiling echoed in metal buckets. As the performance began, the traditional divisions between the auditorium and the stage disappeared, and the theatre became one big room shared by the actors and the audience.

For their most recent A.R.T. production, Desire Under The Elms, Szász and Hernandez took inspiration from Eugene O’Neill’s frequent references to the rocky New England soil. They covered the entire stage floor with stones and dirt, creating a barren landscape that extended all the way up to the first rows of seats and through the aisles leading to the lobby doors. Everyone in the audience had to walk through the dirt to get to their seats, entering the world of the play even before the performance began.

As they prepare for their production of The Seagull, Szász and Hernandez have been thinking about the play-within-the-play, Treplev’s experimental drama that looks two thousand years into the future. Their design for the production suggests an abandoned theatre that hasn’t been used for thousands of years, filled with debris, puddles of water, threadbare theatre seats, and chandeliers – an image perhaps from the world of Treplev’s play. Like all of Szász’s productions, The Seagull will draw the audience into the performance, seating us alongside Chekhov’s characters for the premiere of Treplev’s visionary drama.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.

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