Have you ever seen a screen from a box on stage?
I don’t think so.
Although the boxes remain a dominant component of the theatre’s architecture, they have from highly desirable to slightly sellable over the past hundred years.
The sightlines are lousy. The view off into one of the wings is weird. Directors and actors hate how they intrude. And unless you truly are an exhibitionist, who wants to be strutted out on display like some big-ego Parisian fop at La Comedie-Francaise?
Boxes are so out of style that, if you’re watching a Broadway musical in New York or Chicago, you might well find them occupied by spill-over musicians. Or actors. Or even dancers. At “Ragtime,” Harry Houdini appeared in one and did a trick.
Correction.
The boxes so old-fashioned.
COVID-19 replaced all that. Suddenly, the boxes, or at least the walled seats or walls around your group, look good.
On Tuesday, Gregory Pratt of the Tribune tweeted, the city’s most productive physician in Chicago, Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady, told the media, “COVID probably wouldn’t be finished for a few years, most likely.”
If this is the case, the existing concept that theaters can remain silent for a few months and then move on to all the old tactics of doing business after a magical designation of “safe” is, unfortunately, a cake in the sky.
It will be a much more confusing and slow process. The public’s willingness to stay away from others, especially members of the public at the most risky times of life. And some kind of physical barrier is much larger than a row of seats covered with duct tape.
Which brings us back to the boxes. Earlier this month, the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia announced plans to design a theater that is necessarily composed of individual boxes for a circle of family or friends who were likely quarantined together. According to the theatre, this “circular cage” of armchairs is fostered through the Globe Theatre of London, the professional home of William Shakespeare.
The plague is also a challenge in the 16th century. The desirable maximum seats were in the stepped boxes on the sides and at the back, not at the front of the hole with other noisy people and orange vendors. For what? These seats were removed from other people and from any disease and infection options.
Social distancing in the arts is not as new as some people think.
This is also the case in Paris in the 17th and 18th centuries, the heyday of personal lodges.
In fact, it wasn’t until the rise of the merchant class in the late 19th century that the best-seat-in-the-house designation shifted to what is now known as the orchestra, or stalls. Theaters adapted to these newly affluent business types headed to see the new dramas of social realism, and removed the working class to the balcony, replete with a separate entrance easily exploited in following years by Jim Crow laws in parts of the United States.
Class and racial segregation en masse came to matter the most to theater owners, and the so-called seating plan started to resemble the one with which we are familiar today.
The boxes, however, were rediscovered in the minds of the architects. The main stepbook theatre, built at the end of the 20th century, is a concrete minimalism, but still has some costumes. The Goodman Theatre, built a few years later with a nod to the meadow, also has some.
In classical theatres such as the Lyric Opera, the Orchestra Hall and the Cadillac Palace Theatre, of course, the word “box” (or “cabana”) can be used to refer to small personal corners of the living room located in front of the stage, not lateral, with those seats throughout the width of the auditorium, infrequently in a bend.
Those perches, which are similar in some ways to the corporate boxes found in sports stadia, are going to be increasingly desirable. In fact, it seems like a good bet that some affluent Lyric Opera patrons are going to want to switch out of their crowded orchestra spots in favor of more separation, whatever the politicians might be saying.
Fewer people will want to see and be seen. Theaters that have those cell seats to offer consumers will have an advantage.
The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at Navy Pier has been silent about its plans, which is actually understandable. But his new space, The Yard at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, adapts very well to our existing protocol (Steppenwolf’s intimate theatre in a circle, still under structure and designed to bring everyone as close as possible, not so close).
The patio is designed with separate towers, all of which can be separated independently. And the resting spaces at each point of the tower are small, easily bookable for a guest organization. In addition, the site of the old Skyline Stage gives a giant spatial footprint, everything is fine those days. Even Chicago Shakespeare’s Courtyard Theatre works well for social estrangement, as you can simply switch to boxes that use existing pillars that are already in space.
You may think all of this is very dystopian for an art form designed for an intimate human connection. You’d be right. Let’s hope none of this is or only temporary. But history teaches us that pests can replace everything.
Chris Jones is a critic of Tribune.
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