ABSTRACT
Andre Bazin makes these remarks to distinguish the theater from the cinema, which does not seem to require this sense of place. We don’t seem to care much whether a movie goes on in Cinema 1, 2, 3, or 4, but a play takes on a crucial resonance from its architectural surroundings. It is not unusual to hear about good plays which have folded because they opened in the “wrong” Theater, nor is it strange to attend a poor production which has survived primarily because it basks in the reflected glory of Stratford or Lincoln Center. Even the language we use reflects our sense that drama is embedded in the idea of architecture: we say synonymously that we go to the theatre or go to a play. We may go to the movies, but not to a particular movie house. When, indeed, we find ourselves choosing a special location to see a movie-Radio City Music Hall, the old Exeter Street Theatre in Boston, even the place on a college campus where the weekend movies are shown —then our experience approaches the theatrical in that we are more immediately conscious of ourselves inhabiting and giving significance by our choice to the building around us. The great baroque movie palaces built in this country before the Depression were designed to contribute to the exotic, dreamy film experience, and perhaps did so, but the movies presented in them and movies in general since seem to have survived outside this opulent frame. Plays, however, and the audiences they speak to, like to settle into particular places. American Theater sometimes gets into trouble because we forget how important a certain place can be. We are said to be a nomadic people, in love with movement and change, and therefore don’t take naturally to the idea that some spots have an aura or atmosphere which cannot be easily reproduced elsewhere. When a theatrical enterprise becomes successful we like to celebrate that fact by picking it up and moving it somewhere more ostensibly grand. The crucial sense of place doesn’t always go along with the move. The American Place, the Café la Mama, the Circle in the Square, all exciting places for theatre in New York in the sixties, were resettled uptown, and something vital seems to have been lost in the process.
