ABSTRACT
In 1987 I was directing a new play for the Manhattan Theatre Club, Don De Lillo's The Day Room. The designer was an old colleague and friend, Hayden Griffin, like myself working in New York as a visitor, and leading the same distinctly unglamorous life, walled up in our basement theatre until eleven at night, then returning to a hotel room to flick briefly through thirty indifferent TV programmes. This was the week of technical rehearsals, and we usually kept each other company during the dinner break. One night we had chosen a restaurant that supplied its patrons with a tumbler of coloured crayons so that they could doodle on the paper tablecloths between courses. Hayden idly drew a rectangle and asked me if I knew what the Golden Mean was. I thought I knew. Wasn't it an ideal proportion dreamt up by the ancient Greeks, and illustrated by the shape of the old Academy movie screen? That was true as far as it went: 1 to 1.618. Hayden then drew a vertical line off-centre through his rectangle, creating to one side a square and to the other a new and smaller rectangle, with the peculiar property of having identical proportions to the first. Another line through this second rectangle repeated this effect on a reduced scale. Theoretically it was possible to create an infinite number of squares, all diminishing in a spiral to an infinite point.
