The decorative problem within the auditorium has found many solutions, depending on the kind of dramatic entertainment to be presented. The modern decorative movement towards larger, smoother and less ornamented surfaces has its peculiar applicability to the playhouse, where the eye should not be distracted from the players by too ornate detail. Yet there is something undeniably exciting and truly theatrical in the rococo interior of the Residenz theatre in Munich (Cuvillies, arch.), and Oskar H. Kaufmann, beginning with a rigid simplicity in the Volksbuehne and other houses in Berlin, has had delightfully amusing recourse to the Chinese baroque for the Theater am Kurfuerstendamm and the Komoedie also in Berlin. The limi tations and the values of decoration depend, after all, on the interpretive genius of the architect.
new attempts to break away alike from the old horseshoe opera house and the realistic peep-show theatre all look back for their justification to the history of the development of playhouse architecture, and borrow heavily from the past.
Following the Fall of Rome and the decline of classic culture the classic theatre dis appeared save for a renewal of some of its form and spirit during a few brief decades of the Renaissance. The theatre, and espe cially the early opera, supposed ironically enough to be founded on classical tragedy, became a mere excuse for brilliant court festivity. As a result of the desire on the part of the audience to be observed by one another good visibility for the stage suffered.
The style of the popular Italian opera predominated. The singers delivered their important arias as close to the prompter's box as possible while the chorus stood practically inanimate. Contact between the stage and auditorium disappeared and with it the spiritual union of performers and audience. Good acoustics and a brilliant social display were the demands made upon the Baroque theatre. The decorative type of auditorium with its heritage of the richness of the Renaissance and the charm of the rococo had originally been a thing of gorgeous, festive yet graceful beauty.
In the course of years it added to the pernicious Italian shape new horrors of decoration and became that horrid overladen gold and-plush spectre of its former self of which unfortunately we still see examples.
Toward the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, came evidence of change and reform. Splendid acting was increasingly in demand and rich settings and appropriate historical costumes were considered essential to enhance the beauty of operatic music. The problem of displaying these adjuncts began to make even the architects of the opera houses see that their art had reached a standstill and that some attempt had to be made to recapture the spirit and some of the form of the classic stage. Their efforts were
partly compromises in the shape of the auditorium, partly a simplification of the baroque theatre following the more serious and less social tendencies of the legitimate theatre.
The reform dates from the work of the Sempers in mid Victorian days and is punctuated with March's Festbiihne for Worms in 1887. The attempts at a new type of auditorium seldom aim at a direct return to the classic but only to one of its descend ants, the Shakespearian stage. Already the results in projects and even a few completed playhouses have been notable.
Steele MacKaye, actor, playwright, artist, director and inventor, was the first to produce a notable plan for a circus-theatre. In 1892 he had almost completed in Chicago as part of the World's Fair a remarkable structure called the Spectatorium. Like so many efforts at the "theatre of the 10,000," it strove to gather together the huge audiences of Greek days and to bring them into close contact with all the possibilities of the stage. MacKaye devised a means of bringing his actors and choruses up from under the audience through steps in the orchestra pit. He invented a proscenium opening that could be made wide or narrow, thin or deep. He provided a crescent shaped stage with scenery sliding on tracks. This stage could be flooded with water. He closed in the back of his semi-circular stage with a linoleum cyclorama. He invented cloud machines for projecting moving clouds on the sky. There were few reforms of modern stage technique that this remarkable man did not fore shadow in this project, which the American financial panic of 1893 arrested when only half built.
It was along the lines of this MacKaye theatre that Max Rein hardt built when he developed his performances of Greek tragedies in circus buildings into the finally realized Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin (Hans Poelzig, arch.). Here he came close to the true conditions of the classic stage, with the actors appearing on a semi-circular orchestra floor almost in the midst of the spec tators, and then retreating up steps to a completely equipped stage with sky-dome, revolving stage, and all the modern ap purtenances. The son of Steele MgcKaye, Percy MacKaye, real ized many of the values his father had planned in his open air per formances of "masques" at St. Louis, New York and Cam bridge, Mass., between 1912 and 1927.