Jesse Green, the New York Times’ chief theater critic, has just returned from the Stratford Festival in Ontario, where the 2022 season began with the opening of a new theater.
Aside from the play itself, the most dramatic presence at the new Tom Patterson Theater may actually be absent. The normal swirl of rotating light and the infinite growl of moving air that permeates most theaters cannot be detected here. Similarly, the blackout is completely black. It’s like the black darkness to set the mood for the play “Richard III,” which opened a fascinating new building at the Stratford Festival in June.
During last week’s six-day, five-show visit, I took a tour of the theater, which costs $ 72 million. Greg Duherty, Patterson’s technical director, guided me from the depth of the trap below the stage, which is useful for drowning and burial, to the catwalk above it. Various noise mitigation measures, especially the air handler, which looks like a space capsule and occupies a stadium-sized room, reduces the ambient sound to 10 decibels, Dougherty tells me like that of a recording studio. rice field.
It’s a lot of silence. The performance of “Richard III” that night made me realize its true value. In this performance, as the title character, Colm Feore delivered the famous first line of the play. “It’s a winter of discontent / I made a brilliant summer with this York son” — he whispered to me later. You don’t have to project here, let alone over-act. I heard his voice clearly as if he was sitting next to me.
Next to me is not the place where I usually want to find the evil king, except for dramatic purposes. But such intimacy is part of the inheritance of the new Patterson, which was built on the site of the old Patterson, with all the charm of a quartz hut. Previously it was a curling rink, a dance hall and a badminton club. .. Nonetheless, the long arena stage was at least loved by the actors and rarely approached the audience. But to create that intimacy, the 480 seats (575 seats if made up of rounds) were so steep that I mine when I first saw the show there in 2017. Finding felt like an event in the Alps.
By 2019, the old Patterson is gone. That summer, the festival’s artistic director, Antonio Simorino, took me on a completely different tour of the campus under construction. This was the only time I wore a helmet at work, but it wasn’t the only one I was able to wear.
The building, which was a skeleton at that time, was already huge. The auditorium, a type of fortress with an enclosure, was beginning to take shape, but the surrounding public foyer and event facilities that mimic the vortices and corners of the Avon River, directly across from Lakeside Drive, are still distinguishable between girders. It was difficult. Like many new performance spaces built in the last half century, the new Patterson was naive and luxurious, worried that it would postpone more to art donors than art.
I was planning to look into it in 2020, but by then a pandemic of the coronavirus had closed almost every theater in North America, including Stratford. When I finally came back last week, I was wearing a mask instead of a helmet. (Masks are highly recommended, but not required.) Watching both the “Richard III” and “Everything Works” shows at Patterson at the time, Lazaridis, one of the event spaces. Participated in 5 discussions and interviews in the hall. He praised the sensual materiality of the undulating brass and glass façade, the expanse of the river on the white oak floor, and the roughness of the pale bricks surrounding the auditorium. I noticed a whimsical electronic screen and a shimmering, seemingly endless bathroom.
But what you can get anywhere. What makes Patterson the best new theater I’ve seen in the last few years is the clear prioritization of the theater itself, which sits like a treasured heirloom in custom cases. Silence and darkness are part of it, paradoxically creating a luxurious space full of emptiness and putting the pressure of expectation when sitting in one of the 600 rust-colored seats. When you watch the play there, you also see the fellow audience who are always watching you. The seats are relatively compressed so you will feel them too.
At an event at Lazaridis Hall on Saturday (part of what Stratford calls the New York Times Week at the festival), I talked to Mr. Simorino and Shamac Hariri of the Toronto company that designed the building, Hariri Pontalinia Architects. I did. Of course, I was familiar with details such as where the wavy glass was obtained and how the sound was adjusted so that the microphone was no longer needed.
Still, we continued to return to something more abstract. The theater as a human effort, especially the seemingly opposite intimacy and community sentiment designed to encourage this theater. This is an approach that recognizes art forms as palimpsest. Text that has been revised and overwritten for thousands of years. (In that sense, the choice to open in “Richard III” was not a coincidence. The play starring Alec Guinness hosted the first Stratford Festival in 1953.) Our human past As ghosts, we, in the seats right next to each other, will feel a deeper connection with the people who are living and breathing now.
Trans Canada
This week’s Trans Canada section was edited by Vjosa Isai, a news assistant for The New York Times, Canada.
Jesse Green is a leading theater critic in The New York Times. His latest book, Shy, with composer Mary Rogers will be published this fall. Follow him on Twitter @JesseKGreen.
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