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Show SIMPLE SCENERY IMPROVES A PLAY "No ono who has seen a play staged out of doors at night, whero the darkness dark-ness eliminated all need of wing pieces piec-es and proscenium, where the characters charac-ters grow Into the sight or melt out of It, can fail to havo been impressed by the heightened, almost dream-like Illusion." writes Walter Pritchard Eaton Ea-ton In "Tho Question of Scenery" In the American Magazine. "If, now, you hang In front of a suggestively painted paint-ed back drop a real picture some negative draperies on either side, eliminating formal wing pieces and sharp edges: if you light this picture from behind the draperies, so that to tho audience they tell rather as folds of shadow, leaving between your actors ac-tors and the audience a transparent region of darkness, as it were, an intangible in-tangible glass of illusion, you have achieved an effect of possible beauty, an Increased Buggestlvenese by the simplest of means. Certainly, by somo such method tho production of Shakespeare could bo greatly simplified, simpli-fied, many of the scenes now" omitted restored to the acting text, the 'waits' cut down, tho whole narrative made more coherent and rapid." |