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Jesse Inexperienced, the chief theater critic for The New York Instances, has simply returned from the Stratford Pageant in Ontario, the place the 2022 season began with the opening of a brand new theater.
Leaving apart the performs themselves, essentially the most dramatic presences on the new Tom Patterson Theater could actually be absences. The same old whir of swiveling lights and the limitless whoosh of shifting air that infiltrate most theaters are undetectable right here. Likewise, the blackouts are absolutely black — simply the type of inky darkish to set the temper for “Richard III,” the play that opened the glamorous new constructing on the Stratford Pageant in June.
I obtained a tour of the theater, which price 72 million Canadian {dollars}, throughout a six-day, five-show go to final week. Greg Dougherty, the Patterson’s technical director, led me from the depths of the traps beneath the stage — helpful for drownings, burials and the like — to the catwalks excessive above it. The varied noise abatement measures, most notably air handlers that appear to be house capsules and take up a room the dimensions of a taking part in subject, cut back the ambient sound to 10 decibels, Dougherty instructed me, much like that of a recording studio.
That’s a whole lot of silence. I understood its actual worth at that night’s “Richard III” efficiency, during which Colm Feore, because the title character, delivered the play’s well-known first line — “Now could be the winter of our discontent/Made superb summer time by this son of York” — in what he later instructed me had been a whisper. No must undertaking, not to mention overact, right here; I heard him as clearly as if he have been sitting subsequent to me.
Subsequent to me just isn’t a spot I’d often wish to discover the evil king — apart from dramatic functions. However that type of intimacy is a part of the inheritance of the brand new Patterson, constructed on the positioning of the outdated one, a constructing that had beforehand been a curling rink, a dance corridor and a badminton membership, with all of the allure of a Quonset hut. Regardless of that, its lengthy thrust stage was a lot beloved, a minimum of by actors, bringing them uncommonly near audiences. To create that intimacy, although, the 480 seats (575 when configured within the spherical) have been so steeply raked that discovering mine once I first noticed exhibits there in 2017 felt like an Alpine occasion.
By 2019, the outdated Patterson was gone. That summer time, Antoni Cimolino, the pageant’s creative director, took me on fairly a unique tour, of a campus below development. Although it was the one time I’ve worn a tough hat on the job, it wasn’t the one time I might have used one.
The constructing, then a skeleton, was already mammoth. The auditorium, a type of enclosed fortress, was starting to take form, however the surrounding public foyers and occasion services, which mimic the eddies and bends of the Avon River straight throughout Lakeside Drive, have been as but troublesome to discern among the many girders. I used to be involved that, like so many new efficiency areas constructed within the final half-century, the brand new Patterson could be blandly luxurious, deferring extra to artwork donors than to artwork.
I deliberate to seek out out in 2020, however by then the coronavirus pandemic had shut down virtually all theater in North America, together with Stratford. After I lastly returned final week, I used to be sporting a masks as an alternative of a tough hat. (Masks are strongly inspired however not required.) I noticed each exhibits working then on the Patterson — “Richard III” and “All’s Effectively That Ends Effectively” — and took part in 5 discussions and interviews in Lazaridis Corridor, one of many occasion areas. I admired the sensuous materiality of the undulating brass-and-glass facade, the riverine expanse of white oak flooring, the roughness of the pale brick girdling the auditorium. I famous the whiz-bang digital screens in addition to the glowing and seemingly infinite loos.
However these you will get anyplace. What makes the Patterson one of the best new theater I’ve seen in years is the clear prioritization of the theater itself, which sits like a treasured heirloom in a customized case. The silence and the darkish are a part of that, creating a luxurious house that’s paradoxically stuffed with vacancy, exerting a strain of expectation as you sit in certainly one of its 600 rust-colored seats. Watching a play there, you’re at all times watching your fellow viewers members as nicely, who sit throughout the thrust watching you. As a result of the seating is comparatively compressed, you are feeling them, too.
In an occasion at Lazaridis Corridor on Saturday — a part of what Stratford calls New York Instances week on the pageant — I talked to Mr. Cimolino and to Siamak Hariri of Hariri Pontarini Architects, the Toronto agency that designed the constructing. We in fact nerded out on particulars like the place the rippling glass had been obtained and the way the sound was tuned in order that no microphones are wanted.
But we stored returning to one thing extra summary: the seemingly opposing emotions of intimacy and group that theater as a human endeavor, and this theater particularly, have been designed to encourage. It’s an method that acknowledges the artwork type as a palimpsest: a textual content that has been revised and overwritten for 1000’s of years. (In that sense, the selection to open with “Richard III” was no accident; the play, in a manufacturing starring Alec Guinness, opened the primary Stratford pageant, in 1953.) If we go to the theater partly to commune with the ghosts of our human previous, we additionally go to really feel a deeper connection to folks dwelling and respiration proper now, within the seats instantly to our proper and left.
Trans Canada
This week’s Trans Canada part was compiled by Vjosa Isai, a information assistant for The New York Instances in Canada.
Jesse Inexperienced is the chief theater critic for The New York Instances. His newest e book, “Shy,” with and concerning the composer Mary Rodgers, shall be revealed this fall. Comply with him on Twitter at @JesseKGreen.
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