Where Did All the Broadway Sets Go?

LAST NOVEMBER, DURING preproduction for his Broadway staging of “A Doll’s House,” the English director Jamie Lloyd and the American playwright Amy Herzog visited Jessica Chastain, the production’s star, at her New York home so the three of them could read Herzog’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 masterpiece of naturalism out loud. That afternoon, Lloyd recalls, Chastain’s performance felt as if “she was bringing the whole life of Nora into that room,” he says. “I told her, ‘You could just do this whole thing from your armchair.’”

A second epiphany occurred when he looked at the plans of Broadway’s Hudson Theatre and noticed that the loading dock door was visible from the seats and could work for Nora’s final exit from both the play and her marriage. Lloyd and his designer, Soutra Gilmour, discarded their initial design ideas and decided the onstage elements should be few: simple wooden chairs, a turntable that rotates Chastain through the space, a lone pale lavender stripe painted along the black back wall. “A Doll’s House” is about the bourgeois comforts that have trapped Nora Helmer in a marriage built on lies but, in Lloyd’s production, which closed in June, period costumes were replaced by plain, dark outfits, all props were excised and even Nora’s three children became disembodied recorded voices. Confronted with the production’s austere approach, Chastain was initially skeptical. “I said, ‘I don’t understand this, I don’t know how to do that,’” the actress admitted on the “Today” show. “Jamie just looked at me and goes, ‘You’ll do it with your acting.’”

Radical though it seemed, Lloyd’s “A Doll’s House” was only the latest minimalist staging of a classic in New York, an idea that can be traced back to Ivo van Hove’s stateside ascent. The Belgian director’s stark 2014 production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” (1993) in Dutch at the Brooklyn Academy of Music reinvented that play for audiences used to seeing it presented more grandly. (As the actor Hans Kesting, who portrayed Roy Cohn, told my co-author, Dan Kois, in “The World Only Spins Forward,” our 2018 oral history of Kushner’s play, “That’s very typical in Dutch theater: a bare stage. Everyone has experience with saying ‘Look at the horse coming!’ and there is no horse.”) The next year, van Hove staged Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” (1955) on Broadway, replacing the Carbone family’s Red Hook tenement with benches and chairs. The American director Sam Gold, who has collaborated with van Hove, then staged “Othello” in 2016 at New York Theatre Workshop on a set designed to look like a wooden barracks and, in 2017, transformed the Anspacher theater at the Public into a nondescript space that evoked a community center meeting room for a production of “Hamlet.” And while traditional dramas, with their compressed timelines and constrained settings, have particularly lent themselves to this sort of stripping back, musical theater directors are trying it, too: Bartlett Sher, best known for huge coups de théâtre, mounted “Camelot” at Lincoln Center last spring in a restrained, projection-heavy production.

Yet what we consider theatrical minimalism today used to be standard: Greek tragedies barely had sets; the major visual element in Elizabethan theater was the performance space itself. This changed in the latter half of the 17th century as indoor staging became the norm. As lighting technology improved over the next 200 years, among other aspects, productions grew increasingly ornate and complex. Throughout the 20th century, many attempted to bring minimalism back: Orson Welles and John Houseman thrilled audiences with a scenery-free “Dr. Faustus” and a modern-dress “Julius Caesar,” both in 1937. In Russia, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold even developed their acting theories around the concept, forcing players to move as little as possible to reveal the subtext that lay beneath their performances. By 1968, the English director Peter Brook had written “The Empty Space,” a book many practitioners still study, which begins, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. … This is all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged.”

AT ITS BEST, minimalism ignites the audience’s imagination, making theatergoers active participants instead of passive consumers. It can remove previous interpretations that may have congealed around a classic, allowing viewers to see it anew. “There’s no visual noise to take your eye off what you’re meant to be focusing on,” Gilmour says of her recent production.

But practicality may also be driving minimalism’s appeal. Building a set on Broadway has only gotten more expensive: Not only has the cost of materials like wood and steel increased, says Mike Bosner, a producer on the new musical “Shucked,” which takes place inside the skeletal frame of a barn, but “during the pandemic a lot of artisans that worked at these shops took other jobs.”

The embrace of empty space also mirrors the rise of minimalism in popular culture. A Marie Kondo-esque moralistic impulse lingers beneath these barren black expanses, which collectively seem to ask, “Why does anyone think they need more than this?” At the same time, when part of this is, increasingly, a Hollywood actor, that star becomes the main spectacle. For some viewers, these productions are the ultimate test of a famous performer’s prowess: Can she fill the space by herself?

Often, the answer is yes. (Chastain received excellent reviews.) When minimalism fails, however, it feels like watching an Off Off Broadway show for Broadway prices, or witnessing a gimmick in search of a real idea. Gold’s “Othello” focused on the corrosive influence of masculinity, its military set lending the production a humid claustrophobia that soon grew nightmarish. His starry 2022 “Macbeth,” on the other hand, which set the opening scene on a nearly bare stage of the Longacre Theater, had no animating idea and was memorable only for such conceptual gambits as forcing the actors to hold their own fog machines.

This season, Gold and the actor Jeremy Strong will collaborate on Amy Herzog’s new adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” an 1882 indictment of democracy; the Broadway debut of “Gutenberg! The Musical!” (2006), set backstage at a fictional show, will look somewhat restrained. After the past decade, however, minimalism itself risks becoming a new kind of cliché, one that reinforces a false binary between more literal approaches and ones that are pared back. Indeed, there is a long history in American experimental theater of maximalism, where directors add to the text instead of taking away, in the hope of expanding our ideas of what live storytelling can accomplish. In 2009, David Cromer’s Off Broadway “Our Town” unveiled a shocking, fully realistic kitchen in Grover’s Corners complete with sizzling bacon. Last year at the BAM Harvey, New York audiences finally got a chance to see Thomas Ostermeier’s 2008 German-language production of “Hamlet,” an over-the-top romp that blended live video, mud, unsimulated flatulence and loud post-rock in scene after thrilling scene. Theater, after all, has always been about people sharing a space to imagine their way through the human condition — and we’re far from exhausting the ways for that imagination to be engaged.

Set design by Theresa Rivera. Photo assistant: Takako Ida. Set designer’s assistant: Ru Jing Liu