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Jesse Inexperienced, the chief theater critic for The New York Instances, has simply returned from the Stratford Competition 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 might in reality be absences. The standard whir of swiveling lights and the infinite whoosh of shifting air that infiltrate most theaters are undetectable right here. Likewise, the blackouts are absolutely black — simply the form of inky darkish to set the temper for “Richard III,” the play that opened the glamorous new constructing on the Stratford Competition in June.
I acquired 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 assorted noise abatement measures, most notably air handlers that appear like house capsules and take up a room the dimensions of a taking part in area, scale back the ambient sound to 10 decibels, Dougherty instructed me, much like that of a recording studio.
That’s plenty of silence. I understood its actual worth at that night’s “Richard III” efficiency, by which Colm Feore, because the title character, delivered the play’s well-known first line — “Now’s the winter of our discontent/Made wonderful summer season 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 had been sitting subsequent to me.
Subsequent to me shouldn’t be a spot I might normally wish to discover the evil king — apart from dramatic functions. However that form of intimacy is a part of the inheritance of the brand new Patterson, constructed on the positioning of the outdated one, a constructing that had beforehand been a curling rink, a dance corridor and a badminton membership, with all of the appeal of a Quonset hut. Regardless of that, its lengthy thrust stage was a lot beloved, at the very least by actors, bringing them uncommonly near audiences. To create that intimacy, although, the 480 seats (575 when configured within the spherical) had been so steeply raked that discovering mine after I first noticed reveals there in 2017 felt like an Alpine occasion.
By 2019, the outdated Patterson was gone. That summer season, Antoni Cimolino, the competition’s inventive director, took me on fairly a distinct 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 form of enclosed fortress, was starting to take form, however the surrounding public foyers and occasion amenities, which mimic the eddies and bends of the Avon River immediately throughout Lakeside Drive, had been as but tough 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 can be blandly luxurious, deferring extra to artwork donors than to artwork.
I deliberate to search 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 a substitute of a tough hat. (Masks are strongly inspired however not required.) I noticed each reveals working then on the Patterson — “Richard III” and “All’s Properly That Ends Properly” — 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 bogs.
However these you will get wherever. What makes the Patterson the very 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 an opulent house that’s paradoxically stuffed with vacancy, exerting a stress 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 properly, who sit throughout the thrust watching you. As a result of the seating is comparatively compressed, you’re feeling them, too.
In an occasion at Lazaridis Corridor on Saturday — a part of what Stratford calls New York Instances week on the competition — 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 saved returning to one thing extra summary: the seemingly opposing emotions of intimacy and group that theater as a human endeavor, and this theater specifically, had 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 hundreds 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 competition, in 1953.) If we go to the theater partially to commune with the ghosts of our human previous, we additionally go to really feel a deeper connection to individuals 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 guide, “Shy,” with and concerning the composer Mary Rodgers, shall be revealed this fall. Comply with him on Twitter at @JesseKGreen.
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