Introduction

Prompt: A Journal of Theatre Theory, Practice, and Teaching is a generative space where theatre artists, educators, and scholars converge to exchange ideas that prompt new thoughts and practices. It was created in response to a moment when digital space became the default site of learning and theatrical storytelling, as a way to investigate issues of materiality and liveness in those places. For more than fifteen months now our stages and our classrooms have been empty, but as I write this, live theatre and in-person learning seem poised to make a roaring comeback. Undoubtedly, this is good news, however, the painful pandemic pause has served a purpose. With the closure of brick and mortar schools and theaters came a (temporary) breakdown in traditional power hierarchies. Digital spaces had fewer gatekeepers deciding who gets to create what, and where, and when. With this newfound accessibility, artists, educators, and scholars engaged in new modes of creativity and made extraordinary things in spite, or because of extraordinary circumstances. As we pivot back to more traditional, pre-pandemic modes of learning, theatre making, and scholarship, what is to become of the work that’s been done during the past fifteen months? What from this time will we take into the future, and what will we discard? If the past fifteen months has taught us anything, it is that creativity, collaboration, and learning can flourish in any place, no matter the given circumstances. 

Volume 1, “Teaching Theatre with Things” explored how the material influences theatre praxis, pairing videos that teach something in the field of theatre and performance studies using a humble technology with accompanying short essays that reflect on an idea that sparks a scholar's interest. Volume 2 “Revitalizing the Scenic Model” continues the exploration of material influence on praxis by pairing photos of scenic designers’ discarded scenic models with playwrights who, in turn, write one-minute plays that take place in the worlds the scenic models invite them to stage. Usually, a playwright’s text inspires a designer to imagine a world in the form of a scenic model. What new worlds might be imagined if designers’ scenic models inspired playwrights to create new texts? Volume 2 of Prompt will contain seven themed issues (rolled out over seven successive months) dedicated to investigating this question.

Issue 1: Ruins

“A model is like a manuscript, or like a polemic—it is supposed to achieve something. Then it is replaced by something else, the right thing, and the model is no longer important” - Johannes Schütz, Models and Interviews

The scenic model is a miniature, three-dimensional representation of a scenic design built in an exact scale. A common working scale for scenic models is expressed as 1:24, or, 1/2” = 1′–0″, meaning every half inch in the model corresponds to one foot in real life; a five-inch-tall wall in the model equals a ten-foot-tall wall on the stage. Models represent the full-scale things we are making; they communicate the set designers’ intentions for the look, feel and shape of the final product. First and foremost, they are tools for production. As such, models are also places of imagined performances. Gazing into models, directors stage scenes, lighting designers devise light cues, actors craft monologues and choreographers construct dances. When final set designs are realized, scenic models become redundant. But, stage sets are ephemeral. As scholar of theatre antiquity (and this issue’s podcast interviewee) Odai Johnson says, “stage sets are not permanent. Sets will never be ruined. They're all, by their nature, temporary. They're going to end up in the dumpster at the end of the run. And there isn't enough life on them to generate the sense of the sublime, or enough investment to generate the sense of the reliquary about them.” Yet scenic models can (and do) endure, long beyond the set designs they represent, and, post-production, continue to serve as containers for the memories of imagined performances, generating what Johnson calls a “charisma” that remains with the models and elevates them to the status of ruins. When scenic models outlive their material purpose, they are often retired to “model graveyards”—piles of forlorn models discarded on dusty shelves in the studios of set designers. These are the material remains of what designers cannot bear to throw away – stacks of miniature, handmade works of art left in ruin (as evidenced by the nearly 170 images of ruined scenic models we received from scenic designers in response to our call for photos). There is an aesthetic to ruins that Johnson describes as a perfection found in brokenness. “We want them broken”, he says, “because they are in their perfect form when they can evoke a kind of glory they no longer can contain . . . we would only be disappointed if they were reconstructed in any way. ” And so, all the scenic models featured in this issue of Prompt resist restoration, insisting instead on remaining (perfectly) broken ruins. 

“But between sex and death and trying to keep the kitchen clean, remember wild roses bloom best in ruins forever after.”  - Rufus Wainwright, Peaceful Afternoon 

When left to their own devices, ruins provide an ecosystem in which all sorts of flora and fauna flourish. As historian Christopher Woodward noted simply in his 2015 essay Rooted in the Past: The Plants That Flourish in Ruins, “Flowers like ruins.” The ruined scenic models curated here prove to be fertile grounds for new dramaturgies to flourish. Having endured beyond their intended material purpose, the models seem to have taken on lives of their own, divorced from the productions for which they were made. They now inspire new fantasies and daydreams in most spectators, but when we paired them with playwrights, whole new plays (seven to be exact) seemed to grow spontaneously from the ruined sites - plays that deal with issues of grief and loss, plays that wrestle with presence and absence, plays that traffic in memory, plays that are full of deep anxieties, plays of destruction, plays about being stuck, and, in some cases, plays that imagine new places beyond the sites of the models that inspired them.

Several playwrights created plays that take place in the landscapes their given images depict - in a sense these plays are staged inside of the ruined models themselves. Jeff Goode wrote three dark comedies - interrelated plays that form a triptych - staged inside of Kenton Jones’ suburban living room piled high with junk. The fear of what exists outside the contained chaos of the model reigns in Living Room Panic, For Sale by Owner, and From Inside the House. Goode maps his post-pandemic anxieties onto this ruin as his characters try desperately to keep unknown intruders out, but their efforts prove futile (and often absurd). Anxiety surfaces again in Ken Rus Schmoll’s The Fold. Models always conjure the future – performances that are yet to come - and Schmoll’s play begins in a moment before the moment Simms’ model depicts: an apocalypse caused by an avalanche of architectural remains. In a small, pink motel room, two characters simply designated as “1” and “2” sit knee to knee on the beds. As “2” relates the story of the ruin of a relationship to “1”, the anxiety of the external destruction that is about to happen permeates the scene. 

External forces also cause ruin in Vanessa Vizcarra’s play Albert and Bianca’s Final Round, but this time, the destruction is caused by the text. The word “Communism” seems to drop like a bomb into Alexander Woodward’s model of three, tall, lime-green paneled walls. Meant as a provocation - “I find it to be a great bullshit detector. The way some people react to the word” says Bianca, one of the play’s characters, to her partner Albert - the “C word” ultimately severs their relationship.

Andrew Maust’s The Music of Memory, gives us two characters (one younger, one older) who venture into the site described by Brigitte Bechtel’s half-collapsed scenic model. Here, among the ruins, they find the object they seek - a piano that makes no sound. But the silent act of one character playing the piano’s keys is what they need to conjure music. It is this artifact’s absence of sound that so loudly marks music’s memory. In Stephen Spoonamore’s Am I (Is He) Wearing Pants?, the plastic model figures found in Melpomene Katakalos’ model come alive in their environment. The tension between the materiality of this scenic model and the imagined performance it inspires is at the heart of this play. Left unfinished by the modelmaker, the characters attempt to design their own situation, but despite their longing, the model holds them frozen in place. Their destiny is to remain eternally trapped and frustrated.

Two plays move outside the boundaries the models depict. Sean Fanning’s ruined model shows up as a material character in its own right in the play it inspired from Wren Aubrey Latham. In Latham’s Unlearning, the model takes a toll on the modelmaker that leaves behind physical and emotional scars. Yet, the model holds pivotal memories for this protagonist – memories so seminal they cannot bear to let the model go. The modelmaker explains, “I can't get myself to throw it away, because I know what it took, and I know what it looked like before. And now it's a pile of rubble, like I intended.” And so the model endures, perfectly broken, a container of the memory of “what it took”. And in Jeanmarie Higgins’ play And Charlie Was Just Laughing at Me, Matthew Buttrey’s model exists only in memory. The site of this play is a bus where two travelers recall a crumbling vintage motel reminiscent of Buttrey’s decaying, concrete, three-story model structure. From the bus, the travelers conjure a scenario about a sex worker whose “whole life unfolds in one of [the] shitty rooms” of the remembered motel, calling into question the beauty of ruins that come at a human cost.

This issue of Prompt sets out to explore how material objects, like scenic models, can endure beyond their intended material purpose to inspire new fantasies and daydreams. Scenic models possess a charisma that constantly engages the spectator’s imagination and invites performance, but when detached from their original duties as tools for production, they become free to take on lives of their own and signify new things. Material objects emerge as fertile sites of creativity where artists can converge to co-write new dramaturgies; the remarkable, new plays inspired by images of ruined scenic models contained in this volume bears that out. But I hasten to point out that the material objects in this issue are present only in digital space. In fact, all collaboration on this issue happened in digital spaces - playwrights wrote in response to images of models (not the models themselves) that they accessed through email or file sharing websites, the audio performances that accompany the plays were rehearsed and recorded remotely using Zoom, and of course, the volume itself is being shared with you on the internet. It is more accurate to say that material objects in digital spaces emerge as sites for the creation of new dramaturgies. And what of this word “Ruins” which Odai Johnson says conjures “monuments that are broken”, “pedestals of statues without figures on them”, and “a longing to be part of a past that never was.” When we assigned the word “Ruins” to this issue, did we prompt the playwrights to write plays of memory and loss? What happens when we change the prompt? What new dramaturgies will be made then?

Watch this space.