PLAYING IN THE BLACK BOX


Darling Grenadine is the second musical to play in Roundabout Underground’s Black Box Theatre. (The first was Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days in 2009.) Four floors beneath 46th Street, the Black Box was built in an empty basement in 2005 and became the official stage for launching playwrights through Roundabout’s New Play Initiative in 2007.


A small space with flexible seating (14x37 feet, with 62 seats maximum), the Underground resembles thousands of small theatres in New York and beyond. Many black boxes were converted from church basements and storefronts in the 1960s and ‘70s—a time when the avant-garde movement was calling for new theatrical forms. The first notion of three-dimensional staging (in contrast to traditional flats and drops) was proposed by Swiss architect and stage designer Adolphe Appia in 1899. Black boxes allow for lower budgets, and being both minimal and adaptable, they spark creativity, imagination, and intellectual rigor in creators as well as audiences. Despite the name, some spaces are painted gray, white, or other neutral colors.


Artists who have worked in the Underground praise its intimacy and flexibility, but like most theatres converted from existing structures, the space presents some specific architectural challenges: • Permanent structural columns


• A low ceiling (affecting set height and lighting angles) • Flat floor and low ceiling impacting sightlines, especially limiting views of the floor • Limited backstage area (informs set design, prop storage, and costume changes)


These parameters promote creative ingenuity. Playwright Alex Lubischer's note for Bobbie Clearly (2018) states, “An acre of corn hangs above a bare stage, tassels down, as though the sky is the earth.” Set designer Arnulfo Maldonado considered, “How does one bring that much punch of a descriptor to a space that is not much taller than one of our actors, with no fly space?” Maldonado and director Will Davis ”embraced the limitations of the space and its literal basement- ness” by placing the audience on three sides of the stage and surrounding the room with corn-crib walls.


Set model by Reid Thompson for Something Clean


For 2019’s Something Clean, set designer Reid Thompson and director Margot Bordelon explored three spatial configurations, including an “alley style” seating with the audience on two sides of the action. Thompson recalls: “The moment we set this up, it felt electric. The two spaces are like magnet poles...The actors loved how this setup pushed them to keep things in action and feeling the audience’s eyes on them from all sides.”


The RYE 2019 Ensemble in the Black Box


Each summer, the Underground goes on hiatus while the Roundabout Youth Ensemble (RYE), a company composed entirely of NYC high school students, mounts a fully realized production of a student-written play. “The Underground is a lot smaller than our school's black box,” says William Reyman, director of 2019’s Thicker Than Water. “It's intimate, in a way confrontational, which lends itself very well to some earnest storytelling. Even though our school's theatre is in the round, there's an extra factor of immersion, in that Underground shows have no choice but to present stories at genuine face value.” More than a century since Appia imagined theatre in a neutral box, a new generation of artists still embraces its creative potential.•


Set model by Arnulfo Maldonado for Bobbie Clearly 16 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


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