Patrick Page and Damon Daunno in Hadestown (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Walking into most theatres, the experience is much the same. At one end of the space, ornate or otherwise, there is a box, which will contain the play you’re about to see. It may be open to view, it may be shielded by a curtain, but we know the box is there. Thrust stages and theatres in the round, while rarely curtained, have their defined footprint, and to a degree the audience becomes the box, surrounding the first setting of the play. Of course, environmental or immersive productions blow up these divisions entirely. But we grow used to the parameters of a given space, of our relationship to the stage, if we visit performances with any regularity.

That’s why one of the more enjoyable experiences of visiting Off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop is its willingness to alter the space entirely from show to show. While plenty of productions there fall in with the prescribed model, others play with the audience/stage relationship so often that entering the small East Village theatre can be a complete surprise. Right now, there is a three-quarter oval seating space, echoing a Greek amphitheatre, for the musical Hadestown. It’s a fitting choice, since the show is a modern retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, drawn from Anais Mitchell’s album.

For Ivo van Hove’s Scenes from a Marriage, the seating and playing spaces were trisected in Act I, with the audience moving from space to space, before a mid-show makeover removed all scenery and stripped the house to the walls, changing what was noticeably reduced into something seemingly vast.

For the US premiere of Caryl Churchill’s A Number, the theatre’s seats were placed on to steep scaffolding, putting one in mind of a vintage operating theatre.

By upending our expectations the moment we walk into a theatre, a show begins to exert its pull, and while it may be lost on newcomers, regular visitors have a special insight. Of course, NYTW is a 200-seat Off-Broadway theatre, and while its reimagined settings involved significant and singular construction, it’s not the same as if they had 1,000 seats. That said, even Broadway shows try to realign our relationship with the stages – the big boxes – from time to time.

Seating chart for Natasha, Pierre and The Great Comet of 1812

The seating charts for the upcoming musical Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 caused a stir when they were posted online because they looked less like the map of a theatre and more like a particularly challenging version of Snakes and Ladders. Neat little rows remained in some places, but what were those yellow squares? The grey dots? The blue dots? The gentle ‘s’ making its way through the centre of the stalls? The white striped curvatures jutting out from the mezzanine? They were ramps, chairs, tables and more, all designed to add a fluidity to the Imperial Theatre that evoked the environmental intimacy of Ars Nova, where the show began, and the large tent where it played extended runs both in the Meatpacking District and just off Times Square.

Broadway has certainly played with seating occasionally in the past. Hal Prince’s 1974 Candide comes to mind, as does the mid-Act II transformation of the Winter Garden Theatre for Rocky. The short-lived Holler If Ya Hear Me created stadium seating in the Palace Theatre, building up from the stalls so that the seating flowed in the front of the mezzanine, leaving a good portion of the stalls area blocked off and empty. Fela removed seats to allow the actors to cross through the Eugene O’Neill Theatre and pass among the audience beyond the standard aisles.

As exciting as the reconfigurations can be creatively, they can be expensive – and not simply to build. If seats are removed to create a new dynamic, that’s revenue lost, and especially on Broadway, with seats selling above $150 each for musicals, you can be talking at least $1,200 in lost revenue per seat per week, provided the show is selling well. While it appears that Great Comet has added onstage seating, and may well be netting out with greater capacity, Holler If Ya Hear Me surely reduced the overall earning potential with its redesign. Obviously, this is a matter for careful budgeting, and negotiating artistic goals with the hard facts of economics.

As an audience member, I delight in the unconventional; as a theatre manager, I find myself pondering what that lack of convention cost, and whether it might make the show’s path to fiscal success more difficult. At least in subsidised settings, grants may rebalance the books (NYTW hasn’t lost a single seat for Hadestown). But as audiences come to desire ever more interaction in their live experiences, whether at the theatre or theme parks, and as virtual reality nips at the heels of a discipline that has long offered the benefit of having always been in 3D, breaking out of the box and erasing the proscenium divide seems ever more essential, even if our largest and most popular theatres may be the least suited to making that happen.

I have yet to see Pinter in the Pinter or Sondheim in the Sondheim. I have, however, seen Ayckbourn in the former and, incongruously, Pee Wee Herman in the latter. For anyone confused, I am referring to the recently renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End and Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim Theatre. I applaud the naming of these venues, and I am equally enthusiastic about the Caryl Churchill Theatre that will open in Surrey next year. They are manifestations of a topic I find myself musing upon: using theatre naming as a means of promoting the awareness of theatrical history.

On the one hand, the name of every Broadway and West End theatre carries history, since the venue name will be associated perpetually with famous productions that played there. However, names are not exactly fixed in stone. While Broadway’s Belasco and New Amsterdam may stretch back to a century ago, the current Helen Hayes Theatre is the second building to honor “the first lady of the American Theatre”; the original (which had two names before Hayes) was torn down some 30 years ago. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? premiered at the Billy Rose Theatre 50 years ago; today, that same theatre is the David T. Nederlander, named for a member of the family that now owns it.

The point is that theatre names are somewhat fluid, and the rationale behind their naming, past and present, can have a variety of motivations. It was certainly the style, once upon a time, for the impresario who built the theatre to name it after himself, but in New York, there has been an intermittently enlightened approach that has resulted in such venues as the Lunt- Fontanne Theatre (named for the husband and wife acting duo in 1958) and the August Wilson Theatre (renamed in 2005, just after the pioneering African American playwright passed away, the building’s sixth name). Among Broadway’s 40 theatres, two are named for legendary critics, the Brooks Atkinson and the Walter Kerr, and a third for newspaper caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, no small recognition for the fourth estate.

Other theatres are named for more practical reasons: when the not-forprofit Roundabout Theatre Company reclaimed a theatre on 42nd Street, part of the restoration and its ongoing funding was secured through a long term sponsorship that named the new venue the American Airlines Theater. Purists were dismayed, but to my mind, it was not affront, since it reestablished a working theatre where none had been for decades.

But I return to the Wilson, the Lunt-Fontanne, the Sondheim, the Hayes, because to me they are exemplars. Maybe, just maybe, patrons seeing shows in those theatres might take the time to find out about these storied names, both bygone and current. Perhaps programmes or websites can provide not just the history of the theatre, but of its namesake. Could our theatre capitals take the opportunity to make themselves billboards for theatre history with more judicious naming? In New York, what of a George Abbott, a Comden and Green, a Wendy Wasserstein Theatre? And they need not be posthumous. Harold Prince, one of the most influential figures in New York theatre from the 1950s to today, might be thusly honoured (even if he has had, at one time, not one but two theatres named for him in Philadelphia). In London, what of Ayckbourn, Stoppard, or Ralph Richardson?

This is not a decision that can be achieved through public opinion, since the authority rests with the owners of the buildings themselves. But perhaps while theatres retain the truly memorable, essential names, the more generic ones can become theatrical history markers. By way of example, both New York and London have Lyceums that might be better off personalized, if preservation regulations allow it. Since theatre is not a religious rite, why do London and New York both have St James Theatres if he was the patron saint of furriers and chemists?

Some theatres’ historic names have been proven outdated, the figures they were named for more fleeting than expected. Perhaps we must change these pieces of the theatre’s history in order to better promote theatre history and commemorate it for subsequent generations.