Theatre in The Round - History of Theater-in-the-Round

History of Theater-in-the-Round

In Margo Jones's survey of theater-in-the-round, the first two sources of central staging in the United States she identified were the productions by Azubah Latham and Milton Smith at Columbia University dating from 1914, and T. Earl Pardoe's productions at Brigham Young University in 1922.

In 1924, Gilmor Brown founded the Fair-oaks Play box in Pasadena, California, an important early practitioner of central staging in addition to other stage configurations that it pioneered in its advent of flexible staging. As Indicated by Jones, the centrally staged productions of the Fair-oaks Play box were followed approximately eight years later by the work of Glenn Hughes in his Seattle Penthouse.

Stephen Joseph was the first to populise the form in the United Kingdom from the US in the 1950s and set up theaters-in-the-round in Newcastle Under Lyme and the Studio Theater in Scarborough. The theater there is now known as the Stephen Joseph Theater. Joseph was reputed to have once rhetorically asked "Why must authorities stand with their back to a wall?" His answer to which was: "So nobody can knife them from behind."

Sam Walters set up an impromptu performance space in the upstairs of the Orange Tree pub in Richmond, Surrey in the early 1970s and subsequently moved across the road to a permanent Orange Tree Theater.

In 1972, RG Gregory set up the Word And Action theatre company in Dorset in England to work exclusively in theatre-in-the-round. Gregory sought to create a grammar that would enable actors to maximise the form's potential for connecting with the audience both as individuals and as a collective. All Word and Action productions were performed in normal lighting conditions, without costume and or make up.