Making the scene

Theatrical scene design is one of the world's most beautiful, varied, and lively art forms. Yet there are relatively few books on the subject and almost none for a general audience that combine expansive scholarship with lavish design. The work offers an unprecedented survey of the evolving context, theory, and practice of scene design from ancient Greek times to the present, coauthored by the world's best-known authority on the subject and enhanced by three hundred full-color illustrations. Individual chapters focus on Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe (including liturgical drama, street pageants, festival outdoor drama, Spanish religious drama, and royal entries), the Italian Renaissance, eighteenth-century Europe, classicism to romanticism, realism and naturalism, modernism, and contemporary scene design. Authors discuss everything from the effects of social status on theater design to the sea changes between classicism, romanticism, and naturalism and the influence of perspective-based techniques, from the classical deus ex machina and special effects in coliseums, to medieval roving stage wagons and the floating ships of the Renaissance, to the computerized practices of today's theaters. Each historical period also includes a discussion of the audience that attended these productions. Such ingenious techniques, interwoven with the sweeping beauty of scene design through the ages, combine with Oscar G. Brockett and Margaret Mitchell's keen scholarship to create a book as compelling as the art it showcases.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.