The show must go on, but a little kleiner.
The Guardian reported on Friday from the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, a 128-year-old Berlin theater that saw the premiere of The Threepenny Opera in 1928, closed after World War II, then reopened as home to Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble in 1954. The company expects to be back on the boards on September 4th.
Audiences will notice some significant changes. For starters, lots of leg and elbow room. Five hundred of the auditorium’s 700 seats have been removed. Most of the remaining seats are in pairs, with some singles sprinkled in. “We simply could have blocked seats or taken out only entire rows, but that would have looked ghostly,” artistic director Oliver Reese said.
None of the seats will be too close to the stage, to allow a safe distance from the performers. Also, some doors to the auditorium will remain open, to keep the air moving.
Notably, none of the performances will have an intermission. This is meant to avoid choke points at rest rooms during the typical act-break rushes. While this may make for more people needing to dash-off mid-show to relieve themselves, the gaps in seating will likely make this far less disruptive than with the usual tight rows.
The programming schedule is currently unknown, but the report did say that a previously planned version of Macbeth that involved a great deal of “kissing and licking” has been scrapped.
If you are wondering how the Berliner Ensemble can plan for a fall season with a drastically-reduced seating capacity (and, importantly, no increase in ticket prices) while so many American producers have completely given up on 2020, The Guardian offers details about German subsidies for the arts.
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