Actors Theatre: A PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Actors Theatre of Louisville boasts three performance spaces that offer distinct audience experiences. Its three theaters — the Pamela Brown Auditorium, the Bingham Theatre, and the Victor Jory Theatre — are staples of cultural Louisville.

While their stages went dark partway through the 44th Humana Festival of New American Plays, Actors Theatre is preparing them for future seasons. Each theater’s unique history shows the variety of work Actors Theatre produces, whether it’s in person or digitally through Actors Theatre Direct, and what Louisville audiences will return to. Production manager Paul Werner filmed a tour of each theater’s technical aspects that most audience members otherwise would never see.

The view from the Pamela Brown Auditorium lighting and stage management booth.

THE PAMELA BROWN AUDITORIUM

The Pamela Brown Auditorium is a 633-seat theater named for the sister of 55th Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown Jr., better known for buying KFC in 1963. Pamela was an actress who died on the ill-fated transatlantic flight of the Free Life, a hot air balloon that crash-landed off the coast of Newfoundland in 1970. When Actors Theatre moved into its current building in 1972, the newly-built auditorium was named in her memory.

As Actors Theatre’s largest and oldest theater, the Pamela Brown resembles a classic proscenium stage, like the Kentucky Center’s Whitney Hall, which allows a clear separation between the audience and the playing space.

Werner describes the Pamela Brown as a “modified thrust stage,” which means the stage extends slightly forward into the floor seats. This allows some audience to sit on the left and right sides of the stage, bringing them closer to the action. This architecture serves classical work like this season’s Measure for Measure, along with large musicals like Once on This Island.

Since the Pamela Brown isn’t a conventional proscenium space that allows many scenic elements to fly in from above, Actors Theatre’s technical staff relies on the auditorium’s wings — the sides of the stage — and an extensive system of trap doors and elevators to bring actors and props onstage in spectacular ways. Think of the Ghost of Christmas Present bursting through the stage in an explosion of gold confetti in A Christmas Carol, or how the Ghost of Christmas Future flies in from either side.

THE BINGHAM THEATRE

The Bingham Theatre, home of Dracula, is Actors Theatre’s newest space. Constructed in 1994, it’s an example of an arena stage, also known as theatre-in-the-round. It seats 318 people on all four sides of the stage, similar to a football stadium. Appropriately, the soccer-themed The Wolves was staged in the Bingham Theatre this winter.

Actors primarily use the four entrance points on the stage level, which don’t have a lot of space for large set pieces. Like the Pamela Brown Auditorium, the Bingham Theatre uses a trap system to raise people, furniture and coffins onstage, in the case of Dracula.

The view from the Bingham Theatre catwalk.

Up overhead, lighting technicians use the Bingham’s roomy catwalks to hang and maintain lighting fixtures. It’s also the structure that allows actors to fly in and drop down from above the stage.

While the stage itself is small, directors often expand the playing space to include the Bingham’s entire architecture. The stairwells see a lot of use in Dracula. “The actors will end up being behind the audience, below the audience or throughout the audience,” Werner says. Some of Dracula’s classic jump scares are made all the more frightening by the proximity between actors and spectators.

Two rows of the audience sit onstage in the Bingham Theatre, which can mean getting up close and personal with Dr. Seward’s study, or with the thrill of seeing a soccer ball roll toward you in The Wolves.

THE VICTOR JORY THEATRE

Actors Theatre’s smallest space, the Victor Jory Theatre, seats up to 159 people in the highest part of the building. Built in 1973, it was named after stage and film Victor Jory, who was the father of Actors Theatre’s second artistic director Jon Jory.

The Victor Jory is a black box theater, which is a purposely simple, small space. Without demands like flying in the Ghost of Christmas Future or lowering the Cratchit family’s kitchen into the ground, the Victor Jory rarely needs many more technicians than the stage manager, the production assistant, and an assistant stage manager, along with lighting and sound operators.

It doesn’t have a trap system or catwalks like Actors Theatre’s larger spaces, but it especially supports language-driven, intimate works. The Victor Jory lets you hear David Sedaris’ every dry word in The Santaland Diaries, and catch the rhyme and rap of Idris Goodwin’s Hype Man last fall.

The theater most recently held the play with music Where the Mountain Meets the Sea, which you may have streamed through Actors Theatre Direct in April. Playwright Jeff Augustin described the play as feeling like “spending an evening with a close friend, listening to the radio and talking long into the night” — which is exactly what the Victor Jory Theatre provides.