Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Waszut-Barrett
While doing some last-minute research on scenic artist Henry C. Tryon in the “New York Clipper,” the heading “Stage Machinery” caught my eye. Eureka! What makes this discovery so exciting that the 1877 stage was referred to as “an engine of motion.” The article suggests that the stage resembles “those great engine-houses which have iron galleries and flying bridges all round.”
Below is one of the most detailed descriptions of nineteenth century stage machinery that I have read to date, identifying the shift from wings, shutters and roll drops to fly scenery.
The article was published in the “New York Clipper” on January 6, 1877. It provides a wonderful perspective during a time when fly drops began replacing shutters and roll drops. Here is the article in its entirety:
“STAGE MACHINERY .
A stage proves to be a very different thing from what the popular eye, gazing from pit or boxes , presumes it to be. A great arch , a sloping floor, pierced here and there with traps ; cellars below, regions above, grooves at each side, in which scenes glide forward or back; rollers stretching across, on which the “cloths” behind are rolled up—such is the popular ideal. But the stage of one of the “grand” houses offers a different spectacle . There is neither floor nor ceiling proper; but above there is a number of light galleries running round in tiers, while, instead of a floor or stage, properly so called , there is a vast expanse of open grating or cage-work, one below the other, the bars of which are parallel with the seats of a pit. The whole, therefore, is not “clear” from top to bottom, resembling one of those great engine-houses which have iron galleries and flying bridges all round. A large stage looks imposing enough from the boxes; but few, perhaps, are aware that below it, in a grand opera-bouse, there is a space of about the same height as the stage, and above more than twice that extent. Thus, the space devoted to performance is really no more than a seventh or eighth of a part of the unseen regions above, below and around it . The stage and the floors below (in a large theatre there are often four) thus appear like a series of gridirons , one beneath the other. This has been found a necessary arrangement, owing to the great scenes, stretching the whole width of the stage, that must ascend or descend, and have a clear passage. As these openings may be required at any part of the stage, the only mode is to make the entire stage an open frame covered with panels , which can be drawn away. A “trap” can thus be opened at any spot, as one of these panels containing the trap and its machinery can be inserted. Few persons are aware of what is the traditional and established engine of motion in all the great theatres , or how it is that in some ambitious transformation scene a huge iron frame, laden with fifty or sixty figures, can be raised aloft . The agency of windlasses and such mechanical powers would entail a vast expenditure of human strength, which, indeed, it would be found impossible to concentrate at a fixed point. The motive power behind the scenes is wonderfully simple, and even scientific, and has been in use without change for more than a century and a half. It consists in a permanent arrangement of great balance-weights always ready mounted, and with which the object to be raised can be readily connected. A child could raise a ton weight to a particular height if the cord passing over a pulley be balanced by another ton weight. Roof and basement, aloft and below, are filled with enormous rollers, each furnished with wheels something like that of a ship’s rudder. To these are attached a series of concentric drums, much like the cone-shaped wheel upon which a watch-chain is wound, for the purpose of allowing cords to be wound upon them. The balance-weights are hung ln grooves next the walls; while the cords attached to run them up to the root pass through pulleys and are then brought down to the drums, to which they are attached. When some slowly evolving transformation is in progress, to be crowned by the ascent of some glorified frame stretching the whole width of the stage, on which a number of ladies are bestowed, its ascent is thus contrived. The weight of the machine and its burden is roughly found; it is then attached to the counterpoises, the ropes in their course being made to pass over the drums of the windlass. The men who lower or raise it have therefore only a few pounds weight to deal with, and hence that smooth, even motion always to be seen in stage changes. In fact , the counterpoises, being slightly heavier, raise the machine itself, and have only to be controlled or checked by the men at the drum. So, too, is the heavy drop-scene made to ascend or descend, and with such motion that it can be made slow or rapid; so figures ascend through trap-doors . Even the great chandelier that lights the hall is thus balanced . —New Quarterly Magazine .
To be continued…
