Smashing apart a 16-foot clock and purposefully splitting wood, the Radium Girls set was taken apart swiftly. As the winter play closes, the theater department’s spring play, Once In a Lifetime, begins rehearsals.
The Performing Arts Center (PAC) gets cleaned in preparation for the Middle School Musicals 2025 performance of Disney’s Descendants: The Musical. Usually, this production would be followed by a high school PAC production. However, this year a big change to a smaller space will be made. Changing to the black box.
The black box is the old auditorium’s stage reestablished into a box, also known as Mr. Katz’s room. Jason Katz explains a black box as “a flexible theater space where you can set the audience anywhere you want in the set.”
This change has become a controversy in the theatre department, with many performers choosing to sit out the production, fearing a black box show as less exciting or too chaotic.
Performing in the PAC is exhilarating. An audience of up to 600, seated both below and above you, a giant set assembled specifically for the stage, performers projected voices bouncing off the walls.
It’s a certain feeling that both actors on the stage and audience members feel; however, there’s also a sense of detachment. The audience sees the stage, but the performers cannot see the people watching.
As Katz describes, “You could leave through the back door of Radium Girls without being noticed, but you would not be able to do that in the black box.”
You are, in a sense, trapped with the actors. Not in a bad way at all. A black box show leads to a much more involved feeling, a more intimate experience as you and the show are in the same space. You are transported into the world being built.
In 2014, Wilsonville did a black box show of The Diary of Anne Frank, the tragically painful true story based on the account of Anne Frank’s diaries during World War 2. To imagine this show taking place in the PAC space is quite impossible, with the gigantic stage pretending to depict a small attic. Katz explains how the space of a black box makes it so “the audience felt like they were in the attic with Anne and the family, just a few feet away.”
Once In a Lifetime is not a tragedy by any means; it’s a comedy. Following the misadventures of three vaudeville actors attempting to ride the high of brand-new talkies, movies with talking, in Hollywood.
Yes, the black box can make for much more dramatic, heart-wrenching performances, but it can also help to heighten comedy. By being in a small space actors no longer need to focus on projection, focusing rather on the words they are saying and the humor behind it.
Senior Molly Foster has been involved in the theatre community since day one, and revving up to this last show she has decided to expand her horizons as much as possible by taking on the role of stage manager/student director.
Like the rest of theater students, Foster has never participated in the production of a black box show. However, her experience of seeing one forged an opinion: “I went to see Orvis’s Book of Metamorphoses at Oregon City last year, which was held in their black box. It was an eye-opener for me as someone who enjoys performing arts.”
Metamorphoses tells the story of a variety of Greek legends, using a distinctive set to express the tale. Oregon City expanded past the usual lines of what a performance space can extend to, constructing a pool onstage used throughout the performance.
Foster continues, “I realized there are so many more ways to stage a production than just on a big stage where you can’t see the fine details very well.” To put on a black box production, “you have to be very intentional about every aspect of the show, from set details, technical movements, operations, to actor’s appearances and how they perform the show.”
The black box creates a world in which every rule of what people believe theatrical performance must be, can be broken.
