SCENERY FOR THE THEATRE: THE ORGANIZATION, PROCESSES, MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES USED TO SET THE STAGE.

Revised Edition.By Harold Burris-Meyer and Edward C.Cole '26. Contributing authors: NicholasL. Bryson, James F. Göhl, Austin O.Huhn, Harvey Sweet, Douglas C. Taylor'62 (Dartmouth Assistant Professor ofDrama and Assistant Technical Directorof Theatre), and Gene A. Wilson. Illustrated with photographs, drawings, tables,and graphs. Boston: Little, Brown andCompany, 1971. 518 pp. $32.

When is a revised edition not a revised edition? Surely when it is so vastly rewritten, augmented, redesigned, and embellished as this Scenery for the Theatre. It had to be so, for in the more than thirty years since the publication of the book's first edition, theatre technology, organization, and even style and form have grown and changed so drastically as to require a new book to do them justice. And this' is virtually a new book, an up-to-the-hour handbook of theatre craft, an encyclopedia of the designer's art, a vade mecum for stage technicians everywhere.

The very dimensions of the book—its fifteen chapters, its more than a thousand illustrations, its charts, diagrams, color plates, graphs and formulas, its bibliographies and lists of manufacturers—all bear witness to the demands today's theatre makes upon the designer. Our theatre is wildy eclectic. Drawing on more than two thousand years of dramatic literature, it calls for productions in any of a hundred styles, from meticulous naturalism to spectacular expressionism. Even the stages themselves deny uniformity. They come in all shapes and sizes—proscenium, thrust, arena—from the proverbial three boards to the latest monsters of mechanical ingenuity, complete with hydraulic elevators and synchronous winch systems. To design and construct scenery for such a pluralistic theatre requires plural skills and many-faceted competence. And to comprehend such skills requires a giant book like this.

It is a book in which Dartmouth can take pride. Its co-author, Edward Cole, recently retired from a distinguished 40-year career at the Yale School of Drama, is an alumnus. So, too, is Douglas Taylor, now teacher and assistant technical director in our own Drama Department, who contributed text and illustrations on metalworking in scene construction. And finally the Hopkins Center appears handsomely in photographs of the Center Theatre, decked out for TwelfthNight, and in photographs and a floor plan of our scene shop.

Lastly, if I have so stressed the specialized nature of Scenery for the Theatre as to discourage the general reader, I have done the book an injustice. If he is a general reader who happens to love the theatre, he will find much here to delight him. Just as a lover of magic may relish magician's manuals, curious to discover how the tricks are done, so too may a lover of theatre magic be fascinated by the how-it-is-done of the stage. For devoted members of the audience, then, no less than for stage practitioners, this is a book to browse and wander in, a guide to a world of cunning and amazement, an initiation into a mystery.

The William R. Kenan Professor andDartmouth Professor of English, Mr. Finchteaches courses in Playwriting and TheDramatic Experience.