Noontime on a brilliant summer day in lower Manhattan - a visitor's steps quicken as he leaves the skyscrapers behind and heads toward the river. Weaving through the traffic near City Hall and dodging bicyclists on the sloping concrete path, he finally reaches the wooden planked walkway atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Ten feet above the stop-and-go pulse of cars, crisscrossing cables of silver-gray frame harbor boats and the skyline with an ever-changing pattern of trapezoids.
If the bridge resembles a 3-D wire sculpture from the outside, the soaring, cavernous space inside its granite support pillars also inspires comparison with a work of art. Walk inside the thick-walled pillar or anchorage on the Brooklyn shore and seven mysterious vaulted chambers, replete with 55-foot ceilings, greet the visitor. Designed by John Roebling and his son Washington more than a century ago to house and support the bridge's suspension cables, the Brooklyn anchorage this summer was the site and inspiration for a theater performance that may be one of the closest collaborations ever between building structure and art.
For playwright Matthew Maguire, the adventure began in 1984, a year after the City of New York restored the space - it had become a warehouse for used tires - to its original grandeur in honor of the bridge's centennial. Maguire had already decided t write about a play about Guilio Camillo, an Italian Renaissance philosopher and mystic who was obsessed with human memory. When he saw the anchorage, Maguire was hooked. "I walked in and thought the place was perfect for a play about memory - all the chambers suggest the reverence of memory."
With the help of ten artists and architects, Maguire transformed radically both the anchorage and his play, first produced in workshop productions at the La Mama Theatre in New York City and the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, for the eighteen-performance run at the bridge last summer. Each of the seven chambers, already eerie and ghost-like, became even more dramatic as they were imbued with aspects of memory: a throne room made of bricks of stainless-steel mesh represents power (and the fact that philosopher Camillo was in the payment of the King of France); a trompe l'oeil version of the Pantheon symbolizes a storehouse of knowledge; and a huge camera obscura illustrates the light and shadowy parts of memory. Adding to the drama of the sets was the reverberation of Vito Ricci's electronic music.
Another chamber, containing a white-walled "pure room" whose sides swing out 270 degrees, inside becoming outside, is also a metaphor for memory, Maguire explained. Like some underground Roman bath, water was a leitmotif fro the production, spouting from a Roman-style mask that designers George Palumbo and Elyn Zimmerman affixed with loose concrete to one wall, and flowing through several plywood-lined brick canals and fountains that appeared to connect several of the chambers. Aged to match the dusty, aging brick of the structure's walls and flooring, the canal and mask looked to be permanent parts of the anchorage, yet, like all the sets, were designed to pry loose without harming the landmark space at the end of the play's run. "We mixed the mortar with sand so the bricks could separate easily," Palumbo, a Brooklyn-based artist, noted.
Perhaps most visually exciting of the sets, which were on exhibit to the public during the day, in addition to becoming theater props at night, was a
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