Stage Design

JB by Archibald MacLeish

"A traveling circus which has been on the roads of the world for a long time." Set in a dilapidated tent, the biblical story of Job's search for the meaning of his suffering was performed by a commedia troupe of ghostly clowns, two of them animating masks of God and Satan in a contest for J.B.'s soul. The environmental design — tenting all around, sawdust covered floor, and a wagon that bodied forth the characters — obscured the boundary that usually differentiates audience from performance space.

JB