Michael Arden

When you begin building a production, what role does space play in the emotional experience?

It's kind of everything.

Because unlike a film where you watch a flat surface, you're watching three-dimensional surface and therefore every vantage point of the audience is in a different relationship to everything on stage.

It's amazing.

It's why you can go back to a show and have a completely different experience, let alone that it's live and there are probably different people and you're a different person than you were the last time you saw it and the air is different and the temperature and the…

And the live music is playing right there.

There's no cheating out.

No hiding.

No, no.

You don't like angle your body to the audience so they can see your pretty face.

It's like you can just look at somebody and you have to keep moving always in circle in the round, which is an amazing challenge for the director.

And also something magical happens in the round.

Say you and I are in a scene.

We're sitting across from each other in the studio here.

We're looking at each other.

There's audience behind you.

There's an audience behind me.

This does two things to an audience.

One, it forces me to imagine as opposed to see.

I have to imagine the world behind you.