Keeping the design out of the spotlight

John Fisher and company make performance spaces plotted to keep audiences riveted on the stage, not the venues' lines.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

May 28, 2006

ARCHITECT John Fisher has always loved actors. In fact, he married one and moved his family to Los Angeles in 1975 so his wife, the late Bonnie Johns, could pursue her craft. "When we got here," Fisher recalls, "the theater scene was mostly just the Mark Taper and all these non-Equity houses that were ad hoc transformations of some other kind of space. Besides that, there weren't many other theaters, though we sure tried to find them."

It has become a little easier to find new theaters in Southern California, in no small part because of Fisher. Since 1985, when his firm transformed a downtown bank into Los Angeles Theatre Center, Fisher has made it his business to design Modernist-inspired performance spaces throughout the region.

And next year, John Sergio Fisher & Associates will see two ambitious out-of-town commissions unveiled. The $21-million Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto (from Nestor + Gaffney Architecture) features two theaters designed by JSFA. And in Washington, D.C., Fisher's firm is working on a 535-seat auditorium geared toward an august target audience: the members of Congress as well as their constituents. Part of the Freedom Forum's Newseum complex developed by Polshek Partnership Architects, the theater, located midway between the U.S. Capitol and the White House, is configured to accommodate televised town hall meetings hosted by politicians, screenings for schoolchildren and 3-D digital cinema events for audiences of all ages.

Fisher, a lanky septuagenarian dressed in all black, juggles these and a dozen other theater projects out of a utilitarian 11-person office in Tarzana. Here the commissions keep coming, he says, because "we avoid bells and whistles and focus on the functionality of the space. For us, the important thing is the performance. We want the audience to focus on the performers, so we try not to distract them."

It may sound simple, but achieving the quiet virtues most appreciated by theatergoing audiences requires from Fisher a near-obsessive focus on fundamentals: strong sightlines and clarion acoustics. Glancing at his building design for Los Angeles' Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, he points to the venue's concrete slab exterior that towers over Washington Boulevard and notes, "The concrete gives the theater spaces good sound isolation from the traffic."

Larry Hoffman is the director of Fassberg Construction Co., which built the Nate Holden space, as well as the Madrid Theatre in Canoga Park where architect Fisher squeezed a 500-seat venue onto a 50-by-140-foot lot. Hoffman appreciates the architect's stripped-down approach. "John knows how to maximize design using basic, simple building materials…. There's not a lot of gingerbread, and you're not going to see fancy colors on the exterior that other people use to jazz things up. These buildings stand on their designs."

John Paul Luckenbach, the Nate Holden's technical director, has been involved in about 30 productions since the theater's opening in late 2004. "You could liken the space here to a good sports car," he says. "Ergonomically it has all the things that you want at your fingertips when you want them. He brings a great feeling to this small space that has all these accouterments, like the spiral lift orchestra pit and the full fly tower, which he really fought for and which is incredible to have in a 400-seat midsize house."

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Eager to solve problems

SHARING Fisher's aesthetic — and workload — is his son Matt, 35, who set up JSFA's five-person San Francisco office in 1996 after earning a bachelor's degree in architecture from UC Berkeley.

Chiming in by conference call from San Francisco, Matt Fischer (he restored "C" to his last name to match the original Hungarian spelling) says: "One thing I picked up from my father was a love for problem-solving. It's pretty exciting to deal with the back-and-forth process, between the technical requirements on one hand and the theme and feeling of a space on the other."

Matt Fischer faced an exceptionally complicated exercise in multitasking when he devised the 450-seat black box performance space at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre, which opened last year as part of the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for La Jolla Playhouse. Ellery Brown, La Jolla Playhouse director of operations, recalls, "We needed this to be a multiuse space, and that's what they gave us.

"We've had a page-to-stage workshop there, the premiere of Lee Blessing's 'The Scottish Play,' 'Much Ado About Nothing.' We've done a bar mitzvah in the space, the county supervisor gave his State of the County address here, and we developed our new musical 'Zhivago' in this space. In just one year, it's been used for everything imaginable."

To enhance the theater's flexibility, Fischer created a system of collapsible railings that allow the U-shaped gallery to be converted from audience seating into an elevated stage area. He also outfitted the theater's ceiling-suspended tension grid with 8-foot square panels that can be removed to create fly-away storage for props, chandeliers and stage walls.

"Inside a theater," Brown notes, "you're basically trying to create an envelope in which to place this other world, and that envelope has to fit many needs — acoustics, lighting, sound reinforcement, audience comfort, actor comfort, disabled accessibility — the list goes on and on. It's a very tall order to make sure all those needs are met so theater artists are allowed to do their work."

John Fisher says the Potiker project embodies the interplay between form and function that he and his son prize: "We take a holistic approach to theater design. Instead of thinking of technology as an afterthought or an add-on, we design the spaces so the theater equipment is integrated into the architecture."

Matt Fischer adds, "We stay functional and bring the money into what's really important, which is this desire to create intimacy between performers and audience members. We don't do ornate design. We like clean simple lines."

JSFA's devotion to Modernist principles are rooted in John Fisher's personal history. Most members of his extended family died in the Holocaust. "Emotionally, one reason I reject icons from the past is that I'm a survivor of this cataclysmic event," he says. "In 1946, with the end of the Second World War we entered a new era."

Fisher and his parents fled from Italy in 1938, when he was 4, immigrating first to Cuba, then Texas and finally Cleveland. There, he became a high school thespian. "I was a weightlifter and had good projection, so they put me in plays," he explains. "I was a terrible actor, but they kept casting me in shows, and I liked it because I got to mingle with the actors."

Fisher studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where, he says, "I naturally gravitated to people who were in the theater department, which was in the same building as the architecture school." He laughs: "I dated the drama students because they were the most intelligent and attractive women on campus."

After earning his master of architecture degree, Fisher spent a year in Europe on a Fulbright grant, soaking up the spare works of Finnish architect Alvar Alto and International Style master Le Corbusier. He then taught at his alma mater alongside the school's critic in residence, Louis Kahn. Before moving west, Fisher served as dean of Syracuse University's School of Architecture.

But for all Fisher's design credentials, Jose Luis Valenzuela, artistic director for Los Angeles Theatre Center's resident Latino Theatre Company, believes it's the architect's affection for stagecraft that best explains his popularity as a theater designer. "John genuinely loves theater, and that gives him a special sensibility about the needs of the actors," says Valenzuela, who is working with Fisher to upgrade LATC with new gallery spaces and furnishings.

"Because of the way John rakes the seating here, when you stand on the stage and look out, you feel like the eye line of the actor is very close to the people in the audience. Those kinds of sightlines and acoustics are very important because theater is about having this whole ritualistic experience, where human beings are able to have a dialogue with other human beings. When you come into this space, you feel embraced by it, and that's no accident. That's because of John."

Murray Milne, a research professor at UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design, admires Fisher's cost-effective, performance-friendly environments.

"John is not competing with the people who are going for the cover of architecture magazines. He's part of the functionalist tradition where you look very carefully at how the building works and how people are going to use the building, and he'll work for people who have tight little budgets and small sites." Milne says. "Le Corbusier talks about a house being a machine for living — there's some analogy in that you could think of a theater being a machine for vicariously living the life of the people on the stage.

"For John, the play's the thing."