Divine Comedy, The

Abstract

Rendering for set design. Norman Bel Geddes's never-realized staging of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy was the most significant early example of his career-long attempts to create emotionally rich experiences in the theater. Favoring abstraction over realism, the play grounded his work within the theories and practices of Expressionism. In the 1910s and 1920s Expressionism influenced the visual arts, architecture, music, and the theater. Its creators distorted reality so that the outside objective world was colored by the artist's subjective emotions, conveying the psychological depths beneath the surface of reality. Geddes's dramatization, design, and production script of Divine Comedy was to be performed in Madison Square Garden in 1921 to celebrate the sexcentenary of Dante's death. When the performance did not happen, Geddes published A Project for a Theatrical Presentation of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri in 1924. He also designed a theater specifically to house a newly-proposed production for the 1933-1934 Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, but this project was not realized either