I saw a theater poster the other day — just an image with no words. Yet I knew in an instant that the play was A Streetcar Named Desire<\/i>.<\/p>\n
To me this means that the poster was successful. It managed to boil down the essence of the play into a single image.<\/p>\n
For some plays this is easy. A poster for Hamlet<\/i> pretty much just needs a guy talking to a skull he’s holding in one hand.<\/p>\n
In fact, it can be a gal holding the skull. Hamlet<\/i> is so iconic, that we would know immediately that what is being advertised is a production of Hamlet<\/i> with a female lead.<\/p>\n
I wonder whether we could rank plays this way: For a given play, how amenable is it to being recognized by a single iconic image?<\/p>\n
Let’s posit, for any given play, that we could come up with a poster consisting only of the optimal image to represent that play. Let’s further posit that are showing that poster only to people who have already seen the play.<\/p>\n
Could we rate every play in order from “most iconic” to “least iconic”? It would be an interesting exercise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw a theater poster the other day — just an image with no words. Yet I knew in an instant that the play was A Streetcar Named Desire. To me this means that the poster was successful. It managed to boil down the essence of the play into a single image. For some plays … Continue reading “Iconic theater posters”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24031"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24031"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24033,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24031\/revisions\/24033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}