Back in the day, you could catch early work from Complicite or Phelim McDermott or the premiere of Caryl Churchill's Fen in an auditorium so cold you could see your own breath.
"I had imagined that these periods in the auditorium would be cold and boring," Shae said in an interview.
The talk is at 3 p.m. at the Grace Auditorium at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, off Route 25A.
In contrast, just across the street sits a staid and humble building, designed as an auditorium when the Cold War was drawing to a close and then, for a time afterward, left vacant.
Earlier this summer in a packed and freezing-cold auditorium in Doha, the all-female team of students from Qatar University burst into cheers and tears as they were pronounced winners of the country's INJAZ Young Enterprise of the Year Competition.
The Rome Opera, whose ornate old auditorium is trapped behind a cold modernist façade, has never attained the prestige of La Scala.
Today, the auditoriums are littered with rubble; cold air comes in through rocket holes; and once-bold Soviet murals of men and women, Afghans and Russians, are hidden in the squalid darkness near cartoon images depicting a Taliban fighter instructing children to become suicide bombers.
Perhaps not to be outdone, Lera Auerbach's 2013 opera The Blind calls on attendees to be blindfolded and led into the hall as gusts of cold air rush through the auditorium.
"In the next seance, the audience was told that during the newsreel there must be silence… so when the moment came, the whole of the auditorium succumbed to a sudden and noisy cold!
And as a cold rain fell outside the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, the news — delivered by state budget officials to an audience that included about 500 state and local legislators — got progressively bleak.
He once wiped out a front row of folding chairs at the Stockton Memorial Civic Auditorium while diving for a loose ball and cold-cocked a teammate in practice.
