World News Syndication

By JULIE V. IOVINE

New York

Nowadays it seems like good architecture has to turn heads to be noticed, putting a burden on talented architects to provide flashy performance before thoughtful execution. And so it is a pleasure when one of the world’s most renowned, and scrutinized, architects, Frank Gehry, designs a quietly potent new kind of space as he has at the Pershing Square Signature Center on an Off-Broadway stretch of 42nd Street.

That there is little razzle-dazzle is just as well, because at the Signature the play’s the thing. And it always has been since founder and artistic director James Houghton established the company’s mission in 1991 to blast through the canons of living playwrights (Edward Albee, John Guare, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, among others) and to build audiences with affordable tickets (there are $20 seats for all productions).

The Signature’s new home exudes a workshop aesthetic and energy. The grand staircase is made of plywood, bolts and beams are visible throughout, the floors are all concrete, and sprayed-on stencils of playwright’s silhouettes decorate the sheetrock walls. It’s jazzy and mutable. That the lobby’s prime real estate is turned over to a vast open space ramping across two levels—with a bar, cafe tables, shop, window seats, couches and armchairs—sends an equally clear message that the audience is part of the production of that longest-running hit known as theater-going.

The three theaters—plus studio theater and rehearsal studio—all fall into the category of small Off-Broadway venues; the largest has 299 seats; the jewel-box and black-box theaters hold 199 seats each. Still it’s a big leap for the Signature from its former home base, where there were just 160 seats.

Along with the 100-seat theater now nearing completion on the roof of the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center and the 299-seat Theatre for a New Audience under construction within Brooklyn’s BAM Cultural District—both designed by New York architect Hugh Hardy—it is also a gain for New York’s theater scene, particularly that segment devoted to the city’s teeming population of newcomers, strivers and on-the-verge or comeback talents.

The Alice Griffin Jewel Box, where Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot” is now playing, is the most charming and successful of the Signature’s three theaters in the way it matches a true quality of intimacy to the smallness of scale. The edges of the space curl around to embrace the seats that appear more clustered than in rows. It’s a sensation reinforced by a balcony braced with overlapping, irregularly shaped panels. Mr. Houghton has described them as torn pieces of paper, perhaps in reference to Mr. Gehry’s reputed method of crumpling scraps to model his architecture’s curves.

The infinitely flexible Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre—with enough metal scaffolding to strap on a herd of horse puppets and folding-chair seats flanking both sides of a patch of stage—feels just as a black box should, raw and ready for conversion. And the 299-seat End Stage Theater is Broadwayesque in its largesse, particularly the stage itself. For the current performance of Edward Albee’s “The Lady from Dubuque,” an entire ranchhouse appears to spread out, a suburban forest glimpsed beyond its windows. The rake of the auditorium seating is just as generous, and the stained-plywood walls cut into loosely rearranged jigsaw pieces shade pleasantly from honey hues at the back to dark mahogany at the stage’s edge, a playful spatial echo of the houselights dimming. Would that part of the careful rethinking of the theater experience had included allowing more leg room between rows: If you are more than 5 feet 10 inches tall, expect to feel cramped.

For years, the Signature bounced around, renting space from the Public Theater downtown or holing up in a black box on Bond Street and then on far, far West 42nd Street. In 2004, the company was selected to be part of a revitalizing cultural mecca promised for Ground Zero. Mr. Gehry would be the architect of a new $700 million performing arts center, and the Signature would share marquee space with the Joyce Theater. But by 2007, with the whole site mired in controversy, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. decided to cut costs and disinvite the Signature, a blessing in disguise.

As it happened, development rights for a large parcel between Dyer Avenue and Tenth Avenue on 42nd Street hinged on including a performing-arts element to make up for two Off-Broadway houses that had been razed to allow for a subway extension. The Signature stepped right in, and Mr. Gehry stuck with the company, though they now faced the far more complicated job of fitting the theaters and all adjacent support spaces between the structural columns of a 62-story tower. Working with H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture as architects of record guaranteed finely tuned theatrical spaces. Hugh Hardy is a practiced hand at New York theater-making, having designed the original Joyce Theater, BAM’s Harvey Theater and many others. Collaboration may well be all the rage in architecture right now, but it’s still rare to see such high-powered talents giving each other an assist, making the Signature all the more notable.

And so it’s hardly worth complaining that the cafe chairs make an awful screech when dragged on those concrete floors, and that there’s still a line to the ladies room at intermission when the audiences of two of the three theaters come out to stretch. A bit of hubbub is, in fact, very much on the program, and it’s right that the architecture should reflect on that rather than on itself.

Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.

A version of this article appeared March 1, 2012, on page D4 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Signature Design by Gehry.

By TODDI GUTNER
| Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Courtesy of IKEA

The head of IKEA North America, Pernille Spiers-Lopez

Full name: Pernille Spiers-Lopez
Age: 49
Hometown: Silkeborg, Denmark
Current position: President of IKEA North America
First job: Dishwasher at a hotel
Favorite job: IKEA store manager in Pittsburgh
Education: Danish School of Journalism in Denmark
Years in the industry: 23 years
How I got here in 10 words or less: Passionate about work, focus on today, know the direction you want to go

Pernille Spiers-Lopez’s path to the top spot at IKEA in North America is anything but typical. Born in Denmark and trained as journalist, Ms. Spiers-Lopez quickly discovered that it would take much longer than she anticipated to obtain a coveted feature writer position. During her years as a reporter, she learned how to think on her feet and get along well with people — two skills that have served her well in retail. Ms. Spiers-Lopez came to the U.S. in 1980 at age 23, leased a car and drove more than 60,000 miles in two years selling Danish furnishings out of her car. “Retail is a self-taught profession where you just get out there and figure it out,” says Ms. Spiers-Lopez. Flush with contacts in retailing, she quickly rose in the field, managing 24 Door Store furniture locations, and then opening two STOR home furnishings stores in California. They were later purchased by IKEA. The company recruited her in 1990 to be marketplace manager of its West Coast stores and she became president of IKEA North America in 2001. She has helped grow the chain from 15 stores in the Northeast and West Coast to 35 stores. Writer Toddi Gutner spoke with Spiers-Lopez about her career path. Edited excerpts follow.

Q: What does IKEA stand for?

A: It stands for name of the founder Ingvar Kampard, and Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, which is the town where he grew up. At 83 years old, he is still active in the company.

Q: What is your favorite IKEA product?

A: I love the IKEA kitchens. They look good and they’re designed and organized well for cooks who need to find things.

How You Can Get There, Too

Best advice: “Always follow your passion and live your values,” says Ms. Spiers-Lopez.

Skills you need: Strong leadership skills and an ability to understand yourself are key, says Ms. Spiers-Lopez. “Be a people person,” she adds. “(And) know the business.”

Degrees you should go for: Ms. Spiers-Lopez says a specific degree isn’t necessary, just “life and life experience.”

Where you should start: On the front line with the customer in the stores, she says. Try to build a career in retail from the bottom, up.

Professional organizations to contact: Professional retail associations

Salary range: Fits with IKEA as a low-cost company

Q: You joined IKEA in 1990 as a store manager and then became a human resources manager. How did you eventually move into an operational role with profit and loss responsibility?

A: Human resource managers can be their own worst enemies. With all the benefit rules and regulations, they often talk about what the business can’t do. As an HR manager, I took my role as a business partner to the company leaders (but) on the front line (in order) to make it possible for them to do what they needed to do. I became recognized as a business leader myself. In fact, many of the top jobs at IKEA come from the HR function. The country managers of Germany and the United Kingdom were both HR managers.

Q: How has being a foreigner in the U.S. running a foreign company helped or hindered your career?

A: I think it would have been much more difficult if I had come to IKEA from another retailer but I grew up with the company. Also, I think coming from Scandinavia myself, where the image is very positive, definitely made it easier as well. I am proud to say that I became at U.S. citizen in January of this year.

Q: How do you reconcile the European work ethic with America’s 24/7 workplace?

A: We take a different perspective that focuses on work-life balance. We think if you want to be a good manager and a good leader then it’s not healthy to work 80-hour weeks. IKEA employees like to work hard, but we also value time with our families and expect our employees to take their vacation time. When you’re tired, stressed and overworked, you can’t really be productive and make the right decisions. We want to attract very good people who stay a very long time.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face in your job?

More How I Got Here

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• How I Got Here: Charity Founder
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• How I Got Here: A Passion for All Things Iconic
• How I Got Here: From Salesman to Vice Chairman
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• How I Got Here: Through The Ranks to Division President
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• How I Got Here: Managing Vibe at Hard Rock Hotel
• How I Got Here: Child of the ’60s Turned Corporate Lawyer

A: There are so many things that come at you everyday, such that nothing is ever done. I have to work to make sure that I keep some distance and don’t absorb everything and let it eat me up. I do a lot of yoga, meditation and I read books.

Q: What does the coming year hold for you and IKEA?

A: Even though it is a tough economic environment, I feel very optimistic. IKEA is about great things at low prices. There seems to be a change happening in society where people respect value; they can do things themselves and they don’t need fancy furniture.

Q: Did you ever aspire to be a president of a company?

A: I have done more than I ever I expected I would do. I have a great exciting job. When you can work from a place of no fear, you’re much more relaxed. For me, it hasn’t been about what is next, but rather about enjoying what I have. Truth is, I am not afraid of being nobody; if I lost my job tomorrow, I would enjoy doing something totally different.

Write to CareerJournal at cjeditor@dowjones.com

My book group has been discussing whether there is a difference between a story with an unhappy ending and a tragedy. What is your opinion?

—K. P., Burlington, Vt.

In his book “Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic,” the British critic Terry Eagleton addresses this very question, conceding, however, that he does not have a particularly satisfying answer. “In everyday language, the word ‘tragedy’ means something like ‘very sad,’” he wrote. “It may well turn out that ‘very sad’ is also the best we can do when it comes to the more exalted realm of tragic art.”

Yet there are clear differences to the admittedly subjective feeling of sorrow. While it’s sad for a son to see his elderly father dying (as in “Dad” by William Wharton), it’s a very different kind of grief from a Polish woman who is forced to decide which of her two children will survive Auschwitz (“Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron). As Thomas Hardy wrote, “That which, socially, is a great tragedy, may be in Nature no alarming circumstance.”

Hardy wrote tragic novels, including “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” “Jude the Obscure” and “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” but unlike earlier tragedies, the fallen in Hardy’s stories are ordinary people, dairymaids and wood cutters rather than kings and princes, who are undone by ordinary human “passions, prejudices and ambitions,” as Hardy wrote, and their inability to escape the consequences. That’s also at the heart of the tragedies of “Anna Karenina,” “The Scarlet Letter” and “Madame Bovary.”

David Nicholls’s “One Day” ended on a sad note, but I wouldn’t call it a tragedy. Nor, I feel certain, would Aristotle, an early theoretician of the tragic, who believed tragedies should inspire not just pity but also fear. Although Richard Yates’s and Cormac McCarthy’s novels are almost unbearably morbid, they’re not tragedies on the order of “Macbeth” or “King Lear.” Theodore Dreiser named his novel about an ambitious young man murdering his pregnant girlfriend “An American Tragedy,” but the story was based on a squalid real-life crime of an ambitious young man murdering his pregnant girlfriend.

It’s clear how profligately the word tragic is tossed around when you look at what books users of LibraryThing (librarything.com) have tagged as “tragedy.” Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible”? Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections”? “The Rotters’ Club” by Jonathan Coe? These are all fine novels in which people suffer, but that’s life, not tragedy. It would be impossible to write great fiction without some characters, even beloved ones, suffering misfortune. “The novelist can not write a novel which is felt to be an absolutely comic novel or an absolutely tragic novel,” Thornton Wilder once wrote. “Human experience can only be regarded as presenting a synthesis of both.”

I was glad to see “Flowers for Algernon” on LibraryThing’s list because tragedy isn’t necessarily about death. I’d say the same about “Lolita” and “Main Street.” I would also argue that Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance” has no business on any list of tragic novels: It may tell of harrowing poverty and adversity, but it’s also a story of human fortitude and hope. Which reminds me that Shalom Auslander’s most recent novel is called “Hope: A Tragedy.”

To some people, poverty is inherently tragic. But I recently read Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” a nonfiction account of life in a Mumbai slum, and while it may be barbaric that humans today have to survive by scavenging junkyards for used plastic, I don’t believe those slum dwellers would describe their own lives as tragic.

The French critic Geoffrey Brereton once wrote, “The death of a great man in an air-crash qualifies for tragedy unequivocally; if he is killed in a sports-car, the tragic quality becomes more dubious; if by falling off a bicycle, the whole conception is endangered.” But if the great man who falls off the bicycle has just survived the battle of the Somme, that verges on the tragic to me. Or maybe it’s just life.

If death is everyone’s unhappy ending, realist writers must kill some of their characters. “One is born, one lives in one’s time, one dies,” the novelist Annie Proulx said in a 1999 interview in the Missouri Review. “The person, the character, is one speck of life among many, many. The ending, then, should reflect…some element of value or importance in telling this ending among the possible myriad of stories that might have been told.”

—Send your questions about books and writing to Cynthia Crossen at booklover@wsj.com.