Читать книгу Setting the Stage - David Hays - Страница 11

CHAPTER THREE

Long Day’s Journey into O’Neill

I WAS A NEW RESIDENT of New York City. During the day, I was painting scenery at the old Metropolitan Opera House on Thirty-Eighth Street, and at night I was designing, building, painting, and lighting at Circle in the Square. After a superb production of Eugene O’Neill’s THE ICEMAN COMETH — with a breathtaking performance by Jason Robards — José Quintero and his partner, Leigh Connell, artistic directors at the Circle, approached Carlotta O’Neill and convinced her to let them produce LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. O’Neill had asked that it not be performed until twenty-five years after his death, but Mrs. O’Neill relented. Her early release was high drama, and there was great buzz about the production. Fredric March would play the father, James Tyrone; Jason Robards, the older son, Jamie; Brad Dillman, the younger son, Edmund (representing O’Neill); and Florence Eldredge, Mary, wife of James and mother of Jamie and Edmund. This is essentially a four-character play, but there is a fifth — a maid, Cathleen — not a major role, but to be well played by Katherine Ross. I would design it, for which I am eternally grateful to José — but that didn’t add to the buzz.

O’Neill sets the play in a small sunroom in the New London, Connecticut, home where the family lived when not on tour. The father is famous to the public for his role in THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and to his family for cheap hotel rooms and fried-egg sandwiches. The playwright’s stage directions call for a room with a back wall, an entrance to the rest of the house on both sides, and windows on the walls that come downstage on each side. (One of the ironies of my life is that twenty years after this play, I lived in this very house for three years with my family. O’Neill’s memory of that small room was exact, surely engraved in his mind by pain.)

This is a long play — four acts — and whatever variety we could achieve in the one room would be precious. José Quintero wanted to depart from the sacrosanct instructions. The visual point of the play, he said, was the movement from a cheerful morning light through noon, then a foggy afternoon, then a dark and depressing night. The stage directions gave us an interior back wall, not the commanding and informative moods of daylight, then darkness. I worked out a set with a huge bay window spanning the entire back wall. It could logically embrace a low platform, lifting upstage actors so they could be seen more easily over the heads of those downstage. Also there could be window seats, actually chests, the kind of sit-on boxes that are jammed with skates and tennis racquets and so forth in a country house. These would be built-in places to sit, relieving us of finding yet more furniture in a room that should look barren and uncared for. These details may seem unimportant and premature considering the major service of the big windows, but even small details with the “aha!” factor make you sense that you are on the right track.

Step by step. I first united the windows in a curve across the back wall. But the floor plan, or ground plan — how a set looks as seen from above — has to have vigor. Weak corners weaken the picture and are sensed by the audience. I had briefly worked for the designer Boris Aronson, converting his setting for THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK to a simpler and smaller set for the road company. He insisted on this principle and, as usual, he was right. So next I set the three windows not on a curve, but as a bay window unit jutting out of the room, framed with sharp corners.

The windows couldn’t be bare — that would feel too naked. But shabby curtains to reflect Mrs. Tyrone’s poor housekeeping? That’s Halloween, too suggestive of cobwebs and bats. Mrs. Tyrone states, in Act I, “I’ve never felt it was my home. It was wrong from the start. Everything was done in the cheapest way.” As the play proceeds, we see that she is incapable of significant improvements.

I asked my teacher Ray Sovey for help with these bare windows, and he suggested colored glass squares, typical of those early years of the twentieth century, rimming the upper pane of the double-hung windows. To me, these colored squares were the best thing on the set. In the morning, they glowed, as hopeful, pretty light streamed through them. At noon, they supplied color; in the fog of the third act, they were muted; and at night, they had that bleak blackness of a church’s stained glass when seen from outside. Years later, I lectured on this process at Harvard. After the lecture, two distinguished professors came to me, one of them actually in tears, and said that my request for help from my old teacher had so deeply touched them. No former student had ever asked for their help.

Now for the rest of the ground plan, starting with the two upstage entrances O’Neill calls for. Here his exact memory of the room overcame his ordinary common sense. There is simply no reason for two entrances, one to a rarely used front parlor, the other to the dining room. Years later I saw Olivier’s production of this play in London and he followed the stage directions exactly. Two entrances (archways, not doors) plus the wall between took up the entire upstage, and the value of changing light as the play progressed was lost. I used a single archway on the upstage end of the stage-right wall. The bay window is at right angles to this wall, angled itself; thus the bay slants downstage toward stage left, ending in a narrow screen door. Thus a center line to the room is sensed — it is as if we cut across a room at an angle. This is not easy to visualize, so I’ve included a simple floor plan.

Concerning furniture on the set. Around the central table were appropriate chairs: a heavy Morris chair for father, a wicker rocker for mama, and ordinary side chairs for the sons. The three bears — plus one. O’Neill calls for three wicker chairs, but I felt the differentiation was better in its small way. My main source for these items and others, such as a chandelier and water pitcher, was the 1912 Sears Roebuck catalog.

In the play, the father is generally rooted to his chair. The sons occasionally take a seat, but usually roam the whole room, particularly the restless Jamie during his bitter speeches. Mary Tyrone uses her rocker, but there was also room on the set for a wicker chaise longue, and it was a good variant for Mary.

In describing the furnishings, O’Neill makes a point of two bookcases. The father’s would contain classics such as Smollett’s Complete History of England, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and so on. The younger son’s would contain Marx, Wilde, Swinburne, and Kipling. Easy to show precisely, if a director chose, on a film close-up. The best a designer can do on the distant stage is to show one collection in leather bindings, the other in paper. And why not? Why not execute the playwright’s simple request in this case? We ignored or altered plenty of his suggestions. But then, how much does an audience see? Do not expect people to notice and analyze every detail, such as this choice of books. Yet the details build up. How many rooms do we enter and sense that they are just right, even at first glance?

A ground plan sketch for Long Day’s Journey into Night. Author’s collection.

In this instance, the bookcases play a role, separating the generations. In Act IV, the father growls to Edmund, “Where do you get your taste in authors? That damned library of yours! Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I’ve three good sets of Shakespeare there.”

One problem was to find room for these bookcases. The father’s bookcase could be a low built-in under the center bay window, between the chests. I felt that Edmund, representing O’Neill, should have a desk, a literary base in the room in contrast to the older, rootless brother. More about furniture choices later. But the stage-right wall, where I put his desk, was narrow. The solution was to put the bookcase on top of his desk, making it into a so-called secretary desk. I wanted him to have a wicker desk, similar to those often seen in seaside hotels, glass-topped, with a back rim of cubbyholes holding hotel stationery. It would look light, appropriately misplaced among the heavy furnishings, a summer note in a winter room. But there were no such desks in wicker, none that replaced the low cubbyholes with a three-or four-tier bookshelf. Trust me. But couldn’t there be? You shouldn’t fool around carelessly with great classic styles like Louis XIV or Chippendale. But some styles, such as Queen Anne, are more informal, and coffee tables (not known in her lifetime) have appeared; even flush toilets (also not known to the queen) are dressed up in her style, with seat covers incorporating fake wicker insets. These seem fair game, even if they somewhat pollute the style’s purity. So I reasoned that Mrs. Tyrone had simply gone to a local wicker maker, common artisans at that time, and ordered this piece for her son. No one complained.

Outside the windows I placed porch posts, vines, and a decorative rim running below the roof. This made sense because of the fog needed for Act III. How could you show there was fog without having something for the fog to conceal? To create this fog, we lowered a scrim (gauze curtain) between the windows and the porch posts and vines, and that scrim gauzed away the outside world. I also enjoyed the porch decoration because the roof rim was the only piece of the O’Neill’s actual house that we copied onstage.

Robert Edmond Jones, a designer who worked with O’Neill, liked symmetry, and he influenced the playwright. Designers can do that. I was once handed a play requiring six sets, with turntables. I saw no reason that it couldn’t be played on one set, and that was done, with the playwright and director’s agreement, thereby saving a ton of construction and operating expenses — and enhancing the play. My set was carefully described in the stage directions of the play when it was published. A student asked me years later, “So what did you do but exactly follow the playwright’s directions?” Expand this thought: the playwright also gleaned credit from others who worked on the first run because many of his poor speeches were cut by the director or producer, and some of the play’s best moments were inspired by them or by — yes — an actor.

O’Neill, surely influenced by Jones, calls for a table centered in the room. This is the gathering point of bitterness, anger, and guilt, centering the whirling accusations. José did not want it centered. It would be a tennis game, he noted: you look right, you look left. So the table wasn’t centered. However, because of the angles of the set, the perceived center line suggests that the table and the chandelier above it are centered in the room. Of course, this is an illusion — they are off-center, toward stage left, as José wished.

An electric cord plugged into the chandelier above the table ran down to a small lamp on the table. A nice touch asked for by O’Neill, indicating cheapness to a modern audience, who have a profusion of wall or floor outlets. As for the table itself, the trouble was that the round table called for in the stage directions caused sight-line problems. I discovered this while drawing it in the plan. The actor sitting at the upstage center of the table was hidden from the side audience by the heads of the actors seated at the sides of the table. The solution was to make the table oval, to shrink its up-and downstage measurement. This brought the upstage actor downstage a foot or so, enough to make him visible from the side seats. Easy. The table still looked round, and if it didn’t, so what? Years after this, José wrote in a memoir that he had instructed me to make the table oval. I was surprised that he had even noticed the alteration. I brought this up in my next conversation with Jason. “That’s the mildest of stings,” he said. “José took credit for inventing — and then instructed me on — every acting idea I ever had.”

Downstage left, I put a screen door leading out to the porch. There was a notion that the father would be seen sneaking along the porch as he goes to the cellar to get more whiskey, but this looked comic and was cut. The screen door was never used, and José didn’t like the way I initially positioned it. He wanted it facing more toward the audience, to serve as a background for much of Mary’s third-act speech in the foggy afternoon. So I nipped six inches from the bay windows and angled the door. Her speech is so sad in the enveloping gloom of the fog-bound afternoon, and it offers a strong contrast to the vitriol of the men: “You’re a sentimental fool,” she says, alone on the set. “What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent where you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin.”

Tharon Musser lit this play beautifully. I lit the rest of my plays, except one where I was fired and one other with Tharon. Tharon and I became close friends, and we often consulted to find solutions to scenery or lighting difficulties. After I started my own company, the National Theatre of the Deaf, I did not always have the time to spend on lighting. A set designer can design a set, oversee the building and painting, see it set up out of town, and visit from time to time. But the lighting designer is stuck for days and days setting levels. There were three shows during these years that I designed but did not light, because I was too involved with my own company to spend that time. Two went well, and the other badly, lighted by a man who was only concerned with his own effects — the kind of effects that would display his genius.

One interesting lighting problem we worked through on LONG DAY’S JOURNEY was the unlighted formal living room, upstage right, showing slightly behind its archway entrance into the main room. How to make a dark room? Just leaving it unlighted usually does not work onstage — it looks as if you failed to attend to it. What we did was to open the heavy drapes in the room about two inches and shoot bright sunlight through that slot. Just before curtain, the electrician went into the room and slapped a loaded blackboard eraser. At rise, the chalk dust caught the slanted beams of light, contrasting with the darkness behind, and the effect was fine. The dust settled, of course, illustrating that an effect well made at the start of a scene can serve throughout the scene: it remains in the audience’s consciousness even after they become involved in other matters.

Another note on lighting: At the end of the play, midnight, the three men are around the table. Jamie is in a drunken sleep. His father is drunk but knows what’s about to come. Edmund is alert. The father says, “I think I’ll catch a few winks. Why don’t you do the same, Edmund. It’ll pass the time until she —” Suddenly the living room light snaps on and Mary Tyrone comes through that archway, ghostly in flowing white nightclothes, carrying her wedding dress. “Suddenly” is the word, bringing a gasp from the Boston audience. In New Haven, for switchboard convenience, Tharon made that lighting unit larger — going from a 500-watt lamp to a 1,000-watt lamp — and hooked it to a dimmer. The dimmer handle was swiftly lifted — but not as swiftly as the snap-on we had in Boston, and the larger lamp took a small fraction of a second more to reach full brightness. Because of this tiny difference we lost that gasp and caused a murmur instead, as if the audience noticed the effect rather than being struck by it. Tharon corrected that, of course. Small differences can make big differences.

Other productions were mounted during our run, and our assistant stage manager showed me a photo of another set. “Isn’t this great? No ceiling!” he untactfully crowed. The picture itself was interesting, the set similar to mine but indeed no ceiling. The lack of a ceiling signals imagination to some, but I’m not sure it worked well in this case. The ceiling contained the drama of the play; one looked out of the trapped, or trapping, room. Opening the room to the sky frees it — too much, in my opinion.

I was praised by Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, our reigning critic, as an “excellent setting of a cheerless living room with dingy furniture and hideous little touches of unimaginative décor.” Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, second only to Mr. Atkinson, said the set was “a perfect echo — curving and empty — of the universe these characters wander.”

WHAT I LEARNED

Some of O’Neill’s stage directions added to our sense of the room without being of practical use. Remember that O’Neill was writing at the end of a tradition where plays were often read at home in evening gatherings — home entertainment before television. (The vestige of these now-rare gatherings is the book club.) To add to these evenings, the playwright might engage us with an extended description of the town and customs of the area. Read Bernard Shaw’s CANDIDA to understand this.

In fact, one learns more about the scenic needs of a play from a close reading of the script than from a playwright’s instructions. Some designers actually avoid reading all stage directions. The designer is hired as an inventive partner, and all ingredients, including the anticipated strength of an actor, should be stirred in the pot. Yes, do what the playwright wants, but, like the director, try to add more to the production and steer away from mistakes.

I was once involved in a conference with the playwright Sam Shepard and the superb costume designer Pat Zipprodt (FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, CHICAGO, THE GRADUATE, and on and on). Sam, just before he stalked out of the room, stated furiously that costumers often didn’t do as he instructed. “But,” said Pat, “if you choose an actress that looks sickly in the black you specify, I’ll dress her in another color. Or if you insist on black, get another actress.”

A note about velour, a cloth used often to cover stage walls, as in this set: It’s essentially a cheap velvet, easy to paint, although it’s important to be aware of the nap — think of stroking a cat the wrong way. You’ve probably seen this painted velour technique used less subtly in Mexican restaurants, with a matador dressed gaudily in yellow and gold, waving his red muleta against a background of black velour or velvet. In the case of this set, I used a stencil to make a faint, rather worn-out wallpaper pattern. The color was a muted green, the tone of the walls slightly heavy, heightening the contrast with the windows and the scattered furniture.

In the theatre, we usually apply the cloth with the nap pointing down so that the cloth more readily absorbs light bouncing up from the stage floor, rather than reflecting it.

Ceilings to these so-called box sets are not, in my experience, made of velour, but of ordinary canvas or linen. They reflect much of this bounce from the floor, and so are painted darker than you might expect. When sets are retouched before opening, you often see the painters darken the ceilings even more.

If only we could stop light after it has done its job on an actor. The bounce that I mention on the walls and ceiling makes set and lighting designers crazy. So we fuss and fuss with focus and framing to pull the actors out of the background. As for box sets, often thought of as rooms with one wall removed so that the audience can see into them, Willy Nolan, a truly wondrous builder of stage scenery, said, “Don’t knock that missing wall. It’s my profit!”

I learned the value of every person’s contribution both from my work and from a course I taught at Harvard to help future audience members understand who does what. Guest lecturers from all the disciplines — producers, directors, actors, costumers, writers of incidental music, and more — came to Cambridge and explained what they brought to the table. To be sure, the playwright and the actors are supreme, but the composer of almost unconsciously heard incidental music may be a greater genius, and he’s doing his best. I mention this here because we can learn so much from teaching. It organizes and clarifies our thinking, and I would urge anyone who has a leg up on this — or any career — to teach. (Teach well, of course. I had a friend who taught that comedy used wavy lines and tragedy used straight lines. Nonsense.)

“Survival time” occurs when one member of a team abandons the big picture and goes off on his or her own, usually because the production is sinking and he (or she) will not go down with it but launch his own lifeboat. This desertion defeats artistry in our industry. Joseph Conrad wrote with authority in The Mirror of the Sea that such behavior destroys art: “He was not genuine in this display which might have been art. He was thinking of his own self; he hankered after the meretricious glory of a showy performance.”

A warning to young designers: No matter how supportive your work is to the production, someone in management is going to say, “You know, your stuff doesn’t sell one more ticket.” Suck it up. They still want scenery. I enjoyed some exceptions to these foolish remarks, and creative criticism and appreciation from Hal Prince, Robert Whitehead, Fred Coe, Cy Feuer, and almost all of the people in ballet and opera, where “the picture” is more important to them.

We took the play to a festival in Paris. There were fine scene painters there, and some old crafts survived. The wicker maker, for example, took my design in stride. The next year, our production played in London. I did not go, but was disappointed in one way when I saw the photographs: the four chairs around the table were not the chairs you would find in a New England seaside home. But consider this: these British chairs meant more to London audiences in creating the “three bears” family than mine. Brits have their own seaside styles, and the recognition of father, mother, and sons’ chairs was more vivid to them this way. A small point but worthy of attention. Interesting. Was I more responsible to honestly show a foreign audience what an American home looked like? Or was the obligation to make the differentiation of the chairs as clear as possible to the audience on their own terms?

Small things make big differences, as I learned from the lighting of Mary’s dramatic midnight entrance. I remember a tiny moment from Olivier’s London production, a dozen years later, when Olivier, as the cheapskate father, is asked the time. He takes out his pocket watch, the old-fashioned style with a lid, opens it about a half-inch and peers in, then snaps it shut. He is so stingy he won’t let out the time. A good note, something we remember, something magical. As a teenager, I saw Eddie Dowling, in the epilogue to THE GLASS MENAGERIE, play a merchant seaman. With a clap of his hands, he flips a cigarette into his mouth, along the way bouncing it off his pea coat sleeve and spinning it in the air. A brilliant detail. Skill like this is so valuable. Don’t we go to shows and athletic events to see superhuman events?

Here are some further things to ponder when considering using a ceiling in a set. As mentioned, I redrew Boris Aronson’s setting for ANNE FRANK. His room for the people in hiding was beautifully done, but it also had no ceiling. Above the walls of the room, you saw a map of Amsterdam. Good thought, that the people in hiding were denied the freedom of their city, and this map reminds us of this. But actually — though don’t take this too seriously — settings should inspire feeling, rather than thought. I would have suggested to the director a ceiling to the attic room that confined them, and one small window looking out to the sky. I would also suggest that having Anne silhouetted against it, looking out, might make a good picture for a curtain-up moment.

To see a contrasting “set,” be sure to go to the magnificent memorial for the displaced of World War II, behind Notre Dame in Paris, if you’ve not done so already. There is no ceiling to the courtyard of the memorial, just high stone walls and sky above, with one small barred window looking out on the Seine. According to the theory I just described, this window alone, with a ceiling or roof to the courtyard, would have worked. And I think it would have. But in this case, the sky offering unattainable freedom over the high walls worked wonderfully. The moral is, as we say: what works, works. Do not get stuck on theories and principles.

Here is a story that marginally works for the “What I Learned” theme of this section, and I cannot resist telling it. I had been apprenticed to the designer Roger Furse in London, and we kept in touch. It was not long after London that my work in New York started and then LONG DAY’S JOURNEY went to Paris. We played at a festival in the old Sarah Bernhardt Theater (since renamed Théâtre de la Ville) in Châtelet. Roger was in Paris and I got tickets for him. After the play, he sat at the Café Zimmer with José Quintero. This meeting resulted in work for Roger, designing José’s next film. I was pleased to have helped get a job for my old boss. During the course of that meeting, Roger commented on my setting and said, as I learned from José the next morning, “David was an eager young man and a good assistant, but now he’s better than I am.” The remark went through my heart like an arrow and still hurts. Maybe Roger was not sober, and yes, it was a good set. But could I draw like an angel? Did I have any feel for costuming? Could I do films? Why so much pain from praise? Should I recall Rex Whistler’s “How sweet it is to get unjust praise from someone one loves”? Or did I learn that if our gods are to be torn down, let them not do it themselves?

My daughter, Julia, perceptive and pragmatic, chides me for my pain. “Dad, you have spent your life eagerly learning from masters, and now you are trying to pass on some wisdom. Your greatest pleasure is when someone you love exceeds you — think of your pleasure when your son or grandsons handle a boat more skillfully than you do. Would you deny Roger, a childless man who cared for you, that same pleasure? Ache away, Pop, but think how much you may have pleased and rewarded him.”

EXERCISE

Occasionally in these chapters I will suggest an exercise. The first one: Draw. Draw your hand. Try it palm toward you, fingers open, thumb across the palm. Practice this while you’re on the phone, or instead of general doodling. My point is not to make directors or playwrights or anyone excellent at drawing, but to sharpen your eyes. The good directors and playwrights I worked with had at least this in common: they were wonderfully perceptive.