Читать книгу Setting the Stage - David Hays - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

Getting the Idea

DESIGN WORK BEGAN for me in high school. Good luck was concealed as bad luck when I broke my collarbone playing football. (A grandchild speaks up: “Did you wear a leather helmet, Pop?”) Unable to play the winter sport, basketball, I designed our two one-act Christmas plays. I forget the name of the first one, but the other, taking its cue from my future, was ILE by Eugene O’Neill. Mr. Harris, our history teacher, met me in the hall the next day and praised the work. “It looked good, David, and the shifts were well done.” In that hallway, at that moment, my ambition ignited. Why not combine my enjoyment of drawing and model making with my other pleasure, literature? Or “stories,” as I would have said at the time. True, another way to combine those pleasures might be to illustrate books, but we were a family that sailed, and the energy of the great moving canvas was happy to me. The work I imagined meant motion in three dimensions: performers moving in a space.

During my time in high school, my parents were taking me to great plays: I saw Laurette Taylor in THE GLASS MENAGERIE, I saw the original DEATH OF A SALESMAN, directed by Elia Kazan. Who would dream that I was to become Elia Kazan’s designer? I saw SOUTH PACIFIC, and didn’t imagine that I would later design two musicals for Richard Rodgers, or that I would sit in a Palm Springs garden forty years later, holding hands with the dying Mary Martin as she talked of flying. Not her Peter Pan flying, but the lift-off she knew would soon be happening.

The day after my encounter with Mr. Harris, I wrote two well-known stage designers asking for a moment with each. I mailed the letters on a Tuesday, and Thursday brought both answers. (The mail was faster then.) I took the train into New York from our suburban home. Don Oenslager, soon to be my teacher and later a personal friend, advised me to go to art school. Robert Edmond Jones said that drawing and painting would take care of themselves, so I should go to college and study art history. “And,” he added, “learn how to read.” I often think of Mr. Jones and this surprising statement. He was right. Thoughtful reading is not easy. The second course is what I chose. The phrase “artists of occasions” comes from his superb book The Dramatic Imagination.

My college years at Harvard were the four best years of the Brattle Theatre Company in Cambridge, and I apprenticed for the company’s designer, Robert O’Hearn. We were on a two-week rotation, so I worked on fifty productions. The Brattle was one of the first of the regional companies that sprang up in the fifties, along with companies like the Arena in Washington and the Long Wharf in New Haven. What a group in Cambridge! Albie Marre, Jerry Kilty, Jan Farrand, Nan Marchand, Bryant Haliday, Robert Fletcher, David Hersey, Fred Gwynne, Jean Cook, and more. There were appearances by guest artists like Hermione Gingold, Nancy Walker, and Zero Mostel (who was currently blacklisted and out of work).

By the time I graduated, I had been allowed to design three productions — and two were good. I was granted a Fulbright to study at the Old Vic in London, probably because Thornton Wilder, living that year in my dorm as he delivered a series of lectures, wrote a fine letter for me, surely mistaking me for O’Hearn.

WHAT I LEARNED

I learned the basics of building and painting and shifting scenery. I learned how to mix paint. In those days, glue came in a gelatinous brick that you melted in boiling water. Then you added powdered pigment. Too much glue in the paint, and the cloth drop would become too stiff too roll. Too little glue, and when you unrolled the drop the pigment would lie there in its original dry and dusty form. I learned other things:

If the scene shop is freezing in winter, offer it to the director for rehearsal. Heat will appear.

Get your stuff done! The actors need the stage; don’t hold them up.

Never open a door, even to a small closet, without knocking.

I started to learn to question, because directors didn’t always know everything. I sometimes collected props for a production, and a visiting director at that time said to me, “David, we should have something symbolic on the mantelpiece.” I said, “Sure. Symbolic of what?” Director: “Just symbolic.”

I learned how utterly satisfying good work can be, and how rewarding it is to be part of a team that can make an audience laugh and cry. I learned how theatre exposes our inner selves, and how actors are our surrogates, our shadow sides, the Olympians of our emotions.

One of the productions I designed for the Brattle was Sheridan’s THE CRITIC. The set used a false floor, just canvas, which was not meant to bear weight. Due to inadequate onstage rehearsal, Jerry Kilty indeed stepped on it and plunged down to chest height during a performance. The play is comic, and Jerry made the best of his fall. Afterward I went to him, almost in tears, and apologized. “Thank you, David,” the gracious actor replied. “But you were weeping in private backstage. I had to deal with it in front of an audience.”

I also learned that a small group working too hard can survive only so long. But when this company split up, and those involved went on to the brighter lights on Broadway, they all told me how wonderful it had been, and that they would have given up the fame and bigger paychecks if only the company could have lasted forever.

I learned the value of polished communication. My letters to Don Oenslager and Robert Edmond Jones must have been good letters for them to respond so quickly! Surely my parents helped me write them. When I lectured at theatre schools, students would often ask about the secret to success. I would surprise them — at least the technical crews — by telling them to speak well and write well.

Perhaps most important — and I did not recognize this until many years later — I became empowered. Empowering experiences are necessary to any artist: to the easel painter who for the first time is appreciated in some way, on and on. Here, at the end of my undergraduate work, with settings for Ferenc Molnár’s LILIOM (the play was later transformed by Rodgers and Hammerstein to the musical CAROUSEL), I made a powerful contribution to the success of a commercial play. Those twelve words — “I made a powerful contribution to the success of a commercial play” — could be the mantra for a lifetime of satisfying work. I was not an easel painter or sculptor, solitary artists, but a member of teams — lively, engaged teams with joyful hopes.

EXERCISE

Draw a room in your house or apartment. Include a door and a window, some pictures on the wall, and perhaps a view from the window. Now pull up Piet Mondrian’s works on the Internet and study his paintings. Adjust your drawing. The rectangular shapes will take on new meaning.