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CHAPTER SIX

Yale and Green Mansions

RETURNING FOR GRADUATE study at Yale was gloomy. New Haven at that time was not Boston, Cambridge, or — believe me—London. It has improved in the last sixty years. I plugged along, doing weekly projects, and I learned. Don Oenslager taught set design and was a good critic. “I get the color of blood and guts, but why put them on rags, David?” That was a MACBETH. He fiddled with our renderings, and one day he held up a handsome watercolor by my roommate Bob Drumheller. “Needs more motion in the sky,” he said, and held the delicate drawing under the faucet in the classroom. With an awful SKKRACKKK, water spurted out all over the rendering, and Don held up a blank square of cardboard.

Our costume instructor was Frank Bevan, and for an OTHELLO production, I reasoned that Iago, the cold, scheming man, should wear ice blue. Mr. Bevan held up my sketch. “What kind of a designer,” he said — and right there, mid-sentence, my hope to design costumes withered —“would dress Iago in baby blue?” Later in the year, reviewing all my work, Mr. Bevan said that I was a romantic. I asked what that meant. “You have more than food in your belly,” he said.

That summer, I inherited a job held by a classmate the year before, and so became the set designer at Green Mansions. This was an Adirondack summer camp, where singles (mostly) went for a week of sun and water and, they hoped, sex. City people could pee in the woods. This was before jet travel to the Caribbean or Europe. The notion of going to a bar and meeting someone for sex that very night was just getting under way (as was “the pill”).

This was before air conditioning in theaters, and most closed for the summer. Green Mansions was also a theatre camp. It had been the formative home of the Group Theatre, with Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, Clifford Odets, Robert Lewis, Lee Strasberg, John Garfield, and others. Now we, the camp theatre staff, were expected to deliver original plays or revues and good musical revivals twice a week on the camp’s small stage. Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, and Michael Stuart were in residence. The producer was Mickey Ross, later responsible for much of All in the Family. My work was good enough, but speed was needed and I became somewhat of a minimalist, supplying what George Balanchine later often asked for: “as less as possible.”

The best thing about that summer was that I met Leonora, my future wife, who was working at Green Mansions as a dancer. I went up to camp two weeks early with the technical crew to get a jump on the frantic season. The singers and dancers arrived one week early. Their first night was spent trying on the season’s costumes, some of which were skimpy. I was painting a drop for BRIGADOON onstage, the only flat space available. The dressing rooms were below the ancient stage and the thin muslin cloth of the backdrop. I heard, “Shit, I’ll have to shave.” We were married that December.

WHAT I LEARNED

In my group of graduate students, I paid close attention to their struggles, their successes, their failures, and they watched mine. A good way to learn. Some of those lessons were

Never talk behind a drop. Careers have been spoiled by criticism or anger expressed behind what seems to be, but is most definitely not, a soundproof wall. Don’t be so angry anyway. A theatre career is a tough and exhausting. Do something else if you blow up or burn out too easily.

Someone yelling at a performer “Back out!” meaning “Get back onstage,” can be easily confused with “Blackout!” which startles your switchboard operator into a decisive wrong action.

Graduate study is rarely happy. Architecture students seemed cheerful and medical students were too busy to misbehave anyway, but in the so-called liberal arts, the future was and is clouded. Unemployment has always loomed in theatre, and not all theatre-school graduates stick with it. They became, in our lingo, “civilians.”

Again, make the stage ready for the performers. At Yale at that time, technical crews dominated the work. Performers did not take the stage until we were damn ready for them. I didn’t like that; it wasn’t realistic preparation.

Words kill. Is it “baby blue” or “ice blue”? I recall a handsome arch designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian that had a rough surface, as if garnished with seashells. Some wit described it as “the garlic arch,” and it never made it to performance.

Mr. Bevan said that he was as interested in quantity as quality. What? Quantity? An insult to a young artist! But I was wrong. Stage designers are not independent artists, not easel painters who can show their work when they want. We work with others, at speed, and our favorite schemes can be vetoed by the director or producer. Then we have to adjust or start again. If you feel that you’ll never again catch the mood you depicted in a certain drawing or painting, perhaps you haven’t done enough drawings or paintings in your life. Perhaps you are not confident, or experienced enough. Frank Bevan was right. This came home to me simply when I remembered a high school baseball game. At the plate, I was startled by a beanball, so at the next pitch I was nervous and backed away a bit from the plate. If we had played more games and practiced more, I would have taken the beanball in stride.

EXERCISE

Look at an ordinary and familiar object, perhaps a chair. Draw it, even crudely (no one’s looking). Now turn the object upside down and draw it again. You may be surprised that you draw it more accurately. At least, you may see it more clearly. Use this as a reminder to draw (or see) what is truly there, not what you believe is there.