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CHAPTER NINE

New York

WHEN THE TANGLEWOOD season ended, Leonora and I drove to New York, all of our belongings in the back of our old car. I took the exam to enter our union, Local 829. We are set and lighting and costume designers and scenery painters (and, at that time, paperhangers, but they didn’t take this exam). This union is the key to Broadway work. We have rubber stamps with the union logo to validate our drawings, and the designers I’ve mentioned learning from are numbered in the single figures. I am number eight hundred.

I scored second among the thirty or so who competed in the exam, which consisted of a day turning out watercolor sketches of sets and costumes, plus a day in a paint studio enlarging, on a cloth, small drawings or photos handed to us. Leonora mentioned my second place to my father, who liked her. He was a prominent trial attorney, and he advised her to not say that again: “They’ll find and hire the designer who came in first.”

In rapid succession we then found a small apartment on West Sixty-Ninth Street and Leonora gave birth. That was nine months and six days after we were married. Leonora had wanted to dance for a few years before breeding, but we never regretted our marvelous Julia. “Conceived on the courthouse steps,” said my mother. And then, concerned she hadn’t been mean enough, she added, “First babies are often two weeks late.” Leonora, a barefoot, Martha Graham–style dancer, represented the “floating world” to my mother, not the “Kinder, Küche, and Kirche” she wanted for me. Jews support the arts — but that meant earning and contributing money, and perhaps one should buy a season ticket, but certainly not engaging in the risky business of entering the field. But the grandchildren (Daniel followed) were a blessing and after some time mother forgave Leonora. Thirty years.

One day, wheeling the baby carriage down the street, Leonora met José Quintero. During our year in Boston, José had come to Boston University to direct three short Thornton Wilder plays, and I had designed the lighting. José’s designer at Circle in the Square (who later became my assistant) had just had a breakdown. Was I available? Of course.

My first show was Gregorio Martínez Sierra’s THE CRADLE SONG. This was followed by others, but the huge hit was THE ICEMAN COMETH. The old Circle in the Square was a haunting space. If you sat in the empty room, without scenery or actors, you could begin to see spirits rising and hear echoes of great speeches. Whatever made this happen — perhaps the proportions of the shadowy room — cannot be clearly explained. Perhaps the space carried in it all the signs, the history, of its use. If a director wanted a room like that, he would ask for a room “with meaning.” Perhaps this would not be literal meaning, with a design that showed peeling wallpaper, with each layer telling us something (a palimpsest). This is intellect, not mood. What a designer would do with this concept is the essence of our craft.

Circle in the Square was a three-quarters stage, meaning that the stage floor was surrounded by seats on three sides. This theater, under Quintero’s leadership, spearheaded the off-Broadway movement. Geraldine Page’s performance in Tennessee Williams’s SUMMER AND SMOKE, before I arrived, was a starburst on the scene in New York — and nationally, where small “open” performance spaces were being created. By “open” I mean that there is no proscenium.

The O’Neill revival was the idea of Leigh Connell, José’s partner at that time. Leigh was quiet, gentle, and wise. THE ICEMAN COMETH began it, and as I noted in chapter 1, in that show Jason Robards emerged as one of our greatest stage artists. My set was good: The bar was at the non-audience end of the stage, with painted tiles and sawdust on the floor. Peter Falk, who later played Columbo, was the bartender. The street door, with an etched glass panel, was alongside the bar, and a shaft of sunlight could pass through that panel and stretch along the entire stage floor, carrying with it the entering actor’s extended shadow. From a central dusty chandelier, a spider web of thin ropes fanned out over the stage and audience and attached along the side walls. There was a spray available that created cobwebs. The whole room and audience were embraced and involved. The door to the imagined upstairs (read Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon and Up in the Old Hotel) was a beaded curtain, made from the rosary beads of the nuns in CRADLE SONG.

It was about this time that the curtain did not always go up to start the play. It might be up (or “out,” as we say) when the audience wandered in, the advantage being that they could absorb the mood of the play in advance. There would be special lighting onstage to enhance this, then the house lights (auditorium lights) would fade and the stage lights would shift to support the play and actors. Of course such open stages as at Circle in the Square did not have curtains. Sitting under those spreading cobwebs was a fine start.

WHAT I LEARNED

Take a good look at the room where the play will take place. If you are going out of town, to Philadelphia or Boston or wherever, and know where you will end up in New York, look at that final house and imagine it. The total effect when the curtain rises is a good lining for your brain as you design. Perhaps, for example, the auditorium supplies a gaudy gold picture frame for the stage. And size really matters. We once had a good comedy playing in Boston’s intimate Wilbur Theatre: Robertson Davies’s LEAVEN OF MALICE, directed by Tyrone Guthrie. Then it died at the immense Martin Beck (now the Al Hirschfeld) in New York. I believe that if we had opened at the intimate Golden or Booth we’d still be running. If your theater is “off Broadway,” this thinking is unavoidable, because each space, usually an open space, is different.

I learned to light such an open stage (no proscenium). An actor standing on the edge of the stage facing the audience is easily lighted from positions above the audience — but when she turns around, how do you hit the face? Light on the face, from the best angle, would carry on into the audience’s eyes. So you pick away at angles, from sides — and it sometimes works.

Another example of unusual space considerations: Ray Sovey designed the original OUR TOWN. Easy, right, since there was no set? Not so. The bare stage of the Henry Miller Theater was full of distractions — radiators and iron ladders and the like — and these had to be adjusted or carefully painted to blend in. And the basic question: Is it a bare stage that the play demands? Or a bare space? It’s the former. Mr. Wilder wanted to challenge theatre tradition.

Another note on Thornton Wilder. At the end of my Boston year, I designed THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH for an outdoor production on the Boston Common. There wasn’t much I could do on that platform, although I later learned how. The remarkable thing was that Mr. Wilder showed up, and we had a lively discussion. Can you imagine the thrill to a young designer? Wilder’s point was that the house of the Antrobus family should reflect all styles of architecture through the ages. My thought was that this would be vague and drab, and we would fare better if we were to pinpoint a fleeting style like high Victorian. The audience would get it: how bright things rise, then fade away. I thought Mr. Wilder’s idea would create a sort of permanent dullness, everything blended to make a bland soup, instead of emphasizing the ephemeral. So be specific! That is usually good advice. I have no memory of how we ended the conversation, but I suspect I received another Olivier-like “My dear boy,” and a pat on the shoulder.

Concerning the author Joseph Mitchell, I am serious when I suggest readings like this to students. Learn to read, suggested Robert Edmond Jones. Design students should not just look at pictures. Read what is so often behind them. Good writing sits in your memory. Often, years after I’ve made a design, the source, subconscious at the time, will occur to me, and it might be literary as well as visual. Even sounds that enter your mental warehouse can influence design. Consider the surprising explosion of pigeons’ wingbeats when you walk into an abandoned building. There’s a color, a shadow-sense in that, a curtain-raising mood.

Teamwork is important. A team of painters is different than an athletic team, but not too different. You don’t compete to win, but you do race time: the curtain will go up. You strive for the approval of the designer of the show, and should be a bit nervous when a respected designer shows up to look at what you have done. The key to my first jobs at Rakeman’s and the Met was not just skill, but coordinated speed — yes, just plain speed, whether that meant me racing four flights to the bottom of the paint frame to hold the end of a chalk line, or quickly priming a drop with an eight-inch brush loaded with heavy starching goop. It was tiring but satisfying work for five or six of us, and the drops or set pieces or props we produced were often beautiful and always useful.

I mentioned that in the theatre, the curtain is “out,” not “up.” I use both “up” and “out.” To the audience in a conventional theatre, the curtain is “in,” or down, as they enter, then goes “out” for a limited time while they watch the play. (A great remark, attributed to George S. Kaufman or Groucho Marx: “I saw [the play] under adverse conditions — the curtain was up.”)

Now, in most stage houses (the backstage) a drop flies out (up) into the flys. (I know, I know.) You might say it goes out of sight, and comes back in to sight. If you haven’t got the height, drops can roll up like window shades and there are other tricks, such as “tripping,” but that’s another book. In my experience in Broadway theaters, the height is usually sixty feet, but the ballet and opera houses I’ve worked in go up to ninety, even one hundred and ten feet. That’s a lot — but if your proscenium can open up to forty feet high, that’s what you need. Of course, we all must work in houses where there are no flys at all, and miracles are expected for scene changes.

To stage workers in rehearsal or scenic set-up, the front or house curtain is always out for days or weeks. Finally the audience starts to enter, usually a half-hour before the show starts. It’s surprising then for us to see the curtain in, and once we had so ignored it that just before performance we discovered it didn’t work. After the show, the curtain stays in for perhaps fifteen minutes while the audience files out, then it is out again. Quite opposite to the audience experience.

EXERCISE

When you read any book, including the Bible, imagine the setting. Try imagining the problems: When Moses drops the heavy tablets at the sight of the Golden Calf, do they fall and crush his sandaled feet? How can you supply a tasteful grouping for a circumcision? Arrange the room where Raskolnikov breaks the vase in Crime and Punishment.

Try envisioning book jackets, too. Do you read mysteries — detective stuff? What will express the dilemma, showing something relevant to the plot and the mood, without giving the ending away? And just as a cover helps sell the book, so a poster does for plays. Do a poster for HAMLET. Do another for a less well-known play. Again, the mood, the spirit, a hint of the content, all help attract an audience. I mention enlarging a sketch. Take a small photo or postcard and draw half-inch squares on it. On a large sheet draw three-inch squares. Transfer (enlarge) the small drawing.