Читать книгу Setting the Stage - David Hays - Страница 18

CHAPTER TEN

Broadway Briefly

SOON AFTER ICEMAN, and a year before LONG DAY’S JOURNEY, José was asked to direct a play on Broadway: Ted Apstein’s THE INNKEEPERS. This was José’s first play on Broadway, and he asked me to design it — my first as well.

The set was the courtyard of a Mexican inn, with a bedroom placed to one side. I elevated the bedroom two steps to help separate it from the courtyard. Borders (overhead masking cloths) were of leaves, and a heavy wisteria vine ran up the courtyard wall to justify them. The essence of the play was that the owners of the inn are fleeing — trying to solve their troubles by running from town to town, owning one inn and then another. There was nothing in this that seemed to be reflected in the setting: we simply had two spaces in an attractive inn. It was the lighting that underlined the drama of the couple’s battles in the bedroom, and made the courtyard either pleasant or sinister.

One problem was that the producer ran out of money before the set was finished. It was built, but not fully painted. The lay-in was not quite dry when it went into the truck. “Well,” said Joey Tulano, the boss painter at Rakeman’s studio, “maybe better this than to dibble around with it.”

Joey had only one working eye; the other had been lost when a tack flew into it as a canvas was ripped off the floor. This was still the age of tack-spitters. Do not try this. Do not take a mouthful of blue tacks and spin a magnetic hammer in front of your mouth, removing a tack on each pass, the tack facing the right way as you spin the hammer again and drive it in with one tap, fixing the cloth to the frame or floor, each tack driven in less than two seconds, spaced at four or five inches. (Spaced too far, the cloth drop will scallop when it is painted and shrinks. Too close, and you might hear the cry, “Who’s the sonabitch what every inch tacks?”)

Joey had become chargeman when Chester Rakeman, who had two huge hearing aids but heard what he wanted to hear, was standing behind a drop and heard the former boss painter tell his crew to take it easy, they could all use some overtime. (Again, never talk behind a drop.)

When we set up THE INNKEEPERS in Philadelphia, I spent the next few days finishing the painting. Union rules forbid this. The set designer doesn’t paint his own scenery; and a local union paint crew should have been called in. But we had no money. I was staying at a cheap hotel, at management expense, of course, and every night when I went there to sleep briefly, a note waited for me: “DAVID GO HOME.” The prop man became sick, but phoned me from the hospital and, with what might have been his last breath, croaked, “Don’t lay out your own money.”

The steps to the bedroom were stingy because I needed every inch in the courtyard. Our wonderful Geraldine Page, not a complainer, had some difficulty. I suggested that she place her feet in a more sideways manner, but that was uncomfortable and we rebuilt the steps.

When lighted, the stage actually looked good. But there was more trouble: we had no theater reserved for us in New York. This was a time of a major “theater jam.” Too many shows; not enough theaters to house them in New York. And even the theater we were playing in Philadelphia had another show scheduled and we had to relocate while we waited for a spot in New York. The only “interim booking” I’ve ever heard of in Philadelphia. So we moved down the street, set up, and lighted again. Then our producer arrived with the good news that we had secured a theater in New York. It was good until the next morning, when we read in the newspaper that our booking was the shortest in history: we would open on a Tuesday and have to move out Saturday night. Of course if we were a giant hit, things could be shuffled, but unless the reviews were raves, there was no chance of our audience growing over time, fueled by that famous publicist, “word of mouth.”

So we went into New York and opened at the Golden on Forty-Fifth Street. Reviews were bad. We closed Saturday night.

WHAT I LEARNED

When I started the design of THE INNKEEPERS, I realized that all the work I had done was in prepared theaters that were already in use. Here, we were renting empty theaters and it was up to us to create what happened downstage in the first two feet behind the proscenium, where the asbestos curtain, the house border, the house curtain, the inner-stage portal, and the first pipe and booms of lights must live. In that order. I went to Jo Mielziner and he showed me what to do. We became friends, and twenty years later his ashes stood on my piano for a week.

I met Jo because my father knew Richard Rodgers from college, and had taken me to see him. Mr. Rodgers’s Connecticut home was beautiful, but somehow I had stepped in dog shit on the way in. I noticed this gob sticking up from my shoe when I sat down in a comfortable armchair and crossed my leg. An omen, predicting the rigors of the first musical I would designed for Mr. Rodgers. And I forgot what Roger Furse would have boldly and appropriately exclaimed: “Yech, dog shit!” I just sat there.

That’s all I remember about the brief, awkward meeting, except that Mr. Rodgers suggested that I meet his designer, Jo. He would send a message introducing us.

Jo lived and worked in the great Dakota apartment building on West Seventy-Second Street, where John Lennon was later shot. Jo’s apartment was above the Romanesque arch of the entry, and his studio was on the right side of the courtyard. It had two workrooms, one for Jo and a larger one for his assistants. We liked each other immediately, and he suggested I might work for him when not designing on my own.

I also learned about kickbacks while working on THE INNKEEPERS. As my damp, unfinished scenery was being loaded into the trucks, bound for Philadelphia, Chester Rakeman handed me an envelope. There was a hundred dollar bill inside, a lot of money then. I asked Ray Sovey what that was all about, and he said that it was common practice, that Chester wanted to build my next show. I gave the money back and did not participate in kickbacks — although once I asked a prop shop to help me finish a table for my home, and I’m ashamed of that.

When we rebuilt the steps to the bedroom, the producer asked me how much it would cost, and I guessed too little, which placed our carpenter, Joe Harbuck, in an awkward position. He gave me a dressing down: “My job, not yours.”

Darren McGavin, the show’s co-star, took me aside after I gave Geraldine the failed lesson on step climbing. He said he had once been a designer, and cautioned me to be careful of defending your scenery — it makes you look like a sore loser. A good lesson. I sometimes remembered it when I was defending my scenery.

I had been smart enough to say to the producer, as we drifted in Philadelphia, that the set would fit into any theater in New York except the tiny Golden. As bad luck would have it, that was the theater chosen for us. I reminded the producer of my warning, and he said, “Tough shit, that’s where we’re going. Stuff it in.” I said I would, but it wouldn’t look so good. “Would it look better in the dump?” he asked. So Joe Harbuck stuffed it in, and it looked okay from most seats during its brief pause on Broadway on its way to the dump.