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CHAPTER ONE

Read This

THIS IS A BOOK about stage scenery, with notes on lighting, and how they work, with thoughts on the how and the why and the good and the bad. The designer, and I am the designer in this case, is woven into the complex tapestry of skills and personalities that create a theatre event. Incidentally, I spell “theater” with an “-er” to mean the building, and “-re” to mean the craft or industry. If you plan to be a designer, this book will be helpful. If you are to be a writer or director or actor or producer or critic or audience member, perhaps this book will add to your understanding of that man or woman behind the curtain.

I taught for over fifty years at New York University (NYU), Columbia, Harvard, Wesleyan, and the National Theater Institute. This is the book I would have assigned to my students. You will find passages explaining how a setting was conceived and executed, thoughts about how to express yourself to a director or producer, and some stupidities to avoid; and I will convey a sense of the life you might lead if you choose this profession. There are other books that delve more explicitly into technical skills — how to stretch canvas, how to build platforms or folding steps — and I recommend them. But read this book first.

I’m writing about work devoted to giving actors, singers, and dancers a milieu, a surround, an ambience, and about being part of the teams that forge our noble craft. I designed for drama, for musicals, for ballet, for modern dance, for opera, for brassiere and whiskey commercials, and I designed and consulted on theater buildings.

The names of some talented men and women I worked with are preserved on film or tapes, such as Arthur Penn — Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man; or Elia Kazan — On the Waterfront and East of Eden. Some giants of my time, Sir Tyrone Guthrie for example, left no such record, and unless you are a certain age, you may not know of them. Time has passed. I will name some former co-workers. I want the air to hear their names again, famous or not. They deserve it; we deserve it; the air deserves it.