Setting the Stage. David Hays
Setting the Stage
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.
CHAPTER TWO
Starting Out
BEFORE PLUNGING INTO an account of the first successful Broadway play I designed, let me say a word: On the first day of my first job — I was thirteen — I gave an enema to a goat. This was in 1943, farmhands were fighting the war, and for ten dollars a week I worked at a dairy farm. I’ve often thought of that first sunny afternoon and I’ve been encouraged. Nasty work, but the goat was relieved, perhaps even pleased, and I was an effective soldier in our war effort — a proud member of a team.
Good luck followed, and I will come to that. What I want to do now is to speak of the first successful Broadway play I designed. This may seem abrupt, but it serves to introduce the thought process of designing LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. This was a remarkable opportunity for a young designer to support the work of Eugene O’Neill, thought by many to be our greatest American playwright. (Note the word “playwright.” Plays, we say, are wrought, not written. We write and direct, design, act, dance, or sing: we develop our work in process — with others.)
CHAPTER THREE
Long Day’s Journey into O’Neill
I WAS A NEW RESIDENT of New York City. During the day, I was painting scenery at the old Metropolitan Opera House on Thirty-Eighth Street, and at night I was designing, building, painting, and lighting at Circle in the Square. After a superb production of Eugene O’Neill’s THE ICEMAN COMETH — with a breathtaking performance by Jason Robards — José Quintero and his partner, Leigh Connell, artistic directors at the Circle, approached Carlotta O’Neill and convinced her to let them produce LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. O’Neill had asked that it not be performed until twenty-five years after his death, but Mrs. O’Neill relented. Her early release was high drama, and there was great buzz about the production. Fredric March would play the father, James Tyrone; Jason Robards, the older son, Jamie; Brad Dillman, the younger son, Edmund (representing O’Neill); and Florence Eldredge, Mary, wife of James and mother of Jamie and Edmund. This is essentially a four-character play, but there is a fifth — a maid, Cathleen — not a major role, but to be well played by Katherine Ross. I would design it, for which I am eternally grateful to José — but that didn’t add to the buzz.
O’Neill sets the play in a small sunroom in the New London, Connecticut, home where the family lived when not on tour. The father is famous to the public for his role in THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and to his family for cheap hotel rooms and fried-egg sandwiches. The playwright’s stage directions call for a room with a back wall, an entrance to the rest of the house on both sides, and windows on the walls that come downstage on each side. (One of the ironies of my life is that twenty years after this play, I lived in this very house for three years with my family. O’Neill’s memory of that small room was exact, surely engraved in his mind by pain.)
This is a long play — four acts — and whatever variety we could achieve in the one room would be precious. José Quintero wanted to depart from the sacrosanct instructions. The visual point of the play, he said, was the movement from a cheerful morning light through noon, then a foggy afternoon, then a dark and depressing night. The stage directions gave us an interior back wall, not the commanding and informative moods of daylight, then darkness. I worked out a set with a huge bay window spanning the entire back wall. It could logically embrace a low platform, lifting upstage actors so they could be seen more easily over the heads of those downstage. Also there could be window seats, actually chests, the kind of sit-on boxes that are jammed with skates and tennis racquets and so forth in a country house. These would be built-in places to sit, relieving us of finding yet more furniture in a room that should look barren and uncared for. These details may seem unimportant and premature considering the major service of the big windows, but even small details with the “aha!” factor make you sense that you are on the right track.
Step by step. I first united the windows in a curve across the back wall. But the floor plan, or ground plan — how a set looks as seen from above — has to have vigor. Weak corners weaken the picture and are sensed by the audience. I had briefly worked for the designer Boris Aronson, converting his setting for THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK to a simpler and smaller set for the road company. He insisted on this principle and, as usual, he was right. So next I set the three windows not on a curve, but as a bay window unit jutting out of the room, framed with sharp corners.
The windows couldn’t be bare — that would feel too naked. But shabby curtains to reflect Mrs. Tyrone’s poor housekeeping? That’s Halloween, too suggestive of cobwebs and bats. Mrs. Tyrone states, in Act I, “I’ve never felt it was my home. It was wrong from the start. Everything was done in the cheapest way.” As the play proceeds, we see that she is incapable of significant improvements.
I asked my teacher Ray Sovey for help with these bare windows, and he suggested colored glass squares, typical of those early years of the twentieth century, rimming the upper pane of the double-hung windows. To me, these colored squares were the best thing on the set. In the morning, they glowed, as hopeful, pretty light streamed through them. At noon, they supplied color; in the fog of the third act, they were muted; and at night, they had that bleak blackness of a church’s stained glass when seen from outside. Years later, I lectured on this process at Harvard. After the lecture,