Setting the Stage. David Hays
watch, the old-fashioned style with a lid, opens it about a half-inch and peers in, then snaps it shut. He is so stingy he won’t let out the time. A good note, something we remember, something magical. As a teenager, I saw Eddie Dowling, in the epilogue to THE GLASS MENAGERIE, play a merchant seaman. With a clap of his hands, he flips a cigarette into his mouth, along the way bouncing it off his pea coat sleeve and spinning it in the air. A brilliant detail. Skill like this is so valuable. Don’t we go to shows and athletic events to see superhuman events?
Here are some further things to ponder when considering using a ceiling in a set. As mentioned, I redrew Boris Aronson’s setting for ANNE FRANK. His room for the people in hiding was beautifully done, but it also had no ceiling. Above the walls of the room, you saw a map of Amsterdam. Good thought, that the people in hiding were denied the freedom of their city, and this map reminds us of this. But actually — though don’t take this too seriously — settings should inspire feeling, rather than thought. I would have suggested to the director a ceiling to the attic room that confined them, and one small window looking out to the sky. I would also suggest that having Anne silhouetted against it, looking out, might make a good picture for a curtain-up moment.
To see a contrasting “set,” be sure to go to the magnificent memorial for the displaced of World War II, behind Notre Dame in Paris, if you’ve not done so already. There is no ceiling to the courtyard of the memorial, just high stone walls and sky above, with one small barred window looking out on the Seine. According to the theory I just described, this window alone, with a ceiling or roof to the courtyard, would have worked. And I think it would have. But in this case, the sky offering unattainable freedom over the high walls worked wonderfully. The moral is, as we say: what works, works. Do not get stuck on theories and principles.
Here is a story that marginally works for the “What I Learned” theme of this section, and I cannot resist telling it. I had been apprenticed to the designer Roger Furse in London, and we kept in touch. It was not long after London that my work in New York started and then LONG DAY’S JOURNEY went to Paris. We played at a festival in the old Sarah Bernhardt Theater (since renamed Théâtre de la Ville) in Châtelet. Roger was in Paris and I got tickets for him. After the play, he sat at the Café Zimmer with José Quintero. This meeting resulted in work for Roger, designing José’s next film. I was pleased to have helped get a job for my old boss. During the course of that meeting, Roger commented on my setting and said, as I learned from José the next morning, “David was an eager young man and a good assistant, but now he’s better than I am.” The remark went through my heart like an arrow and still hurts. Maybe Roger was not sober, and yes, it was a good set. But could I draw like an angel? Did I have any feel for costuming? Could I do films? Why so much pain from praise? Should I recall Rex Whistler’s “How sweet it is to get unjust praise from someone one loves”? Or did I learn that if our gods are to be torn down, let them not do it themselves?
My daughter, Julia, perceptive and pragmatic, chides me for my pain. “Dad, you have spent your life eagerly learning from masters, and now you are trying to pass on some wisdom. Your greatest pleasure is when someone you love exceeds you — think of your pleasure when your son or grandsons handle a boat more skillfully than you do. Would you deny Roger, a childless man who cared for you, that same pleasure? Ache away, Pop, but think how much you may have pleased and rewarded him.”
EXERCISE
Occasionally in these chapters I will suggest an exercise. The first one: Draw. Draw your hand. Try it palm toward you, fingers open, thumb across the palm. Practice this while you’re on the phone, or instead of general doodling. My point is not to make directors or playwrights or anyone excellent at drawing, but to sharpen your eyes. The good directors and playwrights I worked with had at least this in common: they were wonderfully perceptive.
CHAPTER FOUR
Getting the Idea
DESIGN WORK BEGAN for me in high school. Good luck was concealed as bad luck when I broke my collarbone playing football. (A grandchild speaks up: “Did you wear a leather helmet, Pop?”) Unable to play the winter sport, basketball, I designed our two one-act Christmas plays. I forget the name of the first one, but the other, taking its cue from my future, was ILE by Eugene O’Neill. Mr. Harris, our history teacher, met me in the hall the next day and praised the work. “It looked good, David, and the shifts were well done.” In that hallway, at that moment, my ambition ignited. Why not combine my enjoyment of drawing and model making with my other pleasure, literature? Or “stories,” as I would have said at the time. True, another way to combine those pleasures might be to illustrate books, but we were a family that sailed, and the energy of the great moving canvas was happy to me. The work I imagined meant motion in three dimensions: performers moving in a space.
During my time in high school, my parents were taking me to great plays: I saw Laurette Taylor in THE GLASS MENAGERIE, I saw the original DEATH OF A SALESMAN, directed by Elia Kazan. Who would dream that I was to become Elia Kazan’s designer? I saw SOUTH PACIFIC, and didn’t imagine that I would later design two musicals for Richard Rodgers, or that I would sit in a Palm Springs garden forty years later, holding hands with the dying Mary Martin as she talked of flying. Not her Peter Pan flying, but the lift-off she knew would soon be happening.
The day after my encounter with Mr. Harris, I wrote two well-known stage designers asking for a moment with each. I mailed the letters on a Tuesday, and Thursday brought both answers. (The mail was faster then.) I took the train into New York from our suburban home. Don Oenslager, soon to be my teacher and later a personal friend, advised me to go to art school. Robert Edmond Jones said that drawing and painting would take care of themselves, so I should go to college and study art history. “And,” he added, “learn how to read.” I often think of Mr. Jones and this surprising statement. He was right. Thoughtful reading is not easy. The second course is what I chose. The phrase “artists of occasions” comes from his superb book The Dramatic Imagination.
My college years at Harvard were the four best years of the Brattle Theatre Company in Cambridge, and I apprenticed for the company’s designer, Robert O’Hearn. We were on a two-week rotation, so I worked on fifty productions. The Brattle was one of the first of the regional companies that sprang up in the fifties, along with companies like the Arena in Washington and the Long Wharf in New Haven. What a group in Cambridge! Albie Marre, Jerry Kilty, Jan Farrand, Nan Marchand, Bryant Haliday, Robert Fletcher, David Hersey, Fred Gwynne, Jean Cook, and more. There were appearances by guest artists like Hermione Gingold, Nancy Walker, and Zero Mostel (who was currently blacklisted and out of work).
By the time I graduated, I had been allowed to design three productions — and two were good. I was granted a Fulbright to study at the Old Vic in London, probably because Thornton Wilder, living that year in my dorm as he delivered a series of lectures, wrote a fine letter for me, surely mistaking me for O’Hearn.
WHAT I LEARNED
I learned the basics of building and painting and shifting scenery. I learned how to mix paint. In those days, glue came in a gelatinous brick that you melted in boiling water. Then you added powdered pigment. Too much glue in the paint, and the cloth drop would become too stiff too roll. Too little glue, and when you unrolled the drop the pigment would lie there in its original dry and dusty form. I learned other things:
If the scene shop is freezing in winter, offer it to the director for rehearsal. Heat will appear.
Get your stuff done! The actors need the stage; don’t hold them up.
Never open a door, even to a small closet, without knocking.
I started to learn to question, because directors didn’t always know everything. I sometimes collected props for a production, and a visiting director at that time said to me, “David, we should have something symbolic on the mantelpiece.” I said, “Sure. Symbolic of what?” Director: “Just symbolic.”
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