Setting the Stage. David Hays
laugh and cry. I learned how theatre exposes our inner selves, and how actors are our surrogates, our shadow sides, the Olympians of our emotions.
One of the productions I designed for the Brattle was Sheridan’s THE CRITIC. The set used a false floor, just canvas, which was not meant to bear weight. Due to inadequate onstage rehearsal, Jerry Kilty indeed stepped on it and plunged down to chest height during a performance. The play is comic, and Jerry made the best of his fall. Afterward I went to him, almost in tears, and apologized. “Thank you, David,” the gracious actor replied. “But you were weeping in private backstage. I had to deal with it in front of an audience.”
I also learned that a small group working too hard can survive only so long. But when this company split up, and those involved went on to the brighter lights on Broadway, they all told me how wonderful it had been, and that they would have given up the fame and bigger paychecks if only the company could have lasted forever.
I learned the value of polished communication. My letters to Don Oenslager and Robert Edmond Jones must have been good letters for them to respond so quickly! Surely my parents helped me write them. When I lectured at theatre schools, students would often ask about the secret to success. I would surprise them — at least the technical crews — by telling them to speak well and write well.
Perhaps most important — and I did not recognize this until many years later — I became empowered. Empowering experiences are necessary to any artist: to the easel painter who for the first time is appreciated in some way, on and on. Here, at the end of my undergraduate work, with settings for Ferenc Molnár’s LILIOM (the play was later transformed by Rodgers and Hammerstein to the musical CAROUSEL), I made a powerful contribution to the success of a commercial play. Those twelve words — “I made a powerful contribution to the success of a commercial play” — could be the mantra for a lifetime of satisfying work. I was not an easel painter or sculptor, solitary artists, but a member of teams — lively, engaged teams with joyful hopes.
EXERCISE
Draw a room in your house or apartment. Include a door and a window, some pictures on the wall, and perhaps a view from the window. Now pull up Piet Mondrian’s works on the Internet and study his paintings. Adjust your drawing. The rectangular shapes will take on new meaning.
CHAPTER FIVE
London, the Glorious City
IN THE FIFTIES, we regarded London as the greatest theatre center. Since in London the stage work was in the city and filmmaking was in its suburbs, an actor could work on a movie during the day and appear onstage at night. Stateside, where Hollywood had succeeded in luring film many miles from New York, the disciplines are more segregated. We had fine plays by then, by O’Neill, Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, but Shakespeare and the classic playwrights of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reigned in London.
I started my Fulbright year in London by painting scenery at the Old Vic, center of classical theatre. I was assisting John Collins, who painted in thin build-ups of transparent color. It was not the most glamorous time to be in London. We were still rationing, London was a pile of rubble, and it was freezing in the paint shop. On one wall we painted a huge Tudor fireplace and a roaring fire, and that helped keep us warm.
Roger Furse (who designed Olivier’s films of HENRY V and HAMLET, and the two CLEOPATRAs brought to Broadway in 1951) was designing THE MERCHANT OF VENICE for the Vic and was running late. I could draft construction plans. I was sent to help. (I was on a federal grant and cost nothing for Roger and the Vic.) That began a year of delightful assistance and friendship.
From Roger’s scene sketches (or “renderings”), I made cardboard models of the set, including furniture if needed, and we’d modify them as needed. Then I created accurate architectural drawings for the builders. I also outlined the individual units of scenery on good illustration board and Roger would color them for the painters.
We worked in his seventeenth-century studio in Chelsea. Among my projects was drafting the original scenery for THE MOUSETRAP. That show is still running, more than sixty years later. (After a meeting about THE MOUSETRAP, Roger complained, “I asked for a small weekly royalty, and they refused. Oh well, what the hell.”) I also drafted THE SLEEPING PRINCE (directed initially by Alfred Lunt, taken over by Olivier).
Roger hated meetings. He came back to the studio one afternoon, grumbling about wasting two hours on King Arthur’s round table. “If it’s too small, we can’t get enough knights around it. If it’s too big, we can’t get the cameras around it.”
I bought a bicycle and raced about the great city. My roommate was Norman Geschwind, who became one of the great neurologists of the past century. One reason I loved wondrous London was its magical fogs, and during my spring there, in 1953, the last of the great “black fogs” fell on us. Truly, your hand was dim in front of your face. Theaters closed because audiences couldn’t see the stage. Even on normal days, a thickness in air held the city. Men and women were merely shapes, the city of Johnson and Wren and Baker Street was cloaked. After that black fog, burning soft coal was banned. In years to come, when I went over to visit or to mount one of my shows, the clean city lacked that mystery of my youth, that smell of burning stone, and I was disappointed. One especially disappointing afternoon, the new owner of Roger’s home and studio refused a visit from my wife and me, and I discovered that the cozy pub across the street had become a French restaurant. But that evening, on that same city street, we saw a fox climb an eight-foot garden wall. An omen? Sudden magic? Roger’s spirit? Though the connection is not entirely logical, this moment makes me recall the most marvelous of all stage directions, in Act II of THE CHERRY ORCHARD, during a picnic. In Stark Young’s translation: “Suddenly a distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, like the sound of a snapped string, dying away, mournful.” Something unexplained, haunting.
At the Vic, I also met and assisted Leslie Hurry, a superb — and crazy — designer. Perhaps, he said, his mind had been affected by growing up above the family mortuary. Leslie didn’t have a studio, but knelt by his bed and set a pad of paper on it to draw. He slowly built up his sketches, like John Collins, though he used transparent inks rather than paints. One of my jobs was to take a fresh pad of paper and make a small wrinkle or smudge on every page. Leslie couldn’t face the challenge, the unlimited possibilities, of a blank or, as he said, “virgin,” page. During the war, he had stacked a dozen paintings in his room, and a piece of shrapnel tore through the center of the stack — leaving gaping holes in a dozen canvases. At that moment, he told me, “I got an immediate stabbing pain in my thigh, and it’s never gone away.”
Here’s a valuable comment from Leslie Hurry. Director: “Leslie, you’ve just contradicted yourself.” Leslie: “So what?”
WHAT I LEARNED
One of the principal things I learned in London: do not slurp your tea to cool it.
I also learned not to begrudge the praise and recognition of others in your field. Alfred Lunt visited Roger almost daily to watch the set develop for THE SLEEPING PRINCE. He would end these meetings by describing his experiences with other great designers: Oliver Messel, Eugene Berman, even Christian Bérard. I said one day, after Mr. Lunt left, “Doesn’t it annoy you, Roger, how he praises these other designers?” Roger replied, “Nonsense, David. He’ll praise me just as much next chance he gets.”
We continued that show for Olivier after Mr. Lunt left (or was asked to leave). As usual for Roger, we were somewhat late. We were hard at work playing pinball at the Eight Bells, the pub opposite Roger’s house and studio, when Sir Laurence himself walked in. Rather than giving a craven apology for our moment of leisure under pressure, Roger barked, “Hah! Caught! And badly!” A good lesson; a good reaction. I have not used it enough.
Roger wanted me to stay another year, and asked Olivier to write my draft board for an extension. Can you imagine my small-town