Setting the Stage. David Hays
That summer, I designed at Tanglewood, working on, among other works, ZAIDE for Sarah Caldwell. This is a short, unfinished opera by Mozart, and I set it in an Asian garden. A simple projector threw an image of clouds on the set’s cyclorama. The projector sat on the stage floor behind the garden wall and, forgetting all warnings, the tenor sat in front of the projector, waiting for his entrance. His sharp image, as he picked his nose, was thirty feet high in the sky.
Tanglewood’s opera department at that time was led by Boris Goldovsky and Sarah Caldwell. They were brilliant artists, and I recall some amusing conversations. A singer, after auditioning, asked, “Suggestions, sir?” Boris: “Zip your fly.” A patron complained, “Mr. Goldovsky, opera is so fake. The diva is dying, but is able to ruminate at length and at full volume.” The maestro responded, “Why, you are so ungrateful! You are not interested in her final thoughts? And you think she should sing them so softly you can’t hear them?”
WHAT I LEARNED
Horace Armistead and Ray Sovey were superb teachers, and it was instructive to make up the new rules for an academic department as we went along. Stupid ones: there should be separate faculty toilets. Wiser ones: how much individual attention to give to lagging students.
As the stage renovation supervisor, I learned that dust does not stop growing after a height of one inch.
Check the lighting booth. There is probably a graduate student living in it.
Some performers, whatever their gifts onstage, don’t have common sense backstage. Part of a designer’s job, though it is usually handed over to the stage manager, is to protect the actors from tripping over cables, strolling absentmindedly onto the stage, or picking their noses in the virtuosic manner described above.
Explain, explain, explain. You don’t want a director saying to you — despite showing him drawings, plans, and even a model —“David, you never told me the platforms were raised!” (Yes, that happened; you can’t make that up.) A similar story. There’s an old joke: “Can we have funnier lights?” That was actually said to me! I hope it’s never said to you.
Now a sad story. Sarah Caldwell did not like the orchestra to be seen. In one of the operas, based on O’Neill’s THE ROPE, we stretched the floor cloth out over the pit, leaving a small hole for Sarah’s head at the conductor’s position. You could not see where the stage ended and the pit cover began — it was the same canvas. A film crew arrived to scope out the setup, and the director walked out onto the stretched cloth. Our warning shouts were too late. He made it out about six feet and fell with a cry through the tearing canvas into the deep pit. He was falling fast when his knee hit a music stand, and he lay screaming on the floor.
He should have sued, and he did. I wasn’t blamed and wasn’t involved in the suit, and I don’t know the outcome, but I doubt if the unfortunate man ever walked normally again.
There is a point that always comes to me when I remember this misery. Safety of course. A fence, rope, or chain. But also this: looking down at the man through the hole in the canvas, I saw his brown and white tasseled golf-style shoes, highlighting the contrast of his debonair outfit to his writhing pain. It is still vivid to me; it knots my gut. The stark lesson illuminates the essence of much of our work: contrast.
EXERCISE
Learn to print attractively and clearly — all of you. In London, a friend of Roger’s taught me. Letters should be the same height, and don’t let your sentences droop. The main trick is to find a slant you prefer for the letters: straight up, angled, or even tilted backwards. (This is easy to maintain for letters with a vertical spine, like L or K, but harder for letters like A or O.)
CHAPTER EIGHT
Painting Lessons from a Virtuoso
HORACE ARMISTEAD, my first boss at Boston University, had been a fine designer and a brilliant scene painter. He advised that the lay-in (first coat) should be free and easy, just basic shapes and colors. Move and splash it freely; it’s just the lay-in. Then, when the lay-in dries, do the detailing (“cut it up”), and that’s also free and easy because the lay-in was so good. “Also,” he said, “don’t lose the drawing.” That meant don’t slosh over and hide the careful drawing on the drop. (This first cover-all is reminiscent of Roger Furse’s advice to me about doing a scene sketch in watercolor.)
During my Boston year, I also had the chance to work with George Lord. There were three scene painters in Boston, and two were named George Lord, though unrelated to each other. The third scene painter was “Burnt-Umber Charlie,” also called “Sepia Sam,” for the reason you can guess. He had a shop and rented scenery. “If the old stinker would paint more stuff, I could rent it,” said his son. “If that damn kid would rent stuff, I’d have enough money to paint more,” said the father. Pure Dickens.
The George Lord I assisted was an old man, but with a brush in his hand he was still a magician. He could dip one corner of a broad brush into dark green, the other corner into a lighter green, and with a rapid downward wiggle produce a tree, showing the sunny and shady sides of the leaves. Or, with different shades of green, dark shadow and moonlight. A few quick strokes and branches peered through. (We called the brushes he used “fitches,” supposedly named after the animal that donated the hair.)
George had a repertoire of four trees, although he could paint any others, or anything for that matter, given a sketch or a photo or a picture cut from magazine. His basic trees were a birch, a pine or fir, an oak or maple, and an apple tree. Using the same two-color dip, he could also paint a variety of moldings, such as the classic egg and dart, with amazing wrist-wiggling speed. Then, with a smaller brush, he added some dark shadows and, if needed, highlights — again, with dazzling speed. See John Singer Sargent for stunning highlights, he advised.
George told me that before the talking pictures, there were fifty acting companies in the larger Boston area. He had painted scenery for many of them, and also for a firm that rented out scenery. He showed me their catalog. You could rent a “center door, fancy” drop, add a couple of potted palms, and there was your hotel or mansion lobby. Or you could rent a kitchen: “Country kitchen, wallpaper; city kitchen, paint,” he said. There were dozens of landscapes and farmyards and terraces with awnings. He said that when you rented the sets for a show, if you chose to present one of the many plays in their files, they would also send along the scripts, perhaps full ones for the director and the stage manager, and “sides” for the actors. Sides were sheets given to each actor on which only his or her speeches were printed, with the cue lines preceding the speeches.
The marvelously painted backdrops might display painted chairs and tables so skillfully done that you might try to set down a package on them. The backdrops were lighted by strip lights, basically tin troughs with bulbs (or “lamps”) screwed in every six inches or so. These gave an overall stage illumination that hit the drops (and the actors) flat on, and this lighting aided the illusion created by the good painting. But with more individually focused spotlights on adjusted stage areas, a development led by my first adviser, Robert Edmond Jones, real chairs and real moldings were needed. Trompe l’oeil drops with their painted shadows didn’t seem to fool anyone any more — or to put it another way, we were no longer willing to be fooled.
I painted the ice for an ice show with George — big stars in red and blue, with outlines for the white stars. When we were done, the Zamboni covered our work with two layers of ice. We wore galoshes and kept our brushes moving. If you pause and your brush freezes to the ice, you end up glued there, idiotically yelling for hot water.
When I later came to New York, I painted at Chester Rakeman’s studio on West Forty-Seventh Street and at the Metropolitan Opera, then on Thirty-Eighth Street. Neither of these facilities had floor space, and we painted on sturdy counterweighted frames, which we could raise and lower. The canvas drops