Setting the Stage. David Hays
high; you couldn’t walk around on the drop and paint it anywhere; nor could you use some of the splashier techniques. Time was lost raising and lowering the frames. It was more difficult to snap the chalk lines that framed the squares that enabled you to enlarge a small sketch, with its small squares, to full size. At the Met, the two frames were far upstage, and a six-foot catwalk for the painters ran between them. The frames worked on the same rigging as the rest of the great overstage fly loft. If some joker raised both frames quickly at the same time, we were convinced we were falling and everyone screamed. On a positive note, while we worked, we heard wonderful music as the singers rehearsed.
WHAT I LEARNED
Painting stage scenery is a mix of speed and accuracy by fine painters as they enlarge the designer’s images from his renderings. Arnold Abramson, in New York, was a superb painter and skillful at managing his talented crew. I was never a fine painter, but I learned how to describe what I wanted, what to expect, how fast scenery can be painted, how different it looks in the studio from its appearance onstage, and how to criticize without hurting anyone’s feelings.
I learned some specific tricks, such as the way we can create a huge oval (say, thirty feet long) with a long piece of string, two nails, and a piece of charcoal. I learned that the fastest way to heat water is to plunge a live steam hose into a bucket of water. Later I saw that the well-equipped Imperial Theater in Tokyo had steam pockets downstage on both sides of the stage. Great for making dry ice mist quickly and abundantly.
George Lord told me that Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), a Brit best known for his satirical cartoons, was of help to him. “Look at his foliage,” George explained. “There is a background smear of color, showing the general outline of a tree or stand of trees. Then see how in some of these color blobs, he paints a cluster of leaves rather exactly, and the eye expands that exactness and you have the illusion of a large spread of exact leaves.”
George complained that directors and producers often saw his work before it was completed. “Never show a fool an unfinished work,” he barked. I thought of this years later when I saw ballet dancers wearing thick and untidy wool leg warmers, as if to say, “I’m in rehearsal, obviously. You won’t see these gorgeous limbs until I’m good and ready.” Lesson: Beware of letting a director or producer see incomplete or indecisive thinking. At least offer thinking that is on a secure road to somewhere he can travel with you. Much of theatre is an exposed art, and I feel sorry for actors as they slowly build a character, with the usual missteps, in front of others.
Do not use this in a somewhat reverse way: too quick, too soon. I once asked a prop man for a set of fine (reproduction) bone china and was handed plastic plates. The intention was to make me a prima donna if I didn’t accept them. That is where a friendly laugh is your ally. If you can’t laugh at errors, choose other work — although I cannot name a profession that is immune from this advice.
EXERCISE
You’ve probably seen a painter, seated at an easel, hold a pencil or brush at arm’s length to match the angle of a roofline or any angled object. Again, this is an exercise to improve your perception, not your knowledge. My students all profited by this, whether drawing a barn or a live model: angle of shoulders, hips, nipples (men have them too).
CHAPTER NINE
New York
WHEN THE TANGLEWOOD season ended, Leonora and I drove to New York, all of our belongings in the back of our old car. I took the exam to enter our union, Local 829. We are set and lighting and costume designers and scenery painters (and, at that time, paperhangers, but they didn’t take this exam). This union is the key to Broadway work. We have rubber stamps with the union logo to validate our drawings, and the designers I’ve mentioned learning from are numbered in the single figures. I am number eight hundred.
I scored second among the thirty or so who competed in the exam, which consisted of a day turning out watercolor sketches of sets and costumes, plus a day in a paint studio enlarging, on a cloth, small drawings or photos handed to us. Leonora mentioned my second place to my father, who liked her. He was a prominent trial attorney, and he advised her to not say that again: “They’ll find and hire the designer who came in first.”
In rapid succession we then found a small apartment on West Sixty-Ninth Street and Leonora gave birth. That was nine months and six days after we were married. Leonora had wanted to dance for a few years before breeding, but we never regretted our marvelous Julia. “Conceived on the courthouse steps,” said my mother. And then, concerned she hadn’t been mean enough, she added, “First babies are often two weeks late.” Leonora, a barefoot, Martha Graham–style dancer, represented the “floating world” to my mother, not the “Kinder, Küche, and Kirche” she wanted for me. Jews support the arts — but that meant earning and contributing money, and perhaps one should buy a season ticket, but certainly not engaging in the risky business of entering the field. But the grandchildren (Daniel followed) were a blessing and after some time mother forgave Leonora. Thirty years.
One day, wheeling the baby carriage down the street, Leonora met José Quintero. During our year in Boston, José had come to Boston University to direct three short Thornton Wilder plays, and I had designed the lighting. José’s designer at Circle in the Square (who later became my assistant) had just had a breakdown. Was I available? Of course.
My first show was Gregorio Martínez Sierra’s THE CRADLE SONG. This was followed by others, but the huge hit was THE ICEMAN COMETH. The old Circle in the Square was a haunting space. If you sat in the empty room, without scenery or actors, you could begin to see spirits rising and hear echoes of great speeches. Whatever made this happen — perhaps the proportions of the shadowy room — cannot be clearly explained. Perhaps the space carried in it all the signs, the history, of its use. If a director wanted a room like that, he would ask for a room “with meaning.” Perhaps this would not be literal meaning, with a design that showed peeling wallpaper, with each layer telling us something (a palimpsest). This is intellect, not mood. What a designer would do with this concept is the essence of our craft.
Circle in the Square was a three-quarters stage, meaning that the stage floor was surrounded by seats on three sides. This theater, under Quintero’s leadership, spearheaded the off-Broadway movement. Geraldine Page’s performance in Tennessee Williams’s SUMMER AND SMOKE, before I arrived, was a starburst on the scene in New York — and nationally, where small “open” performance spaces were being created. By “open” I mean that there is no proscenium.
The O’Neill revival was the idea of Leigh Connell, José’s partner at that time. Leigh was quiet, gentle, and wise. THE ICEMAN COMETH began it, and as I noted in chapter 1, in that show Jason Robards emerged as one of our greatest stage artists. My set was good: The bar was at the non-audience end of the stage, with painted tiles and sawdust on the floor. Peter Falk, who later played Columbo, was the bartender. The street door, with an etched glass panel, was alongside the bar, and a shaft of sunlight could pass through that panel and stretch along the entire stage floor, carrying with it the entering actor’s extended shadow. From a central dusty chandelier, a spider web of thin ropes fanned out over the stage and audience and attached along the side walls. There was a spray available that created cobwebs. The whole room and audience were embraced and involved. The door to the imagined upstairs (read Joseph Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon and Up in the Old Hotel) was a beaded curtain, made from the rosary beads of the nuns in CRADLE SONG.
It was about this time that the curtain did not always go up to start the play. It might be up (or “out,” as we say) when the audience wandered in, the advantage being that they could absorb the mood of the play in advance. There would be special lighting onstage to enhance this, then the house lights (auditorium lights) would fade and the stage lights would shift to support the play and actors. Of course such open stages as at Circle in the