The Morgan Puts a Spotlight on Set Design

If you’re a theater lover, this has got to be the best time of the year. In the four-week period between the announcement of the Tony nominations and the handing out of the awards, it seems as though the whole world (and not just we theater geeks) starts thinking and talking about Broadway. And the buzz is even louder than usual this year.

The June issue of the glossy mainstream magazine Vanity Fair has a photo spread with 25 stars who have appeared on Broadway this past season. Just this week, PBS aired a documentary on the making of In the Heights, which took home Tony’s Best Musical honors last year. Recent guests on “The View's" daily gabfest have included David Hyde Pierce (star of Accent on Youth), Nathan Lane (co-star of Waiting for Godot) and, coming next Friday, Neil Patrick Harris (the host of this year’s Tony Awards show).

The New York Times has already devoted an Arts & Leisure section to the Tonys and continues to run features about the nominated shows. There are also interviews with nominees on the Playbill website, on the BroadwayRadio podcast, on blogs, in tweets. And, of course, there are predictions everywhere; one of the best is NY1 critic Roma Torre’s chats with some actual Tony voters.

Now, even the Morgan Library & Museum, which usually celebrates printed text, has gotten into the act with a new show, “Creating the Modern Stage: Designs for Theater and Opera.” The exhibit, which opened last week and runs through Aug. 16, traces the history of set design in the 20th century and although it displays more drawings from opera productions than the theater ones that most fascinate me, it is still a terrific introduction to a field about which I know far too little.

The exhibit is small, with only around 50 drawings, which means you can really focus on each one, without worrying that you won’t have time to get through the whole thing as is the case with so many megashows. Most of the drawings are drawn from a gift by the widow of Donald Oenslager, the prolific set designer who got his start as an actor with the Provincetown Players but went on to create the sets for such shows as the original productions of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and to teach at the Yale School of Drama for 45 years.

Oenslager was clearly a student of set design as well as a master of it. His collection includes drawings by the pioneers Adolphe Appia, the Swiss designer who led the move away from painted scenery to what he called “living” sets; Edward Gordon Craig, son of the celebrated British actress Ellen Terry, whose influential book “The Art of the Theater” advocated experimental lighting techniques and expressionistic sets like the one he did for the 1906 production of Hamlet in the drawing at the top of this entry; and avant garde Russian designers like Erté, who brought the art deco look to the Ziegfeld Follies; and Serge Soudeikine, who cut his design teeth with the Ballets Russes and later did the sets for the original 1935 production of Porgy and Bess.

American masters like Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, Oliver Smith and Ming Cho Lee are also represented. One display card tells the story of how Mielziner’s set drawing for the final act of Maxwell Anderson’s 1935 play Winterset was so impressive that Anderson changed his text to better correspond with Mielziner’s interpretation. I wish there had been more behind-the-sets stories like that one.

I also wished the exhibit had included more of what it calls the “ephemera” related to some of the productions like those in a display case near the Of Mice and Men drawing that include opening night tickets ($3.30 each for orchestra seats), Oenslager’s written account of a production meeting that Steinbeck attended, and a copy of the script, annotated by its female star Claire Luce in now-faded red pencil.

Another treat was being able to compare Soudeikine’s original 1935 set for Porgy and Bess with the one Juozas Junkas did for another production 30 years later. It all made me hungry for more exhibits like this one. And they'd be just as welcomed even when it’s not Tony season.

An Inadequate "Curtain Call"

Last week, I found myself with a couple of hours to spare between appointments and so I headed to one of my favorite places in the city: the exhibition gallery on the first floor of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. The shows they mount there are catnip for theater lovers like me who can’t get enough of showbiz lore. Still, I hadn’t rushed to see the current exhibition, “Curtain Call: Celebrating a Century of Women Designing for Live Performance,” when it opened last November. And apparently I’m not the only one. The New York Times, which usually reviews the Library’s exhibits, seems to have skipped this one.

I don’t know why the Times snubbed the show but I dragged my feet about going because I hate ghettoizing of any kind. Why, I thought indignantly, should accomplished female costume, set and lighting designers be lumped together by gender instead of recognized right alongside their lauded male counterparts? But that, said a plaque at the beginning of the exhibit, is exactly the problem: “The multifaceted talents of women that translate into design are tragically absent from the histories of art and performance.” This show, declared its curators Barbara Cohen-Stratyner and Carrie Robbins, aims to remedy those past wrongs by documenting the work of over 100 designing women.

These remarkable designers include pioneers like Caroline F. Siedle, the first woman recognized as a professional costume designer back around the turn of the last century; Aline Bernstein, the first to be admitted to the AFL’s Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers in the 1920s, and Lucinda Ballard, the recipient of the first Tony Award for design in 1947. But the show also celebrates the work of contemporary craftswomen like Sally Jacobs, who created the seminal white box and trapeze swings for Peter Brook’s legendary 1971 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the prolific Anna Louizos, whose work includes the sets for Avenue Q, High Fidelity, Curtains, In the Heights and White Christmas; and the longtime lighting whiz Peggy Eisenhauer.

There are sketches and fabric swatches as well as full costumes, architectural drawings and small models of sets in addition to photos that show how it all fits together. It was fascinating to see and read about all of them. Or it would have been if I could have concentrated on what I was seeing and reading. Instead, I had to fight to hear myself think over the continuous loops of two very loud and extremely annoying recordings that droned through the small space. The first, which lasted just under five minutes (I timed it) and then immediately repeated itself, served very little point, except to welcome visitors to the gallery. I would have preferred silent hospitality.

The second recording was more informative. It offered interesting tidbits about some of the items on display. The problem here is that all of the costumes are jammed onto two platforms. Small numbers are placed in front of each one but the information about them is on a collective label in the middle of the platform and the recorded tour is so random that so you have to run from one spot to another if you want to see the details that are being explained.

Over the next couple of months, the Library, in collaboration with the League of Professional Theatre Women, will be holding a series of events showcasing the work of some of the pioneers and offering interviews with some of the designers working today (click here for more information about the dates and times). That should compensate a bit. Still it's a sad commentary that a show created to honor innovative designers who haven't gotten their proper due is perhaps the most poorly designed exhibit the Library has ever presented. The talented women whose works are on display here deserve a much better curtain call than they're getting.