Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 1977 - 28

section has a headline which announces: "A Yearning for
'Normalcy' - The Current Backlash in the Arts."
The author, art critic Hilton Kramer, goes on to say:
The truth is, much of what has passed for being
avant-garde in recent years has proved to be extremly boring and extremely trivial-a mere charade
of the great age of experiment in the arts, and of no
great esthetic merit in itself ... The taste now is for
clarity and coherence, for the beautiful and recogn izable, for narrative, melody, pathos, glamou r,
romance, and the instantly comprehensible, for
empathy rather than entropy-for art that is a
pleasure rather than a moral contest.! 2
All of these entertaining qualities that Mr. Kramer lists
are evident in the public's current interest in nostalgia, in
the bicentennial, and in numerous revivals now on Broadway. But unfortunately, we cannot survive on the messages of another era. The revivals may bring a breathing
space from the pounding sensations of current culture
but they carry no relevant communication. Alfred Kazin
says:
What are we nostalgic for? Why so many commemorations, appeals to the past, imitations of what has
never really disappeared from our lives? Nostalgia is
never for what we have lost, but for that part of
ourselves, like childhood, that we no longer understand. Nostalgia is the effort of the too-conscious
present to understand itself in the light of the unconscious past. Nostalgia is the effort to rejoin
ourselves to ourselves-when the effort is in one
sense, too late. I 3
Another, but equally, negative explanation of nostalgia comes from Jean Shepherd.
I think most nostalgia is a sickness. It's symptomatic of a deep cleavage in American Iife. It's one
of the only things Americans have left in commonthe past. How else can a kid from Hammond,
Indiana and a kid from Brooklyn talk to each other?
They have to talk about Bogart because they don't
understand anyth ing el se about each other's lives.! 4
So we can't go home again. As theatre designers, our
stock in trade-cliches, stereotypes, and prejudices-have
been taken from us. The man with the long hair is not a
hippy, he's a candidate for president; the mad man is
not pitiful, he's a rock star earning a million dollars a
show; and the babe in the slinky, low-cut, red dress is
not a whore, she's your grandmother. We remain in a
communication vacuum.
Finally, the point of all this 'is to explain why the
absence of significant verbal commu nication has had a
profound effect on the course of scenography in the
past few years. The most published and probably most
imitated scenographers today have abandoned the theories of design which three generations of designers in the
United States have accepted as dogma. That dogma,
according to Robert Edmond Jones, was:
A setting should not be a thing to look at in itself.
It can, of course, be made so powerful, so expressive, so dramatic, that actors have nothing to do
28

FALL. 1977

after the curtain rises but to embroider variations
on the theme the scene has already given away.1 5
And in Prague, in 1976, Jo Mielziner repeats:
· .. the designer must be the servant of the director.
Designers should not be leaders, they should be
collaborators.! 6
But these statements depend upon a theatre of verbal
ideas in which overpowering visual effects would kill the
intention of the play.
Compare Jones' and lVIielziner's words with these of
Ralph Koltai, the English scenographer:
I'm interested basically in finding a concept for a
production. I tend to work with directors who like
me to find the concept. And I tend not to work
with directors who have very strong ideas themselves.I 7
And Robin Wagner speaking of Tom O'Horgan:
· .. He's very open and free about using anything
that he feels is good. So if you come up with a
seemingly crazy idea and it works for him, he
wants it and you use it. He has absolutely no ego
that way . . . . someone had made a comment in
an interview that I had a tendency to overdesign
and Tom's comment was, 'No one can overdesign
for me,.'d S
Or an article in this Journal which said:
· .. I think that the evidence suggests that Svoboda's
work in the 1970's shows relatively more of the
traditional designer than of the scenographer as
he himself has embodied that term . . . I suggest
that the cause is closely related to his lack of
work with a certain kind of director, one with
whom he can interact fully and freely and almost
intu itively ... 19
From these statements and from any number of sets
we have all seen, it is clear that we have crossed a frontier
in theatre. We are no longer completely bound by the old
rules of scenic restraint. As scenographers we are even
being prodded forward by Clive Barnes who has said,
"That Broadway design is, scenically locked into the
1930's." He continues,
· .. certainly we have never seen the sort of total
visual concept that can occasionally be seen in opera
or dance. Wake up, Broadway! There are images out
there to be captured. They are not using gaslight
anymore. 20
What Mr. Barnes fails to recognize is that a conflict
ex ists between the old theatre of ideas, of words, of
humanistic principles, and the theatre of the senses, of
visual supremacy, of mechanistic magic.
One spokesman for verbal communication is Barnes'
co-critic on the Times, Walter Kerr, who writes:
What is very clear is that words, those strangely
supercharged constructs by means of wh ich a
sustained intellectual intensity is generated, are
not only the original tool of the theatre; they are
the only remaining tool of the theatre, the one
means the stage has of coping with - maybe even
whipping-the competition. The stage can't compete

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