Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2001 - 22

COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF JO MIELZINER

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Because of the episodic story line of Miss Lonelyhearts, Mielziner had to
follow the quick montages, which introduced new characters by flashes, with
equally rapid changes of mood and atmosphere. Mielziner used twenty-one
projections, some with distorted angles, to reproduce impressionistic interiors

slides. He did not worry about spilling the projections on the actors: it became part of his
plan. The theatre itself dictated his thinking. Because the Playhouse-in-the-Park is an
amphitheatre, he knew that most of the audience would view the play and the actors against
the stage floor. He had the stage floor painted
white and the vertical surfaces, black. Mielziner
threw most of the projections on the stage floor,
making sure that they did not obscure the actors' faces except by plan. The projections
themselves were taken from Caravaggio's paintings and were changed with great speed during
the course of the play. Although it was an effective and thoroughly dramatic presentation, it
was neither inexpensive nor easy to pull it off.
(Kliegl, which supplied the projectors, sent a
specialist in projections to Cincinnati to oversee
the installation.) But no other system at the
time could have come close to the rapidity of
the scene changes made possible by the projections. It was a triumph of scenic design that was
not exportable to any Broadway house.

COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF JO MIELZINER

and exteriors. The exterior shown was painted by Mielziner on black paper.

Halfway between a scenic device and a lighting effect was
Mielziner's use of the painted scrim in many of his assignments. Perhaps it was Mielziner's background as a trained easel artist that made him use the painted scrim so often and so
well; perhaps it helped satisfy some lost vestige of his painter's
soul to be able to "paint" his picture albeit not on small canvas
but on a large surface to be hung not on a wall but on a stage.
Whatever it was, it certainly became a mainstay of his designing. Bergman's studio painters perfected the double-sided
double-painted scrim that needed special lighting to work its
magic. Their work for The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The
Innocents (1950) demonstrated this technique, but even after
Bergman closed his shop, Mielziner recognized the affinity of
the painted scrim for the "poetic" plays of other works by Tennessee Williams and employed it whenever he could. Of
course, lighting the scrim to reveal both sides was Mielziner's
particular genius. Since the technique is seldom, if ever, used
today (because of the perfection of projected scenery), it can
now be relegated to a lost art.
In the last twenty-five years, playwriting and musical production have undergone enormous and periodical sea changes. From
literalism in the immediate postwar decades, plays and musicals in the successive years demanded a different kind of stage
production. For the landmark production of Sweeney Todd in
1979, Eugene Lee filled the entire proscenium with a construction that looked like a giant tinker toy and placed interior
and exterior scenes within it on several levels. Every part of it
was visible to the audience when they took their seats; it was
the job of the audience to figure out when and where the action was taking place within the structure. Perhaps Mielziner
would have admired Lee's daring, and he certainly would have
applauded the designer's emphasis on the actors once the
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rawness of the setting was digested by the audience.

Presented as the inaugural production at the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois,
Galileo (1969) by Bertolt Brecht presented another challenge. Brecht set his play in twenty
scenes, which Mielziner knew could only be done simply with a unit set and quick and simple
changes to fit within a university budget. To set the period (late Renaissance), he used
projections from original drawings by Michelangelo, da Vinci, Callot, and other old masters.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2001