Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2001 - 23

COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF JO MIELZINER

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With the experience of designing Galileo with projections, Mielziner
expanded his use of projections in his scheme for Caravaggio (1973)
at Cincinnati's Playhouse-in-the-Park. For Caravaggio, he could drag
the projections all over the stage (painted white) and onto and
above the actors, not specifically to change scenes but to move the
action of the play through a succession of the artist's paintings in the
various periods of his life. It was an interesting and daring solution.

Many of the plays and musicals in the past twenty-five years worked
well within a single setting, sometimes with the entire backstage exposed
to the audience as well as the lighting. In the 1967 production of Hair,
the exposed overhead stage lighting became part of the message of the
musical: its honesty in proclaiming that it was, after all, a protest against
all phases of the establishment. (Mielziner, incidentally, detested both
the production and its message.) Because of his insistence that all scenes
flow one into another, Mielziner might well have adapted to the single-set
production but would have decried the deconstructions of Robert Wilson, for instance, as being too far over the edge. Abstractions may have
been acceptable on canvas, but on stage, he would have considered them
distractions and conundrums for the audience. Mielziner would have found
a way to interject logic and reality into the scenery-if (and this is a big "if")
he had ever been commissioned to design a non-traditional theatrical piece.
Mielziner welcomed the mechanization of the theatre-motors
running the turntables, wagons, jackknife stages, curtains, flying scenery,
etc.-which was cautiously being introduced in the late 1960s while he
was still alive. They were expensive, but at the beginning, it meant that
fewer hands were necessary backstage which could result in fewer mistakes. Scene changes were rendered-at least to the eye of the audience-
effortlessly as well as seamlessly. Once the unions woke up to the fact that
their men were being displaced, new rules were put into place and stagehands slowly but surely went back on the payroll. (Mielziner enjoyed
harmonious and mutually respectful relationships with the boys back22

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stage, and depended on their expertise for the smooth running of his
shows. He would have understood their complaints.)
Certainly, Mielziner would have fallen in love with the automation
brought on by the electronic age. (He was always attracted to technology,
even if he never completely understood it.) For a while during the last
two decades of the twentieth century, the computer was programmed to
run the stage machinery in a timed and precise system that would function in exactly the same way for every performance of a play or musical.
Alas! that is also its main drawback. Last minute changes in the director's
thinking or problems with the scenery necessitated re-programming and
that could be costly as well as time-consuming. Would he have backed
away from it as have today's designers to a large degree? Probably, yes,
because of pressures brought by expense-conscious producers, but he
would still have tried it even when the system began to have a history of
frequent and unpredictable breakdowns; and in the long run, became
inflexible in its precision.
Would Mielziner have used the computer in his studio? Because he
loved the whole process of design from the early sketches to the finished
renderings, it is unlikely that he would have become personally involved
with Computer Aided Designing (CAD). But when faced with hiring as his
assistants young graduates of design programs in college and universitybased departments where it is taught, he would have wanted to learn
about it and how it could be applied to his work. Ming Cho Lee, a
Mielziner protégé, believes that his legacy was the evolutionary process
of design. It begins with a ground plan, research, sketched ideas, evermore precise drawings, to elevations and drafting, a three-dimensional
model, color choices, finally, a finished rendering. (For today's designers, the "white model" and renderings that Mielziner completed for each
show have been replaced by fully-developed and painted models.) The
computer in the hands of most contemporary designers becomes just
another tool and is used only when the show has been completely designed and the plans are ready to be reproduced mechanically.
Mielziner's design process did not originate with him. He learned it
from Robert Edmond Jones and improved upon it. (As testament to his
process, hundreds of Jones's preliminary sketches are included in the
Tobin Collection at the McNay Museum in San Antonio.) Because
Mielziner's experiences with Joseph Urban and Oskar Strnad had taught
him the value of mechanical drawings, he tried to hire assistants who
were either well-grounded in architectural draftsmanship or could learn
it rapidly from his experienced associates. Such was his influence that
the scores of young would-be designers who went through his studio became the legatees of the Mielziner system and passed it on to future generations. (Donald Oenslager, also a Jones assistant, not only used the
Jones approach but taught it during his many years at the Yale Drama
School, thus perpetuating the system into future generations.)
Mielziner bequeathed to the world hundreds of finished scene renderings that are works of art in themselves, and thus, has insured his immortality as a stage artist if only through the published reproductions
and exhibitions of them. (Lee Simonson dismissed renderings as mere
"records of intent.") But Mielziner's special genius was in lighting his
own sets, an art that is instantly ephemeral. A few designers living today
still consider him the greatest lighting designer who ever lived-at least in
the twentieth century. What he was able to accomplish with what must be
considered today as almost primitive instrumentation and equipment can
be attributed to his own profound understanding not merely of the aesthetics and mechanics of lighting the stage but of the effect of lighting to
convey the drama and its internal psychological truth to the audience.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2001