Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2006 - 72

George Tsypin Opera Factory
Building in the Black Void

models take up space normally used for showering or sleeping.
Ming has gone through a number of stylistic changes that are mostly
detailed by Unruh in the text. In fact, Unruh wisely uses many direct
quotes that allow us to "hear" Ming ruminating on his work. Ming's early
scaffold designs are well known and much copied. Ming himself comments on the over use of doors in rear walls. And the sets that are basically right-angled boxes are repeated and have had an influence on many
other designers but are a cliché now. Others will find examples of favorite repeated devices because artists do repeat themselves. Just one example is the use of side walls curved into the stage floor. See Jack
McGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett, 1970, Macbeth, 1995, and
Peer Gynt, 1998.
Unruh's text is extremely useful and is so very readable because it
uses none of the academic jargon or incomprehensible art criticism language that are often found in monographs. Ming's realizations that design must start on the inside and go to the outside is connected by Unruh
to European design philosophies. But looking at Ming's work and what
we have seen from abroad, I find the connection tenuous. I am quibbling
here about a text that is wonderfully informative.
Part One of the book tells about Ming's family in China. But there is
no more information about anything personal, except we are treated to a
sweet and touching picture of Ming and Betsy at their wedding party. Because Betsy has been the definition of helpmate, I would have hoped that
more could have been said about their partnership and how their family
life differed from what we were told about Ming's early years.
The book ends with a distressing irony. In 2002, Ming accepted the
National Medal of Arts from President Bush. Several years later, with
Bush's actions and intentions becoming clearer, Ming is quoted as commenting: "I have always wondered why a great nation and people with a
great cultural heritage such as Germany could submit itself to Hitler and
the atrocity that followed. I think we Americans are facing the same situation except the process is much subtler and therefore even more dangerous. I fear Americans have been silenced and that we have lost our
capacity for dissent."
The Designs of Ming Cho Lee should now join Mary Henderson's
Mielziner and Ralph Pendleton's The Theatre of Robert Edmund Jones
as the definitive histories of American design art.
Beeb Salzer, author of The Skeptical Scenographer: Essays on
Theatrical Design and Human Nature, teaches design at San Diego
State University, where he is a professor of drama.

by George Tsypin with Julie
Taymor and Grigory Revzin.
New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2005. 223 pp.; ill. (chiefly
col.). ISBN: 1568985320, cloth, $75.
Reviewed by Arnold Aronson
There is no other designer in the
United States today like George
Tsypin, perhaps no other designer in the world. He works on
a scale and with a vocabulary virtually unmatched in today's theatre and opera. In this sense, he
evokes comparisons with designers such as Joseph Svoboda and that small coterie of twentieth-century
iconoclastic designers who used Wagner's operas as fertile ground for
exploring the limits of the stage. Tsypin does not necessarily share anything stylistically with these designers. Rather, he shares a theatricality, a
desire to break convention and expectations, and a different understanding of space than most.
Tsypin first became widely known in the late 1980s for his work
with director Peter Sellars and a few other cutting-edge directors. But for
more than a decade he has been working almost exclusively in Europe.
Of the twenty-two projects illustrated in George Tsypin Opera Factory:
Building in the Black Void, only three were created for American venues, and only the Julie Taymor-directed The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera was done since 2000. Much of the most recent work has
been done at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre or at the Netherlands
Opera in Amsterdam.
Opera, of course, has always been the home of scenic fantasy and
extravagance. It is where Aleotti and Torelli developed moveable scenery,
and where the Bibienas raised perspective to its theatrical pinnacle. In
the Baroque era, opera was sometimes little more than an excuse for
scenic spectacle. But in the mid- to-late twentieth century, as fewer new
operas entered the repertoire and the form became institutionalized, the
opera house became a laboratory for directors and designers, despite
the resistance of conservative audiences at some opera houses. Nonetheless, much opera design has remained solidly with the pictorial or emblematic traditions.
Tsypin's background includes training as an architect and working
as a visionary urban planner in the Soviet Union before emigrating to the
U.S. He also has a parallel career as a sculptor and intermedia artist. He
approaches space and design with a different set of assumptions and expectations than many, more traditionally trained scenographers. "I travel
around the world," he explains, "I imagine the sets I design as fragTHEATRE
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TECHNOLOGY

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2006