Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2001 - 21

travelers made of scrim could cross each other as they moved in opposite directions. Used with front lighting, the travelers hid the stage as the
scenery behind them was being changed; once the back lights were
brought up, the new scene miraculously appeared.
Flying scenery had been part of the designers' standard vocabulary
for several hundred years and was liberally employed by Mielziner. For
his productions of Susan and God and The Star-Wagon (both 1937), he
carried the technique even further by nesting completely dressed scenes
one within the other, flying the nested scene out of sight when it was not
used. He was sometimes accused of straining the limits of the grid with heavy
scenery and gained an ill-deserved reputation for this practice. In two such
cases, there were faults in the structure of the theatre buildings and in the
attachment of the grid to the structure, not Mielziner's scenery that
caused the trouble.
Several of Mielziner's other ideas for expanding the possibilities
of scenery went nowhere. In 1964, while he was working on the design for
the stage and interior of the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, he described for Edward Kook his idea for a new type of cyclorama, one that "in essence is a surface to receive countless varieties of light, patterns or tones, which is free of
wrinkles, which carries the eye out of sight overhead, and takes care of
the scene sightlines right and left." According to his design, it was to be
made of narrow strips of tape attached to electrically-controlled rollers
which could conceivably roll or un-roll the tapes to set up the cyc or fly it
at will minus the weight and bulk of traditional more solid structures.
Unfortunately, his idea created more problems than it solved and never
moved off the drawing board.
During the 1940s, as playwrights began to abandon the standard
three-act play and replace it with an episodic, even cinematic, structure,
it became even more important for designers to come up with what master stage technician Peter Feller called "seamless scenery." Designers
were challenged to create any and all devices that could move the action
along without impeding the flow of the play with interruptive scene
changes. Mielziner had already experimented with open changes where
actors, scenery, and props were moved in full light in On Your Toes, a
musical, as early as 1936. Two years later, he reduced the realistic background of the play to fragmented bits of scenery against a lighted cyclorama in Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938). By the time the episodic plays
and musicals reached the boards a decade later, he was already wellversed in handling both techniques.
All in all, Mielziner pushed the technology of his time as far as it
would go. Occasionally, he played around with gimmicks. One notable
example was his scenery for Mr. President in 1962. He felt (and the critics later agreed) that the musical by the usually dependable Irving Berlin
with book by the equally dependable Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
was a tired, patchwork pastiche. In order to bolster the credibility of the
work, the producer (Leland Hayward) and director (Joshua Logan)
"crammed it with visual, oral, and other kinds of gadgets" (Mielziner's
words) to keep the ship afloat. Taking a cue from a magnetic pin board
that he had seen, Mielziner decided to apply the concept to scenery. He
mounted three radiating walls on a giant turntable, attaching the set
pieces by means of 60 electro-magnets built into the walls. On the back
of the set pieces, he placed large metal plates which the stagehands
would position next to the electro-magnets and snap them into place
once the operator activated them with electrical charges from above the
stage. Peter Feller, who built the 31 sets according to Mielziner's specifications, confessed that it was a stagehands' nightmare since the pieces
had to be aligned perfectly. The reporter from Variety thought that it was
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original scenic concept that worked. Ingenious though it might have
been, Mielziner never used the system again.
As he got along in years, Mielziner became more and more convinced that the best scenery was the least scenery and that meant to him
getting rid of most of the all-too-solid stuff of three-dimensional traditional materials. From the time that he began his career in the 1940s, he
had always wanted to use (and did use) projections against neutral surfaces as part of the effects, but was frustrated by the shallow stages of
Broadway theatres. It was impossible to throw images from rear projections because of lack of depth backstage in American theatres. (In Europe, where the depth of theatres from proscenium to back wall was
more than double the depth of Broadway houses, it was relatively easy to
use rear projections as a matter of course.)
The shallow Broadway stages necessitated the use of front projectors, which caused all sorts of problems. Positioning the equipment so
that the projections did not spill on the actors was often impossible. And
more often, the projections would be washed out by the overhead lighting. In European theatres, the projectors were mounted behind, not in
front of a screen or neutral drop, and did not interfere with either the
acting area or the general lighting. But throughout his career and with
the help of Edward Kook of Century Lighting, Mielziner soldiered on in
his quest for solutions. Sometimes, he was brilliantly successful, as with
his projected scenery for Death of a Salesman (1949). When Willie Loman
summons up early memories, Mielziner projected bright green leaves on a
scrim drawn across the stage to carry Willie back to the "old days." He used
this effect whenever he could, designing the templates or painting slides
for insertion behind the lens of the projectors.
Using whatever Kook and Century Lighting could devise, Mielziner
also had some success in creating moving projections (clouds, leaves,
shadows, etc.,) utilizing either rotating discs or continuous film strips
mounted behind the lens of a motorized instrument. He could see clearly
the future of projected scenery but he could not achieve it with the
industry's limited technology. He saw an opportunity to make a contribution, however, when he became the co-designer of the Vivian Beaumont
Theatre at Lincoln Center. His insistence that the backstage depth of the
theatre extend to ninety feet not only to accommodate what everyone
thought at the time would be a genuine repertory theatre with sets stored
backstage, but also his vision of rear projectors that could throw large,
clear images without distortion or obstruction on a permanent screen.
His inclusion of a provision for positioning a rear projector in the Beaumont was ample proof indicative of his faith that the future would one
day arrive. Unfortunately, the whole course of the repertory theatre
changed and Jo's association with it all but ceased after the first production. Some years later, he designed a revival of Arthur Miller's Crucible at
the Beaumont and opened each act with a scene-projected from the
front, not the rear.
Mielziner had one opportunity to play with projections to his heart's
content. In 1973, he was invited by his former assistant Word Baker to
design a production of Caravaggio, a new play about the artist by
Michael Straight, at Cincinnati's Playhouse-in-the-Park. The play moved
from scene to scene following the ascent and descent of the artist's life
and was a challenge for Mielziner both for the settings and the lighting.
He wisely decided not to use much solid scenery, relying on a series of
projections and matching lighting to Caravaggio's paintings. He used six
carousel projectors adapted specifically for stage use, fifteen 2100-watt
projectors for 34 by 4-inch slides, four 5000-watt projectors for large
seven-inch-square slides and one 5000-watt unit for five-inch-square

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