Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2002 - 10

the ubtext
Designer Genes

etween my junior and senior year in high school
I was taken to New York to show my callow portfolio to Jo
Mielziner. Later, in college, I had Sunday brunch with
Mielziner when several times a year he was in New Haven trying out a new show. Much later, starting out in New York, I lost
a promised a show to him when he offered to design the play
for scale. The unassailable argument was that his name could
help raise money and mine would be useless.
These Proustian remembrances of things past were revived while reading this year's Golden Pen Award winner, Mary
C. Henderson's thorough and lively book, Mielziner: Master
of Modern Stage Design. Long forgotten emotions and memories of people I have known flooded my brain as I relived
those early years. Henderson's book is not only a biography of
one man, she chronicles the history of design from the beginning of the twentieth century to Mielziner's death in 1976. The
book fills an historical gap, supplying information about a
golden age of theatre little known to today's students and
young designers. It should be required reading in every theatre department.
Starting with Robert Edmond Jones and Lee Simonson,
the scene shops and paint studios, and the scenery rental houses
of the day, Henderson traces the influences that created scenic
and lighting design in America. So while I lived through the
last third of this story, my knowledge of the first two thirds was
spotty. Mielziner connected the dots. The picture that appeared was a family tree with intertwining branches.
While Simonson was a great designer, it was Robert
Edmond Jones who was the patriarch with the most influence.
The blood lines flow through him because he changed the way
design was practiced. Moreover, from him sprout the two
branches that then became the most influential in the next
generation: Donald Oenslager and Jo Mielziner.
Oenslager and Mielziner were friendly rivals who respected each other. Mielziner was represented in Oenslager's
extensive collection of scene designs. In the golden age when
over two hundred shows opened each year on Broadway, each
had eight, ten or twelve shows. Both were gentlemen who
wore three-piece or double-breasted suits.( My classmate in
graduate school, the late Chilean designer Bernardo Trumper,
idolized Mielziner. But when I took him to meet the great man,
Bernardo was confused. He thought Mielziner looked more
like a banker than an artist.)

Beeb Salzer

The two men were almost exactly contemporary:
Mielziner, (1901-1976), Oenslager, (1902-1975). Their
backgrounds were not at all alike. Oenslager was born in Harrisburg Pennsyvania, went to Harvard where he studied with
George Pierce Baker. Mielziner was born in Paris where his
painter father was working. His first language was French. At
sixteen, he left school and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Oenslager's influence was through the students he taught
in his nearly fifty-year tenure at the Yale School of Drama. His
students then fanned out across the country teaching design in
newly established theatre departments. Since Yale was the pioneer in theatre education, Oenslager's methods of teaching design became the model. He was one of those exceptional
teachers who did not turn out clones of himself but respected
the individuality of the talents he guided. Maybe this reflected
his own displeasure at being type cast as the designer of elegant box set interiors. In his book The Theatre of Donald
Oenslager he chose to include more of his non-traditional designs than the box sets he was famous for.
Mielziner's influence is partly due to his sets for such
classics as Death of Salesman and Streetcar Named Desire.
But he also trained several generations of designers who were
his assistants. Of these, the most influential for our purposes
was Ming Cho Lee. Ming started as an unpaid apprentice and
after four years, passing the union exam and working on a
dozen Mielziner designs, was listed as an assistant designer.
Although Ming's sensibilty is different from Mielziner's and his
designs moved the art forward into a new aesthetic, his initial
training years with Mielziner were a profound influence.
I explain this genealogy to my students by showing them
how they are related to what has gone before. My colleague
Ralph Funicello was trained by Ming Cho Lee and assisted several other designers. My professor in graduate school was
Oenslager and when I went to New York, I mainly assisted
George Jenkins who had been one of Mielziners assistants.
And so the branches become intertwined in students studying
with both Funicello and me. I wager almost every designer can
find similar links to the past. From Appia, Craig, Robert
Edmond Jones, Oenslager and Mielziner, ghostly presences
stand behind students, as they themselves will extend an honorable lineage. Our heritage is a gift that should be acknowledged. Henderson's book does just that. ❖

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2002