Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006 - 50

The Happiness Cage
by Dennis J. Reardon, 1970, New York Shakespeare Festival, Newman Theatre, directed by Tom Aldredge.
Marjorie B. Kellogg (sets), Theoni V. Aldredge (costumes), Martin Aronstein (lighting).

PHOTO BY M.B . KELLOGG

It took place in an army mental hospital where they were doing illicit, nasty experiments on human
subjects. What I got involved with here is obviously the tile. The upper level was clean and pristine, all
the rest of it was dirty and old. I was using here the texture of reality repeated and exaggerated to help tell
the story of money lavished on the lab at the top and the neglect of the ward below where the human
subjects, the lab rats, were housed.

Kellogg's inclination for poetic realism is well-founded.
She grew up in New York seeing the designs of Oliver Smith.
But her impulse toward what she calls abstraction is equally
ingrained. She has an impeccable design genealogy. As a teenager she worked several summers for Ming Cho Lee in the
shops at the New York Shakespeare Festival. After getting a degree in drama from Vassar she quickly abandoned graduate
school in California to return to assist Lee in his studio.
"I learned how to draw a decent line from Ming," Kellogg
told Aronson. She clearly learned much more. She said in Louisville, "I don't really care about realism as a style or an aesthetic manifesto. What I do care about is real things. I care
about that fabulous array of textures and shapes and colors
and significant signs and symbols and vocabularies that are
available to us as observers of the real world."
Kellogg reached what she called "the apex of my career
as a realist" in 1982 with Steaming, Nell Dunn's comedy
about six London women who meet regularly at a public Turkish bath for soul-searching and steam. The set, inspired by extensive research at the Porchester Baths in London, had
working showers and a real plunge pool. Did Steaming require the full Belasco? Kellogg acknowledges it didn't. "But,"

she said, "we all got into the glory of these old public baths,
these Victorian buildings that the British built to wash the public, the destruction of which was one of the central metaphors
of the play. We just really wanted to put one of them on stage
and let the audience share in that appreciation."
The appreciation turned out to be mostly for Kellogg's
bravura in getting the reality right. Alvin Klein, reviewing the
production for The New York Times in its pre-Broadway run
at the Hartman Theatre, said the real water was "obviously intrinsic to the setting: a gorgeously worn-out bathhouse designed to the last dilapidated detail... Since the play's content
is so slight and its characters are made of such stock stuff, the
impressive production values turn out to be not only the
evening's novelties, but also its only sustenance." On Broadway, Frank Rich agreed that the set and Pat Collins' lighting
(along with Judith Ivey's star-making performance) were
the production's strengths. The "grand but decaying municipal edifice, complete with corroded pipes, sooty tiles,
showers and cots, as well as that downstage pool" made for
a scenic atmosphere so powerful "that it even adds a measure of depth and warmth to the play's more shallow and
tepid interludes."
THEATRE

SPRING

2006

DESIGN

&

TECHNOLOGY

49
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006
