Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2008 - 51

intention to establish himself as one of the core modernist
stage designers in the United States. Originally named Norman
Melancton Geddes, he transformed his name using the prefix
Bel, which he borrowed from his first wife, Belle Sneider. This
rather eccentric pairing served Bel Geddes well during his
professional career, which extended across one of the most
interesting periods of artistic and theatre history in the U.S.
Norman Bel Geddes characterized himself as a modernistRenaissance person, attempting to combine his multiple talents
in theatre and industry with radical and often futuristic visions
and ideas. His ambitious and sometimes utopian approach to
stage scenery and lighting technology is evident in his later productions such as Jeanne d'Arc (1925), Hamlet (1929-1931),
Lysistrata (1930), Dead End (1935), and Iron Men (1936) in
which Bel Geddes combined his set designer role with that of director and producer of the theatrical performance, establishing
himself as the single interpreter of a play.
Bel Geddes' incredible productivity and his ability to combine creative thinking with technical knowledge were reflected
in his designs. His futuristic concepts and desire to make the
world "cleaner, safer, prettier, and better for all men" (Roberts 1979, 6) by employing advances in science and industry
can be defined as "hope-giving" to the economically depressed
America of that time. Together with other followers of the New
Stagecraft movement, such as Lee Simonson and Robert Edmond Jones, Bel Geddes employed an expressionistic stylization
which emphasized psychology and emotional states throughout
the play. However, the over-complexity of Bel Geddes' concepts,
frequent underestimation of the costs, and his lack of flexibility in the modification or adaptation of his sets to a particular
theatrical space, resulted in a number of unaccomplished projects. These might have been some of the reasons why his contribution in the area of theatre design, highly rated at the time,
has remained hardly noticed for the last few decades. Unfortu-

nately, it is true that "no scholar has judged Bel Geddes worth
a monograph; and his name is barely remembered except by
experts in American theatre history" (Innes, 2003).

The Divine Comedy
Norman Bel Geddes defi
defined
ned stage design as a process for reinterpreting theatrical space and the objects within it, combining them into a structure where each part was an essential
element of the main concept. He strongly believed that the
only way to realize the main idea of the show was through absolute symbolism and spectacle, and that the value of design
was simply "in its homogeneous integrity in giving significance
to an idea and fulfilling it" (Geddes 1960, 261). Bel Geddes'
designs were not only dramatically expressive but also highly
technical. Similar to Craig's professional habits, Bel Geddes
tended to construct large-scale models of his future sets, often
emcompassing the theatre buildings to accommodate them
(Innes, 2003). Each of his models represented in detail every
individual setting, filled with figures of actors wearing neutral
costumes. His models were so precise that their exact reproduction in real-size was difficult to question. Additionally, Bel
Geddes provided architectural blueprints and elevations with
detailed cost estimates (which he usually exceeded). He also
created many theatre adaptations and set designs that were
never produced. As admitted by Bel Geddes, his most remarkable work was his production of Dante's The Divine Comedy.
Unfortunately, his fully-functional stage model is lost.
Bel Geddes's 1921 theatrical interpretation of Dante's
masterpiece was his first serious attempt to escape the obsolete two-dimensional proscenium stage. He started working
on The Divine Comedy after designing several successful musical productions, for example Erminie, shown in figure 1,
partly because he didn't want to be identified solely with this
traditional type of theatre.

Figure 1. Norman Bel Geddes' design for the 1920 production of Erminie. Source: The
HRC, the University of Texas in Austin.

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