'The Orchard'

 by Kirk Woodward 

[Frequent readers of Rick On Theater will be familiar with my friend Kirk Woodward.  He’s the most prolific of the guest-bloggers I’ve published on ROT, with something over 100 contributions.  His territory ranges from directing and playwriting to acting, to songwriting and music performance (especially The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and jazz), to biographies of cultural figures (particularly in theater and music), to theatrical performance, notably reviews and reports. 

[This time, Kirk’s writing about a performance he saw on Wednesday, 29 June, of The Orchard, the adaptation of The Cherry Orchard conceived for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s theater center in Hell’s Kitchen.  The two-hour, high-tech production opened on Tuesday, 7 June, and closed on Sunday, 3 July. 

[I won’t spoil Kirk’s effort by previewing what he says; he and I both want you all to read it for yourself.  Suffice it to say that he applies his rather deep understanding and experience of theater to his observations.  Besides, as he points out, he got to see Baryshnikov.]

I have not seen the production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet starring Alex Lawther and directed by Robert Icke that opened on June 28, 2022, at the Park Avenue Armory. I begin by mentioning it only because a section of a review of the show by Maya Phillips in The New York Times on July 1, 2022, caught my eye. Phillips writes in part:

What’s most frustrating about Icke’s otherwise intriguing approach is the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech. A grid of 12 screens hangs overhead, and two larger screens flank the stage, showing security footage from the castle and news reports about Denmark’s conflict with Norway.

The screens also flash “pause” and “stop” before the two intermissions and the final scene, mawkishly calling attention to the audience as spectators. The way Icke and the lighting designer Natasha Chivers handle several of Hamlet’s monologues is more effective: soft overhead light haloes Lawther as he seems to address theatergoers directly from the edge of the stage, only to snap off when he’s done speaking.

I quote this review, written by someone who sees a great deal more of theater than I do, because earlier that same week I had seen The Orchard, a version of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (translated by Carol Rocamora, with “new material” by Igor Golyak, who “conceived” and directed the show) at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street in Manhattan. I will explain.

I wanted to see The Orchard for two reasons. The first was that I had never seen Mikhail Baryshnikov (b. 1948) in person, and I wanted to. For years he and Rudolph Nureyev (1938-1993) were shining stars in the world of dance. I saw Nureyev at least twice, but never saw Baryshnikov.

Those unfamiliar with his work in ballet might check out the film The Turning Point (1977), selected dance highlights of which are available in a YouTube video (Mikhail Baryshnikov - The Turning Point (Ballet) - YouTube). Far from being satisfied with his career in ballet, Baryshnikov continued to expand his range and interests, working with numerous choreographers, leading the American Ballet Theatre, performing with and founding modern dance companies, and acting (including both plays by Samuel Beckett and the 2003-04 season of Sex and the City).

So I had always wanted to see him in person (and why hadn’t I?). I was also curious about the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), opened in 2005 and home to a variety of arts and artists. It’s a modern, industrial-style building, rather severe, but efficiently designed.

The Orchard played in the BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater; it seats 238, so it’s relatively intimate, and it has a floor-level stage (with minimum offstage space). The seating is steep, so visibility is good, although from the back of the balcony, where I sat, one sees a lot of tops of heads.

One feature in the Robbins Theater is new to me: instead of each seat being a single unit, there are many seats for two and even three, kind of like sitting on a small couch, and often two people have to stand up to let one pass.

In The Cherry Orchard (first performed in 1904), an extended Russian family unit faces the likely sale of its estate, including the orchard of the title, as part of the wave of modernization moving through the country. The family offers little resistance to change, and at the end of the play the house and the orchard are being torn down and the family is dispersed.

In The Orchard Baryshnikov plays the aging servant Firs, representative of the oldest Russian traditions (he was originally a serf, and considers himself attached to the family). Among others in the cast, Jessica Hecht plays Ranevskaya, an impulsive actress who has returned from Paris to see the estate again. I was particularly taken with the performances of Nael Nacer, who plays Lopakhin, a businessman, and Mark Nelson as Gayev, a billiards-obsessed eccentric who simply can’t focus on the danger the estate is in.

Baryshnikov brings to his acting a quality he also brought to his dancing: he is always present in the moment, giving it exactly what it requires, and it often requires a lot. His performance in The Orchard is by no means showy, but I find myself thinking a great deal about it as time passes. “Focus in the moment” is a requirement of good acting, and Baryshnikov does it.

(I should add that a friend said to me, “You went to see the greatest dancer of all time, and he spent the evening walking around like an old man?” Well, yes. Better late than never.)

I said above that I had two reasons for wanting to see The Orchard. Baryshnikov was the first. The second is that I saw from advance publicity and from reviews that The Orchard has a high-tech, multimedia aspect to it, and I wanted to see what that was like.

As a director I’m a minimalist; I’m happiest with the fewest possible costumes and properties and the least set. I may be exaggerating to say that for me, stage technology means electric lights (although I did act in a performance once that was lit entirely by candles, a story for another time). But the only multimedia performance tool I’ve ever used is Zoom.

So I wanted to learn what “multimedia” means in terms of theater, and how it can be used. Clearly The Orchard offered a chance to find out.

So, which high-tech, multimedia elements stand out in The Orchard? For starters, when the audience enters the theater it sees benches, a couple of large balls and a rocking horse (the first act takes place in a nursery), and, almost center stage, a huge white three-section machine, with a base for two long interlocked sections that when fully extended must reach at least twelve feet in the air.

The machine in The Orchard. Note the robot dog at the far right

This machine remains center stage for the entire play. It has a camera on the end of the second extension. Sometimes the “arm” reaches down so the camera is in someone’s face. Once it furnishes a tray with cups of tea. It has a personality – it will occasionally seem to favor one character rather than another. Sometimes it just sits there.

I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure what the machine reminded me of. A dentist’s drill . . . a Storm Trooper in a Star Wars . . . the Pixar Animation Studios lamp . . . a Martian . . . a modern sculpture . . . a dinosaur . . . .

You will not need to be told that Chekhov (1860-1904) did not envision such a machine, nor does the play as he wrote it call for it. He probably also would be startled at the “scrim,” an opaque stage-sized screen that when lit from behind can display elements of a scene. This particular scrim stretches between the stage and the audience, so when projections appear on it, the effect is much like a 3-D movie.

Frequently the scrim shows cherry tree leaves floating down to earth. (At least I think so. I spent nearly the entire performance thinking the leaves represented snow – actually, most of the time, a blizzard. I found this extremely confusing.) The entire stage floor is also covered with paper “blossoms.” This is symbolism; a nursery floor almost certainly would not be covered with cherry blossoms, no matter how big the orchard was.

Usually leaves fill the scrim, but in one scene (the most effective use of the device) the planets and the solar system appear, looking quite beautiful. Sometimes computer messages appear on the screen. Sometimes it shows dialogue from the play, sometimes lines the actors are speaking, occasionally lines from a different translation. Act-change information is also projected.

There is a dog in the play; it is portrayed by a robot. A tiny model of the house has lights in its windows; later they go out, showing that the house will be emptied. The model is passed around among the characters. Cameras (both on the machine and somewhere in front) capture a live simulcast of the performance, and sometimes show the in-house audience what the remote audience is seeing.

How does Chekhov’s play fare with all these distractions? – because they are distractions, if the play is what interests you, or that’s how they struck me. I have the impression of a tiny, mostly decent production of the play, surrounded by a battery of relentless technical effects. What is the production trying to achieve with this approach?

In attempting to answer this question, I don’t want to simply reject the production, make fun of it, or use it for a series of comic riffs (although the temptation is strong). A lot of gifted people worked on The Orchard, and they must have believed their approach was worthwhile. Was it?

Some things worked well. A deaf actor, John McGinty, was cast as Trofimov, the dreamer of a new and better world, and he signs his impassioned speech about the destruction of the present world and the coming of a future one to Juliet Brett’s Anya, who completely misunderstands what he’s saying and believes he’s talking about his love for her.

The most effective scene of all, when Lopakhin tries to find words to propose, is simple and straightforward, with no technical effects at all.

To my mind, a great deal of what went on did not serve the play at all, and it seems to me that serving the play is what a production of a play should do. But I’ve tried to think of justifications. The most obvious is that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.

But either this supposition is incorrect, or it was poorly carried out, because for me at least it was difficult to find the play that’s hiding behind the tech, and, besides, The Cherry Orchard is not a play that needs a lot of illuminating. It’s clear in theme and in characterization, there’s nothing difficult to understand in the story, and it’s hard to imagine an audience that needed a vast array of technical tools to make sense of it.

Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand. For that matter, is there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit? For some reason directors seem terrified that their plays will seem obscure.

I have already mentioned that Chekhov’s first scene takes place in a nursery. That’s not an accident – Chekhov is underlining from the beginning the family’s infantile nature when it comes to understanding business, and in many cases themselves as well. Nothing much of that carries over into The Orchard except a moment when a character is riding the hobbyhorse. Perhaps Chekhov should be allowed to do his work?

If all the special effects were meant to illuminate the play, they skipped important plot points. For example, the family has opportunities to save its house, but lets those opportunities fly away; it can’t concentrate on them. Why not? The director must make sure the answer to that question gets through to the audience. The Orchard doesn’t try.

But perhaps the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were “something special.” Perhaps, but I doubt that that’s a general feeling. How many people (besides me) want to see a play because of its technical effects, rather than because of the play itself? (Do tech-heads make up a large segment of any theater audience?)

Might we suppose, then, that the purpose of all the tech is to get audiences to use their imaginations? If so, I believe the result is actually the opposite. I felt no opportunity to use my imagination during The Orchard, because I was so busy looking everywhere, trying to see what else there was to see, feeling certain I’d missed something (as I frequently found I had), and being battered by one “effect” after another.

Surely there’s a difference between telling a story, and hitting the audience over the head with it.

Will the play draw more people because seeing it is like being inside a computer? The answer ought to be “no,” but I’m not sure, or rather, I’m not sure the show’s creative team didn’t think so. There’s a general assumption right now that “everybody” loves computers, that “everybody” has smartphones, that “everyone” knows all the features of their devices and wants to be up to date.

Then, perhaps, does The Orchard want to alert us that high tech is the future? Is it saying, “Get used to it – this is what theater will be like from now on”? Maybe – but I have a feeling that this blitz of technology is already a cliché. Maya Phillips’ review of Hamlet certainly suggests that’s the case, referring, in the passage quoted above, to “the inessential, and by now, highly unoriginal, incorporation of high tech.”

Surely there’s no question that high-tech multimedia effects can enhance a play, particularly when used to define and depict a space. We’ve known that at least since the efforts of James Hull Miller (1916-2007) to get theaters to use projections that there’s really no limit to what a stage setting can be. Beyond that, though, what are we accomplishing by piling technology on top of a play?

Reviews of The Orchard made many of these points. Laura Collins-Hughes, in The New York Times (16 June 2022) wrote that “the creators of this production are in thrall to technological possibilities they have yet to grasp expertly.” Examples of this when I saw the show were occasional tiny stutters in the projections, which called even more undesired attention to them.

Jonathan Mandell, in New York Theater (16 June 2022), says that “Considered individually, Golyak’s directorial choices struck me as fresh, if not always straightforward, but taken together they felt at odds with one another — a series of touches that become distractions.  I was impressed by the stage production, but I wasn’t always engaged with it. “

Mandell greatly preferred the online version of the show, which includes a quick look at the theater, Baryshnikov appearing as Chekhov, and a question-and-answer period in which some production choices apparently are explained (justified?).

I didn’t watch the online version, although it sounds worthwhile, because as long as live theater is an option, I prefer it. I began the COVID shutdown watching a great deal of theater online (and producing some), and eventually became seriously tired of it.

Zachary Stewart, in TheaterMania (16 June 2022), is excited about the show’s technology, but he reviews the online, not the in-person, version of the production. Stewart says the production offers “the next step in live theater,” an idea about which people, I would say, will have to make up their own minds. Is a barrage of technology (I’m putting it unfairly, of course) the “next step” in theater, and if so, is that a good thing?

The director Igor Golyak’s biography on The Orchard’s website says he is “a global leader in the virtual theater movement.” Is it possible then that the live performance I saw was for those who are left behind in the “movement” – those of us too primitive to take advantage of online technologies?

Were we in the theater in fact basically seeing a studio production, meant to be viewed remotely? (In that case, why were we sold tickets?)

One more possibility occurs to me as a justification for The Orchard’s approach. In one short but powerful scene, Ilia Volok  portrays a Passerby as a belligerent and frightening soldier or ex-soldier, in a convincing demonstration of the old saying that “There are no small roles, only small actors.” Volok is large – at least in my recollection – and downright terrifying in the scene, bellowing at the actors frozen with terror around the base of the machine.

Both Volok and Igor Golyak, the director, are from Ukraine, now deep in a grisly war with Russia. Is it possible that The Orchard demonstrates that a production can be essentially an embodiment of a director’s personal feelings, applied to a more or less appropriate script? Is the wild world of The Orchard a theatrical image of the horrors that many in the Ukraine – or elsewhere – are facing right now?

My own basic assumption is that everything in a performance should serve the play. Perhaps Golyak would say that in The Orchard, everything does – because the lives of both the characters in the play, and our own lives, are lives of chaos, brutality, and danger. If we say, “My life’s not like that,” perhaps Golyak challenges us to look deeper.

Does this rationale satisfy? It only occurred to me days after seeing the play. Would it be possible for a production to express the same feelings without all the technology . . . is it appropriate, does it “work,” to represent chaos in a chaotic way? Or do the rest of us have to adjust because that’s the way things are going to be?

And I did get to see Baryshnikov.

[In my afterword, I’m going to focus on one aspect of Kirk’s analysis.  My guest-blogger asserts, “Numerous productions these days seem to feel the audience needs a lot of guidance, resulting in their spelling out things in plays that aren’t that difficult to understand.”  He follows this statement by suggesting that “the thinking was that few people want to see the plain old Cherry Orchard, and that it might have a bigger draw if it were ‘something special.’”

[This rumination put me in mind of an essay by theater critic, writer, and educator Robert Brustein (b. 1927), “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” in the New York Times of 6 November 1988 (republished on ROT on 10 March 2011 (Rick On Theater: “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?”). 

[I wrote on that article before I republished it on my blog; my interpretive post was “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage (18 September 2009; Rick On Theater: Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage; originally written on 11 and 19 November 1988), and I’ve invoked Brustein’s essay numerous times in discussing various performances.

[I won’t recap Brustein’s essay or my examination of it, but I want to point out that both he and I talk about the very phenomenon that Kirk addresses in “The Orchard”: In Brustein’s words, “the reinterpretation or ‘deconstruction’ of celebrated classical plays.”  For ROTters who wish to see what Brustein and I actually wrote, I’ve provided the links to both posts.  The Times article is also posted on the paper’s website at STAGE VIEW; Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip? - The New York Times (nytimes.com), as well as through many libraries if they subscribe to ProQuest newspaper databases.)

[What Kirk means by “something special” in connection with stage productions is what he described in an earlier post, “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” (25 June 2019), as “radical notions about how to stage a play—sometimes in ways undreamed of by their authors.” In that article, Kirk called this the “Bright Idea,” a term he attributed to theater critic, scholar, and editor Eric Bentley (1916-2020).

[Kirk’s description of the Bright Idea production sounds exactly like what the department tech director at Rutgers when I was in the MFA acting program there referred to as ”Hamlet on roller skates”!  Bentley introduced the term “Bright Idea” in a 1952 essay from the New Republic, “I Have a Bright Idea” (reprinted in What Is Theatre?), and defined it thus:

A Bright Idea is an invalid idea which has more appeal to the semi-literate mind than a valid one . . . .  It is a thought which can’t bear thinking about; but which is all the more influential on that  account; it surprises or reassures, it flatters or inflames; if it cannot earn the simple epithet “true” it frequently receives the more characteristically modern eulogy “intriguing” or at least “interesting.”  At the very worst it is praised as “cute.”

[Neither Brustein nor I was writing specifically about adding technology to a performance text, but the implication is the same.  The justification for doing it, in Kirk’s view, is “that the creative team believed the technical effects would shed light on the play, perhaps making it clearer to the audience.”  I said “that some directors of classic plays distrust modern audiences so much that they feel they have to [enhance the play] to make it comprehensible to us.”

[In another post, a report on a production of Amadeus I’d seen, I applauded the director for a statement he made in the program: “The older I get, the less interested I am in saying something than I am in letting the play speak for itself and in letting the audience take what it will from the experience.”  I congratulated and thanked him because he “showed me that he trusts his audience to see what is going on.”

[Should a play present something that’s a little “difficult to understand,” Kirk asks “[I]s there anything wrong with an audience needing to stretch itself a bit?”  In an Off-Off-Broadway staging of Macbeth I saw, the director had a point to make, and he carried it off with cleverness, a modicum of subtlety, and no glaring spotlights.  I’d had to figure it out myself.  I reported: “The director had a message for me, and I got it.  And he never needed to explain it to me.”

[For me, then, the answer to Kirk’s query is ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with the audience stretching itself a little.’  Indeed, I summed up my Macbeth experience by asserting, “This may have required a little astuteness, but it wasn’t really all that hard.  It was also fun, and gave me a sense of accomplishment.”

[As Kirk states, “everything in a performance should serve the play.”  A Bright Idea, as Bentley and Kirk use the phrase—and Brustein implies in his discussion of directors who needlessly “enhance” their productions of classic plays—doesn’t do that.  It serves the director’s ego and sense of superiority (because he can understand the play while we spectators can’t).

[Perhaps these sentiments are why Bentley, who’d turned down an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a symposium on directing, wrote in a couple of letters to the organizer’s president in 1986 that “I don’t believe in a Director’s Theatre,” and threatened to “remove” directors from the theater.

[He ended his correspondence by asserting:

A constant irritant is the Nutty Production.  You set a story in another time and another place—the more inappropriate, the better.  That is how to make your name as a brilliant young director.

[If you replace ‘resetting the play’ with ‘inserting elaborate technology,’ you have the same issue with which Kirk takes exception in “The Orchard.”  QED.]

"Broadway's Dirty Secret: How to Turn Costumes From Riches to Rags"

by Erik Piepenburg 

[From time to time, I post articles on Rick On Theater that illuminate work in the theater about which most theatergoers don’t know.  In the past, I’ve republished articles on stage managers (30 January 2017), dance captains (6 May 2020), wig designers (30 June 2014), and whole series on arts administration (2, 5, 8, 11, 14, and 17 December 2020) and sound design (25, 28, and 31 March, and 3, 6, and 9 April 2021). 

[Erik Piepenburg’s article below, from the New York Times of 18 August 2016, is another in this occasional series, focusing on costume designing.  You’ll see, however, that its emphasis isn’t so much on the conception of the garments the actors wear on stage, but on one aspect of the costume process: distressing. 

[Distressing, says Piepenburg, is making “costumes look beautifully bad” or, to be more precise, making them “look as if they’d been dragged through the mud or bloodied in a fight.”  This is a very particular skill, and you’ll meet Hochi Asiatico, known, appropriately enough, as a “distressor,” the artist who accomplishes this effect.]

Hochi Asiatico gives Broadway costumes the appearance of having a long (and soiled) history. Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

The nicest thing you can say to Hochi Asiatico is that his work looks like hell. 

That’s because Mr. Asiatico is one of a small number of Broadway distressors, artisans who make costumes look beautifully bad. In the play “Eclipsed,” he turned a “Rugrats” T-shirt, worn by Lupita Nyong’o, into a sweaty rag that looked as if it had spent weeks forsaken in Liberia, where the play is set. Clint Ramos, who won a Tony Award for his “Eclipsed” costume design, said that Mr. Asiatico created “a history for a garment” that came across onstage as “organic and inherent.” 

                                                    

Mr. Asiatico turned the “Rugrats” T-shirt worn by Lupita Nyong’o in “Eclipsed” into a shirt that looked as if it had been worn for weeks. 

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times 

“In his mind, he can picture how the character goes through his or her day,” Mr. Ramos said. “He has a relationship to the clothing and how it interacts with the environment in a physical way. It informs everything.” 

Mr. Asiatico does more than make clothes look as if they’d been dragged through the mud or bloodied in a fight. He’s mostly a costume painter, whose brush strokes can be seen on the unitards in the Broadway revival of “Cats.” In “The Color Purple,” his painting and silk-screening add elegance to the kimono worn by the actress Heather Headley.

Hiring Mr. Asiatico, who also designs costumes, isn’t cheap. The cost can range from $3,000 to $140,000 per production. Perfectly ragged clothing doesn’t just come off the rack.

“Producers say, ‘There’s no fabric out there that can do the part?’” said Mr. Asiatico, who has been in the business for some 22 years. “But costume designers know that what I’m going to give adds finesse to the show.”

Distressing for the stage requires exaggerated painting and destruction techniques, such that color, shadows and “damage” can be read under the lights and from a distance. Recently, Mr. Asiatico added subtle variations of “blood” and “sweat” to costumes in the revival of “The Crucible,” and made uniforms in the musical “Doctor Zhivago” look as if they had gotten wet from fresh snow.

The New York Times recently asked Mr. Asiatico to modify some of his techniques to turn a jean jacket into a wearable, distressed, chic-looking garment that anyone can make. Here, in four relatively easy steps, is Mr. Asiatico’s guide to D.I.Y. distressing.

Step No. 1: Shred

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

Distressing a garment requires a combination of washing (to break down the fabric), painting and working it over with tools, like scissors and sandpaper. Mr. Asiatico begins with a shredder, a hand-held, spiky comb that looks like a torture chamber device. In short, quick strokes, he breaks down the fibers, pulls down the shape and trims the edges, giving the garment the appearance of everyday wear.

“You don’t want it to look fake,” Mr. Asiatico said. “It has to look lived in.”

It’s a workout to distress a fabric as tough as denim, but the result can be almost delicately soft. And expensive-looking, like “Ralph Lauren, what you’d find in a vintage store,” Mr. Asiatico said.

Step No. 2: Paint

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

After shredding, Mr. Asiatico applies layers of paint, usually with an airbrush. Here, he uses a spray bottle that can accommodate attachable jars, each with different colors of thinned-down, Setasilk paint (about 25 percent paint and 75 percent water). He applies thin layers of gold, brown and black on the chest and arms, spraying more heavily around the collar and the sides, “where the garment tends to get more of the dirt.” He then uses a small brush to apply black low lights, or shadows, on the sides of the denim. This “blocking” technique creates depth and gives the garment dimension.

Step No. 3: Dry

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

After he paints the garment, Mr. Asiatico uses a hair dryer to make the paint permanent. (For Broadway, the costumes are usually heat-set in a clothes dryer.) When dried, the paint will appear on the garment in a lighter shade. And it’s not going anywhere.

“If you don’t heat set, you can wash and remove the paint,” Mr. Asiatico said. “It’s hard to remove paint when it’s dry.”

After drying, he adds more accents of paint here and there, and dries those areas again.

Step No. 4: Sand

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

After the paint is dried, Mr. Asiatico sandpapers parts of the jacket, a technique that returns highlights to the garment by forcing the paint into the fabric. “It brings back life into the garment,” he said. “It was becoming too painted. Now it has shadows and light.” Mr. Asiatico does the sanding on a dress form, which helps pull down the garment and naturally distresses the denim. (It can also be done on a table.) He also cuts off some excess threads on the hem. The finished look is about a six on a distressing scale of one to 10.

“For the theater, they would buy a jean jacket that costs $30 and charge me a couple hundred to do this,” he said. “A full jacket for a Broadway show would take probably four hours. We did this in about 90 minutes.”

The original denim jacket, left, and the finished version, completed by Mr. Asiatico in about 90 minutes. Photographs by Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

Ming Cho Lee (1930-2020)

[During his career, which spanned seven decades, scenographer Ming Cho Lee was considered one of the leading set designers in the United States.  My awareness of his work came at the time of Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (1982, plus many revisions in later years); Lee designed the set for Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage production of Execution (10 May-16 June 1983) which then-Associate Producing Director Douglas C. Wager staged.  My parents saw that show and were so enthusiastic that when it came to New York City, I went to see it as well.

[Mann reused Lee’s set design for her own staging of Execution at the Guthrie Theatre, which premièred in Minneapolis in October 1985.  The producers of the Broadway mounting of Execution bought the design for Lee’s Arena set and rebuilt it at the Virginia Theater for the production I saw, also directed by the playwright (13-22 March 1986).

[I was very taken with the entire mise-en-scène and when I did research on the play and its several productions in the late 1980s.  Lee’s set, used in three separate productions, figured prominently in my work at that time.

[Lee had been associated with Arena for 31 years during his career, from 1967 to 1998; he created 21 set designs for the Washington rep company,  I almost certainly saw examples of his work before Execution, though I wasn’t aware of it.  The first set which I knew was his work was Broadway’s K2—but I never saw that production.  Lee won a 1983 Tony for his design of a snow-covered mountainside, originally designed for Arena’s 1982 première of the play

[After Execution of Justice, I became very aware of Ming Cho Lee’s name and work, which was almost always astonishing.  His death at 90 last October is worthy of noting.].

“MING CHO LEE, DESIGNER, DIES AT 90; ALL THE WORLD WAS WOWED BY HIS STAGES”

by Neil Genzlinger 

[The obituary below was printed in the New York Times of 28 November 2020 (sec. B [“Sports Wednesday”]: 10), but was posted  online as “Ming Cho Lee, Fabled Set Designer, Is Dead at 90” on 26 October at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/theater/ming-cho-lee-dead.html.]

His work in theater, dance and opera helped redefine American stage design.

Ming Cho Lee, an innovative and influential designer who created sets for hundreds of plays, dance works and operas, and whose ideas continue to influence the field, died on Friday [23 October] at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His son Richard confirmed the death.

Mr. Lee, emeritus professor at the Yale School of Drama, was a Tony Award winner for the 1983 play “K2,” about two climbers scaling that titular Himalayan peak, for which he put a huge, icy, Styrofoam-and-wood mountain onstage at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on Broadway.

“The very fact that the Atkinson’s curtain goes all the way up as the evening begins creates its own stir of excitement,” Walter Kerr wrote of the production in The New York Times, “almost before we’ve been able to take in the full, ravaged splendor of designer Ming Cho Lee’s pitted pillar of crystal. We are so accustomed to curtains that welcome us by crawling halfway up the arch and then halting, with the emptiness above cut off by an artificial ceiling, that the curtain’s failure to stop midway is startling.”

If his “K2” set was realistic in the extreme — one actor had to scale it with spiked boots and pickax — many of Mr. Lee’s other creations went the other direction, toward minimalism. He was principal designer for Joseph Papp early in the life of the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park, and he created sets for leading dance and opera companies as well, introducing new materials and new ways to envision a work that moved beyond the literalism of earlier times.

“In the 1960s and ’70s Lee radically and almost single-handedly transformed the American approach to stage design,” Arnold Aronson, professor emeritus at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and author of the 2014 book “Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design,” said by email, “particularly through his work at the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York City Opera and Arena Stage in Washington.”

Professor Aronson said Mr. Lee had woven together a variety of influences — his training in Chinese watercolor painting, for instance, and his knowledge of German opera — to “forge a new American scenic vocabulary,” one characterized by a more vertical approach to stage space, a use of pipe work or wooden scaffolding, emblematic elements, collage, rough textures and new or unusual industrial materials.

Mr. Lee’s impact in theaters was matched by his impact in the classroom. He taught at Yale from 1969 to 2017, serving as chairman or co-chairman of the design department for much of that time, and many of his students went on to prominent careers in the field.

Mr. Lee thought a good designer should work in multiple forms, though he had a particular fondness for dance.

“Dance demands the purest kind of designing,” he told The Times in 1975, “because you’re dealing with the abstract essence of a dramatic statement, which I express either in sculpture or painting. There are no hours of dealing with props or cigarettes or where the ice box should go, as you must with a play.

“Next to dance, I enjoy designing opera and Shakespeare, which also take design away from the literal situation. I’m very bad on props. I don’t like shopping around for them. That’s why my Broadway career has never been very strong.”

The comment was characteristically self-deprecating; at the time he made it, he already had more than 20 Broadway credits as designer or assistant designer, and he would add another 10 by the end of his career. In 2013 he received another Tony Award, for lifetime achievement.

“Though postmodern approaches to design, particularly in opera, moved beyond Lee’s aesthetic,” Professor Aronson said, “they would not have been possible without the revolution he inspired in the 1960s and ’70s.”

Ming Cho Lee was born on Oct. 3, 1930, in Shanghai to Lee Tsu Fa and Tang Ing. His father was general agent in the Far East for insurance companies, including what was then Occidental Life, and for a time Mr. Lee thought that that was probably his future as well. But then he became enamored of Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movies, which were available in China at the time.

“One day my uncle heard me listening to their records and said: ‘They’re no good. You should listen to this guy,’” he told The Times in 1967. “He gave me some records, and it was Caruso. Then he gave me some more Italian opera records, and pretty soon I knew I couldn’t go into insurance.”

His parents divorced, and he stayed with his father, who moved his business to British-ruled Hong Kong with the rise of Communism in China. In 1949 Mr. Lee went to the United States for college, and stayed.

“I essentially became a refugee because I had no place to go back to,” he told The Washington Post in 2001. “Hong Kong at that time was not an easy place to get back in.”

He enrolled at Occidental College in Los Angeles, but his English was still imperfect, giving him trouble in lecture classes. So, having been painting since he was a young teenager, he enrolled in “every drawing class I could get my hands on,” he told The Times in 2014.

“I would get A’s,” he said, “which balanced the D’s I got in freshman English. They saved my life.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1953 at Occidental and a brief stay in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, he moved to New York in 1954 and became an assistant to Jo Mielziner, one of the most prolific set designers in Broadway history. Many of Mr. Lee’s early Broadway credits were as Mr. Mielziner’s assistant. He also worked with Boris Aronson, another top stage designer (no relation to Professor Aronson).

Mr. Lee was principal designer for Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival from 1962 to 1973. His early work was done before body microphones replaced stationary ones, which meant that, as innovative as his designs for Papp sometimes were, they started with a very mundane consideration.

“In designing for Shakespeare in the Park,” he once said, “the first thing you do is figure out where to put the microphones. It was all very primitive. All the staging was controlled by where you are in relation to the mikes.”

A particularly striking effort from that period was his set for the 1964 production of Sophocles’ “Electra” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park: three stone sculptural walls on a metal framework. It was, he told The Times in 2014, his first set with “a completely nonliteral abstract design, though at the same time it was real, an emblem, an icon.”

“It wasn’t an illustration of a place,” he added, “it was the pure expression of the play.”

Among his other projects for Papp was the original staging of “Hair” at the Public Theater in 1967. In 1974 he designed his first set for the Metropolitan Opera, a production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.” He designed more than 20 productions for Arena Stage and also for Martha Graham and other leading choreographers.

“Certain words keep reappearing in reviews of Lee’s sets — minimal, terse, severe, sparse, skeletal, suggestive,” The Times wrote in 1975. “For Martha Graham’s ballet ‘The Witch of Endor,’ he used only two thrones and a striking piece of welded metal; for another Graham work, a welded clump of metallic trees.”

Mr. Lee’s acclaimed Broadway career had a paradoxical element to it: A number of the shows he designed for were flops. “K2,” by Patrick Meyers, closed after just 85 performances. Several lasted just days, the sets having often been the best part of a given production.

“The most distinguished aspect of ‘Here’s Where I Belong,’ the new musical that opened at the Billy Rose Theater last night, is the scenery by Ming Cho Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in reviewing that one-day wonder for The Times in 1968. “But no one ever walked out of a theater humming the scenery.”

In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Lee is survived by his wife, Elizabeth (Rapport) Lee, whom he married in 1958; two other sons, Christopher and David; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Lee, a 2002 recipient of the National Medal of Arts, tended to greet the many accolades that came his way with modesty. Accepting his Tony Award for “K2” in 1983, he immediately shifted the praise to his lighting designer.

“Without Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting,” he said of his mountainous set, “it’s just going to be a large chunk of Styrofoam.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film, and theater critic.] 

*  *  *  *
“HOW MING CHO LEE TAUGHT ME TO SEE”
by Susan Hilferty 

[The following article, a personal remembrance by fellow theater designer Susan Hilferty, ran on the American Theatre website, posted on 14 November 2020 at https://www.americantheatre.org/2020/11/04/how-ming-cho-lee-taught-me-to-see/.]

The great designer and teacher’s attention was intense and clarifying, bringing us closer to the heart of our work and closer together in community.

Ming Cho Lee: Teacher. Mentor. Friend.

Imagine a sheet of canary yellow tracing paper spread over your work, a No. 2 pencil gently but confidently finding the heartbeat of the design underneath and bringing the intention into focus. It is an image I hold dear as I remember the passion, the love, and the drive of my teacher, Ming Cho Lee.

I can see his hand smoothing the yellow trace on top of my drawing, and I can hear his words guiding his pencil and my eyes as he helps refocus the design beneath. There are so many lessons from that image, even in the choice of materials. The yellow trace torn from a roll is humble, unlike an expensive piece of watercolor paper, which seems to question whether the mark you make is “worth” it. The pencil is quotidian; it makes it easy to toss a sketch aside, tear off another piece of trace, and sketch new thoughts inspired by the first.

The most important lesson, however, was that the trace protected the original design. Ming did not draw on or over my drawing. He was protective. He meant to guide, not to force a change. Deep in his method of teaching was the inspiration that the design for a set is constantly unfolding and that the designer needs to be available to sketch quickly—in model or on a piece of paper—to allow the full idea to be revealed at the end of the process. Ming’s eyes had razor-sharp focus as he weighed scale, proportion, and value in what he was looking at, while also tightening up the point of view of this student designer. He helped me see.

Watching Ming go into action as he was about to critique someone’s design felt like watching a great hunting dog pick up a scent. I saw him work this way hundreds of times, whether it was in the classroom or at the “Clambake,” the annual gathering of graduating MFA designers from across the country. Ming was equally intense from start to finish. Sometimes, as he shifted to your work after exhaustively looking at another designer’s, it felt that you were the prey; but then he would look you in the eye and show his gentle nature and you would breathe. Then his eyes would move to the design in front of him, hungry to leap into a new text and the evolving sketches and model.

The posture was always the same: Eyes at just the right height to see the model from the audience’s eye level. Hands itching to get into the cardboard proscenium so that he could shift something ever so slightly that in full scale might only be a matter of inches, but Ming knew it could bring the whole design into balance. His thirst for looking at theatre work was insatiable. He would stay deeply focused long after other guests or teachers had tired. I realize that it was fuel for him. Oxygen perhaps. Being on the receiving end of a Ming critique was exhausting; sometimes I wasn’t sure I would survive it. So intense. So focused. So much to learn!

Words I would use to describe Ming Cho Lee: Proud. Passionate. Political. He was uncompromising. He loved the challenge and problem-solving of design, and like a chess master was always thrilled with a “beautiful” solution. My favorite moments of observing Ming during a critique were when he would exclaim, “Why didn’t I think of that!” He wasn’t competitive with his students, but he was competitive with himself.

I got my first set design job out of school because of Ming’s “Why didn’t I think of that” response to my thesis design for Uncle Vanya. He was speaking at a TCG conference, where he, in his Ming way, described his excitement about the fact that design is ever-changing and responsive to the times. As an example, he mentioned that a student of his had designed a classic play, Uncle Vanya, in a way he hadn’t envisioned before. An artistic director reached out to him to ask the designer’s name. Ming was so generous that way; I was always grateful for that generosity.

Above all, a breakthrough was the ultimate reward that could come out of a session with Ming. He would prod, cajole, and sometimes demand that you focus your time, energy, and eye to keep searching for the heart of your design. And then, sometimes, a miracle would occur! It was like the moment that the clouds part and the sun bursts through and everything is illuminated. We did learn to see our own work. We did learn to challenge ourselves and our colleagues. Ming helped us to look and to really see.

There is a huge community of theatre artists who have been brought together by Ming and his wife Betsy’s energy. It went way beyond the Clambake. It was in his spirit to reach out and connect us as fellow-minded artists who would then join together and learn from each other. It is that spirit that makes me committed to teaching, to continue to expand the circle and embrace new generations of designers and theatre artists. Ming Cho Lee was a brilliant designer, but it is this commitment to our community that I think of as his legacy. It is a beautiful legacy, and one we must all try to uphold.

[Susan Hilferty is an American set and costume designer for theatre, opera, and film.] 

*  *  *  *
“‘MING CHO LEE: A LIFE IN DESIGN’ CELEBRATES THE DESIGNER’S WORK”
by Arnold Aronson 

[Author Arnold Aronson’s article about his book on Lee’s designs, published by the Theatre Communications Group in 2014, was part of the “Production Notebook” feature of American Theatre, published in issue 31.8 (October 2014):40-45; online, the article was posted at https://www.americantheatre.org/2014/09/19/designs-of-ming-cho-lee-honored-in-ming-cho-lee-a-life-in-design/ on 19 September. ]

A retrospective, with images, on the work of set designer Ming Cho Lee.

Rather than delving into the design of a single production, this month’s Production Notebook takes its cue from the issue’s theme—“The Designer’s Eye”—and expands to celebrate the artistry of one of the most important American designers of the 20th century, Ming Cho Lee. On the eve of TCG Books’ publication this month of Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design, theatre historian Arnold Aronson’s richly detailed exploration of Lee’s unprecedented career, we bring you a sampler of the work Lee created for five flagship American companies.

Unlike many of the designers he trained and mentored, Lee didn’t make his mark on Broadway. Instead, it was through some 300 productions of theatre, opera and dance at venues across the country that he reshaped the aesthetics of American scenic design. Images for the book were chosen personally by Lee from thousands of photos, drawing, sketches, renderings and models, all carefully cataloged by Lee’s wife and lifelong archivist, Betsy. The following images and excerpts highlight Lee’s designs for five theatres where he worked extensively.

NEW YORK SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL

What was happening at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival would have a profound impact on American theatre, and it was at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park that American scenography was radically transformed by the work of Ming Cho Lee. There are slightly varying accounts of what led Papp to call Lee. Lee thinks that the company manager, Hilmar Sallee, may have recommended him. Lee had actually interviewed with Papp once before, but at that point he had no Shakespeare experience and very little in his portfolio that was relevant. Meanwhile, director Gerald Freedman believes that he urged Papp to see Lee. Based on the recommendation of his Northwestern University schoolmate Omar Paxson, Freedman had met with Lee several years earlier when he was looking for a designer for an Off-Broadway revival of On the Town. “It soon was apparent,” Freedman recalls, “that Ming wasn’t of that sensibility. But his portfolio was so outstanding, so gorgeous, I still talk about it, and I said, ‘We’re going to work together.’ I introduced him to Joe Papp, which then led to our long collaboration there.” Whatever the impetus for the call, Papp was obviously impressed by this second encounter. Lee remembers Papp ending the interview with, “All right, you sound pretty good. Go for it!”

The boxes around the front of the stage hid the floor microphones, which were essential because of the theatre’s poor acoustics (and long before the age of body mikes).

There were also microphones hidden within the scenic units. “In designing for Shakespeare in the Park,” notes Lee, “the first thing you do is figure out where to put the microphones. It was all very primitive. All the staging was controlled by where you are in relation to the mikes.”

THE ARENA STAGE

Lee first learned about Arena Stage through his former assistant Karl Eigsti, who was designing there, and the Washington, D.C. theatre intrigued him. But in 1967 Lee never anticipated that Arena would become a second home where he would ultimately design a total of 21 productions through 1998. Part of the appeal was the space itself. The theatre took its name from the stage configuration it used, a theatre-in-the-round, also known as an arena stage. Despite the name, Arena’s stage was not circular but rectangular, surrounded on four sides by steeply banked seating risers—founding artistic director Zelda Fichandler referred to it as a gladiator ring. Designing for the round imposes peculiar demands. It is not possible, for instance, to have standard walls because they block sightlines for some part of the audience; entrances are generally made through the vomitories, passageways to the stage from under the seats. The most important scenic element tends to be the floor. At the same time, the stage must be envisioned as a cube with the vertical space crucial for establishing the stage as a distinct locale within the auditorium. Lee was eager to take on such a challenge.

Lee seemed to have an instinctive feel for the space. “I have a real understanding of working in a theatre where the audience and performers are under one roof,” he observes. “I always thought in terms of floor and scenic elements and icons. When you approached things at Arena Stage with the greatest of simplicity, the play being in the middle of the audience, and you were not distracted by pictures, it could be so potent, you can’t imagine.”

THE MARK TAPER FORUM

The Mark Taper Forum, opened in 1967, is a circular building in the midst of the rectangular campus of Los Angeles’s Music Center, which also houses the Ahmanson. The buildings were designed by architect Welton Becket, but the theatre itself was designed by Jo Mielziner, who had also designed the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in New York. The stage is a thrust surrounded by a semicircular amphitheatre. The Taper’s founding artistic director, Gordon Davidson, says that as a director he has always been interested in the three-dimensionality of the thrust, in particular the intersection of stage and audience. “I never had to explain that to Ming,” he remarks. “He thrived on it. He was very sensitive to how the set lived within the larger place. It was one entity.”

ACTORS THEATRE OF LOUISVILLE

Former Actors Theatre of Louisville producing director Jon Jory had been familiar with Lee’s work for years. Nonetheless, he says it took a lot of nerve to call Lee, who he describes as the great American designer of the period. As always, Lee grilled the director about his ideas for the production. But Jory also describes Lee as a “remarkable dramaturg,” and the evolution of that production was, in the end, a truly collaborative process, perhaps more so than any experience either Lee or Jory had had until then. Their first conversation about the production lasted more than an hour during which time, according to Jory, they never discussed the design. It was about the play and the ideas inherent within it. “I was nervous,” Jory admits, “but he generously draws out your ideas and melds them with his own. Soon you begin to feel that you’re pretty intelligent.” Costume designer Marcia Dixcy, Jory’s wife, designed four of the six shows Lee and Jory did together. “Ming was a guiding force dramaturgically and visually on every production we worked on,” she says. “His insights into the text and in to how an audience may best perceive the text are deeply felt and vividly theatrical. Few set designers discuss character with his humanity and compassion.” “I consider myself one of Ming’s students,” Jory reflects, echoing what many of Lee’s collaborators have felt. “He disguised his classes as productions. I have no degree beyond high school, but I have a master’s degree from the University of Ming.”

SHAKESPEARE THEATRE COMPANY

Under Michael Kahn’s direction, the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. presented a repertoire of classics seldom produced in the American theatre, and among the plays Lee designed there were Mourning Becomes Electra, Peer Gynt, King John, Don Carlos and the almost unknown Lorenzaccio. The Shakespeare Theatre Company became Lee’s primary home for the remainder of his career, with six productions in the eight years before he retired. As Kahn points out, Lee’s great strength is his ability to shape space, and while his sets are rightly known for their verticality, there is usually something that cuts across the horizontal plane that restricts or transforms the space.

[Arnold Aronson is professor of theater at the Columbia University School of the Arts in New York City.  He frequently writes about scenography and contemporary theater, and his other publications include The Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011 Prague Quadrennial; Looking into the Abyss: Essays in Scenography; American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History; and American Set Design.  He has a long history with the Prague Quadrennial theater festival, serving as President of the Jury in 1991 and 1999, curator of the U.S. exhibit in 1995, and General Commissioner in 2007.]