Hyperreal Theater

 

On Friday, 18 December, last year, I spotted an obituary in the New York Times headlined “Noah Creshevsky, Composer of Complex ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75.”  I had no idea who Creshevsky was, or what in the world “‘hyperreal’ music” could be.  I couldn’t conceive of such a thing, so I read the obit and even looked the composer up. 

What intrigued me was that though I didn’t know anything about hyperreal music, I was familiar with hyperreal art and, more specifically, hyperreal theater.  I couldn’t see how music described as hyperreal could be related to art and theater made in the same style.

The truth, it turns out, is that it isn’t.  But my brief exploration of the genre led me to the notion that hyperreal theater would be a good subject for a Rick On Theater post because it’s an interesting theatrical style, it’s little known, and had a short life in the 1980s and then largely passed from the scene.  I decided to give it a go.

Let’s start with some definitions.  Since ‘Hyperrealism’ is derived from ‘Realism,’ I’ll start there.

Realism is an art movement that advocates the representation of the subject of a piece of literature or visual art without stylization.  The world depicted in the artwork seems like real life to the reader or viewer.  It’s not, however, reality, but a representation of reality by artistic means.

‘Hyperrealism’ is made up of the word ‘realism’ and the Greek prefix ‘hyper-,’ which means ‘over,’ ‘above,’ or ‘beyond.’  Note that in the literary and visual arts, as distinguished from music, the notion of exaggeration isn’t applicable (see ‘hyperreal music,’ below).

Hyperrealism is an art form that creates illusions by enhancing reality.  Hyperreal artists in the medium in which they create place added focus in their work on the visual, social, and cultural details of everyday life.

I won’t write any more about hyperreal music, but let’s describe what it is.  Noah Creshevsky, a composer and performer of electronic music, didn’t invent hyperreal music, but he coined the label.  In his 2005 essay “Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama, Superperformers and Open Palette,” Creshevsky defined the genre thus:

Hyperrealism is an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”).

The “real” sounds from “our shared environment” in his works were scraps of vocal and instrumental music, speech, outside noise, television snippets, and other bits of sound, much of it sampled or taken from recordings. 

When I pointed out the Times obit to my friend Kirk Woodward, who’s far more musically knowledgeable than I am, he listened to some of Creshevsky’s compositions and then remarked that some sounded “like intellectual Spike Jones, and I heard at least one piece which made me think of the Beatles’ ‘Revolution No. 9,’ except more musical.”

My response was that “the description of his work made me think of Leroy Anderson—maybe a precursor of hyperreal music.”  For instance, “The Typewriter,” written in 1950 and recorded in 1953, features an actual typewriter as a percussion instrument.  Other pieces use instruments, sometimes exotic ones like temple blocks and a slapstick, to recreate natural sounds like hoof beats or whip cracks, as in 1948’s “Sleigh Ride.”) 

“There’s also a little Dada in it, too,” I added; “—especially George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1923-24),” a composition for player pianos, mechanized regular pianos (16 baby grands) plus other automated instruments (4 bass drums, 1 tam-tam, 3 xylophones) and noisemakers (siren, 7 electric bells, 3 airplane propellers, fans).

The concept of hyperreal theater is based on that of hyperreal art, so I should explain the genre in visual art first.  Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are so meticulously rendered that they resemble high-resolution photographs.  In fact, Hyperrealism in painting and drawing is often equated with Photorealism.

Hyperreal theater was pioneered as a style of playwriting by California playwright Adele Edling Shank (1940-2014),  Shank was inspired by such painters as Robert Bechtle (1932-2020) and Richard Estes (b. 1932), among several other hyperreal artists.  Theatrical Hyperrealism combines an objective perspective borrowed from photorealist painters with classic dramatic values like characterization and plot. 

In an interview requested by West Coast Plays, the semi-annual publication that first published Shank’s SUNSET/SUNRISE, the dramatist told her husband, theater scholar, playwright, director, and drama professor-emeritus at University of California-San Diego Theodore Shank (b. 1929):

You and I were both interested in exploring the theatrical equivalent of the painting style of hyperrealism or photorealism.  After studying the characteristics of the painting style we discussed how they could work in the theatre.  For example, the paintings keep the viewer on the surface, there is no projection into the painting, no emotional involvement, no interpretation. 

In “Against Interpretation,” her famous 1964 essay, Susan Sontag asserts, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”  I cited this passage in my 12 June 2018 blog report on Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960, a Whitney Museum of American Art exhibit, and declared:

I have had a hard time agreeing with Sontag’s ban on interpretation for one fundamental reason: it’s not possible to experience a work of art—or nearly anything else—without finding some kind of meaning in it.  I think it’s human nature—we’re hard-wired to find meaning in what we see and experience.

So I can’t entirely accept the Shanks’s premise about plays that can’t be interpreted—or whose elements can’t be interpreted.  I still don’t think that’s possible.

Playwright Shank continued, nonetheless:

What you see is what there is.  I extended that into a theatrical style and made some basic decisions.  The focus would always be on the present moment; there would be no projection into the future and virtually no past revealed.  This meant little or no exposition.

This is a slightly disingenuous remark because of the six California Plays in the hyperreal style, several are connected narratively, so some of them do comment on the pasts or futures of others.  For example. Winterplay, though it was written later, is a prequel to SUNSET/SUNRISE and Tumbleweed follows on The Grass House (and also includes a character carried over from Sand Castles, a sequel to Stuck).  (I’ll discuss some of these plays shortly.)

Theodore Shank, who staged most of his wife’s hyperreal premières, differentiated between theatrical Realism and Hyperrealism as exemplified by the work of Adele Shank:

The theatre style called “realism” is quite different from “hyperrealism.”  Realist plays present characters behaving in a theatricalized manner which oversimplifies the work of the audience through exposition, a high degree of selectivity, and by performance techniques such as a single focus, actors facing the audience and pointing lines, etc.  All but the central action tends to be suppressed.  Actors focus on the dominant stage interest rather than on the preoccupations of their characters.  As spectators we have become so accustomed to this style in the theatre that it seems natural even though highly theatrical.  In hyperrealism the apparent lack of selection and the abundance of detail is actually more natural, but because it is unusual in the theatre, the performances seem theatrical.

(I take exception to Shank’s characterization of the acting in Realism; what he describes above is not in line with my training or my practice.  Indeed, all the teachers I worked with emphasized the opposite techniques of those Shank describes.  Shank’s general conclusions are not wrong, however, so the comparison generally holds.)

All of Adele Shank’s hyperreal plays—she wrote in other styles as well—construct portraits of the American dream, or rather the difference between the promise of that dream and the dissatisfaction of characters who’ve achieved it.  The Grass House, which I discuss a little more in a bit, looks at what one theater’s literary adviser called “a spoiled Eden.”

Shank’s hyperreal plays microscopically examine how individuals relate to one another.  The style requires a script of simple language that’s interesting, but free of artful ambiguities, heavy symbolism, or other distractions that might keep the audience attending to presentation (language) rather than underlying truth (human relationships). 

In terms of plot, playwright Shank meant the organization of the incidents of the action, not the progress of a storyline.  While her hyperreal plays do have narrative elements, they’re not examinations of a protagonist’s destiny, but rather explorations of a condition.

Further, the dramatist kept the plots very simple,  “A complex plot,” said Adele Shank, “creates too much suspense.  It involves the audience too deeply in the fictional world, so they hang on what might happen rather than being focused on the present moment.”

The hyperreal sets make the intended microscopic examination of the characters all the more accessible.  Even the minutest details are rendered with photographic accuracy—and everything is as real as a theater can possibly manage.  (It might remind one of David Belasco’s famous 1912 production of The Governor’s Lady for which he recreated a Childs Restaurant on stage using materials and food from the actual restaurant chain rather than conventional representative stage scenery.)

Speaking of his wife’s writing, Ted Shank wrote of the sets:

The setting was the starting point for . . . the . . . hyperreal plays.  In order for the productions to function in the hyperreal way intended it was essential to develop the setting from closely observed reality because imagination is not sufficiently detailed and is too influenced by mediated experience.

Among Adele Shank’s most prominent hyperreal works were the six California Plays that included SUNSET/SUNRISE (1979), Winterplay (1980), Stuck: A Freeway Comedy (1981), Sand Castles (1983), The Grass House (1983), and Tumbleweed (1984).  (These plays, once hard to find in print, are now published together in California Plays [South Gate, CA: NoPassport Press, 2015].)

One excellent example of Shank’s hyperreal plays is The Grass House, first presented by San Francisco’s Magic Theatre from 12 October to 4 December 1983; the director was Theodore Shank, the playwright’s husband and UCSD colleague.

Set on a marijuana farm in the California hills, The Grass House depicts Anemone preparing to marry Moon Hawk.  Present are Anemone’s mother, a “call girl” (she lives and works out of a VW bus), and her father, a municipal court judge, as well as other members of the bride’s and groom’s “families.”  As the group prepares for the ceremony, many hidden facets of their characters and histories are revealed, baring many small cracks in façades and relationships.

Shank, as in most of her work, is parodying the American dream—here the back-to-nature simplicity of rural America.  In a 1983 script evaluation, literary manager C. Lee Jenner (who was also the teacher who introduced me to Shank’s hyperreal plays) observed that Grass House “evokes an image of the pioneer spirit gone awry.”  

The idyllic myth of farm life is turned on its head: the farm is a pot farm (an illegal crop in 1983), and far from escaping the threats of modern city life the alternative lifestyle was meant to leave behind, the would-be urban refugees contend with coyotes, a fear of strangers, and the site of an ancient tragedy on their retreat.  They surround themselves with guard dogs, rifles, and bolted doors.

Most of the characters are trapped in untenable lives that only seem productive.  Only Anemone and Moon Hawk, who seem just as trapped as the others, finally show signs of being able to escape.

Like all hyperreal plays, the style of Grass House requires fastidious attention to minute detail in production and characterization. 

Adele Shank used what she called “role models” for her characters, so each of them possesses characteristics and behavior traits of actual individuals.  While the characters’ lives are different from those of the models, Shank limned “their way of speaking, their energy level, and their personality.”  Actors playing the roles have the characteristics of real-life people to work on—even if they don’t know the models.

Shank followed the same pattern with the settings, which were created from actual locations in California.  The house in SUNSET/SUNRISE (see below), for instance, was conceived from a composite of real homes in the Davis, California, neighborhood where the dramatist lived when she wrote the play.

SUNSET/SUNRISE (Shank’s first hyperreal play), premièred in February 1979 by the Dramatic Art Department of UC-Davis under the direction of Ted Shank; it was then presented in the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s New American Play Festival from 28 February to 23 March 1980. 

In the backyard of a California home, a lawn-and-pool party is getting underway.  During the course of the evening and night, cracks appear in the surface of several of the empty relationships, some temporary liaisons are made, and some realizations dawn on a number of the characters. 

Principal among these are Louise and James, whose yard is the scene of the party, and their daughter, Anne, who’s believed for some time that she’s so allergic to everything except plastic that the only way she can venture out of her room is in a gas mask and wetsuit.  Ordinarily, she stays in her room and communicates with the world through a two-way TV hook-up. 

As her parents finally make tentative overtures to reestablishing their faltering, empty relationship, Anne makes an attempt to come out of her protective shell, literally and figuratively facing the world naked.

Offering a cockeyed picture of affluent California suburbia, the dramatist is telling us that a life that doesn’t go below the surface is ultimately a lie and will destroy what remains.  It’s clear that none of the characters begins the play with a true relationship based on honesty and trust with anyone else.  Most are engaged in duplicitous affairs with others at the party—some of which affairs are, in themselves, lies. 

One character, Josh, Louise and James’s son, lives in an old car in the backyard.  It doesn’t run and is connected to the house’s power supply by an immense extension cord—what one of my teachers called “the world’s longest umbilical cord.”  Josh won’t live with his parents, but he won’t actually move away, either.  It’s an inverted take on youthful rebellion and the vaunted California car culture.

That’s probably one of the most visible idiosyncrasies in SUNSET/SUNRISE (after Anne’s set-up), but another, less obvious one is much more intriguing.  Throughout the party, Louise incessantly feeds James cholesterol-heavy foods and drinks.  It’s never mentioned in the dialogue, but we’re witnessing a slow-motion attempted murder by cholesterol poisoning!

I think this is an extraordinary play, Hyperrealism notwithstanding, with a stimulating situation that’s both recognizably all-American, and unique.  Though the empty lives of all the characters could be seen as symbolic, it plays as reality.  The effect is startling and moving. 

The Hyperrealism of the play demands an elaborate set, which requires that all of the trappings of life—sounds, objects, language, light, and so on—be represented with absolute, precise reality on stage.  Everything that is seen on stage, including a practical barbecue, TV monitor and camera, and the general patio with furniture, must be absolutely true-to-life. 

(Shank has said that the SUNSET/SUNRISE set can be designed with the pool off stage—but if it’s part of the mise-en-scène, it must be a real pool.)

The style also affects the acting and directing.  Because of the hyperrealism of the language and conversation, there must be what Shank calls “out-of-focus” dialogue and other Robert Altman-esque touches of cinéma vérité. 

The actors and the director must construct the behavior of the characters with a clarity that will make the process as transparent as possible to the audience.  Careful attention needs to be paid to details in body language, vocal intonation, and blocking, every element that delves beneath the words to the feelings and attitudes that constitute relationships.

Stuck: A Freeway Comedy, Shank’s third hyperreal play, was arguably her most audacious—with respect to its production style, though not so much in its text.  First produced by the Magic Theatre from 7 October to 22 November 1981, the première was staged by Ted Shank. 

The premise of the plot is that on the same stretch of a California freeway that connects a suburb with a city, there is an accident resulting in a traffic jam every morning and every evening.  Over the months, some of the commuters have gotten to know one another and have developed rituals that help them cope with the frustrations and boredom of their lives.

The 12 men and women in the carpools all work for the same corporation, but they have little contact with one another except during the traffic jams.  They aren’t neighbors, and they aren’t friends.  This situation is the same for both acts and, in Ted Shank’s début staging, the cars—five for each act (with two of them in each act the same)—are facing in the opposite direction in act two than in act one.

For all intents and purposes, this is the carpoolers’ world.

In a 1982 issue of Theatre Design & Technology, Ted Shank described his production:

Adele Shank’s Hyperrealism demanded, the director asserted, “nothing short of actual cars and the appearance of a real freeway.”  The Magic Theatre staged the play in a warehouse on a pier extending into San Francisco Bay the length of two football fields (720 feet or 240 yards, including the end zones).

A special enclosure was built inside the warehouse to serve as a performance area and seating for 99 spectators sitting in three rows in each side of the performance area, designed to look like a two-lane freeway. 

The seating platforms were sharply raked “so the spectators looked down into the [performance] space at a steep angle.”  This, felt Ted Shank, “gave the spectators an unusual perspective . . . which aided in creating an increased psychic distance for the spectator somewhat akin to looking down on a street from a window in a building.”  Shank thought that this made the theatergoer more an observer than a “psychic participant.”

The ends of the freeway performance area were closed off with black drapes.  One end could be opened with pulleys so that the cars could be repositioned during intermission.  The asphalt floor of the warehouse was painted with Aquatar to make the roadway look freshly surfaced and all the details of the road were based on California Department of Transportation specs so they’d be authentic.

The specifics of the freeway set were meticulously matched to actual highway appearance, such as the yellow painted lines that demarked the shoulders which were sprinkled with glass powder to make them reflective as on actual highways.  Some materials were even purchased from the same suppliers from which Caltrans gets its road materials.

Here’s how director Shank describes the visual effects of the production; note all the atmospheric detail set designer Andy Stacklin and lighting designer Patty Ann Farrell incorporated in the concept:

The flood lights used to light the seating areas were directed toward the audience so they could not see into the unlighted performance space until the house lights went down and the stage lights came up.  Act One begins with the commuters in a morning traffic jam on their way from the suburbs to work in the city.  It is a foggy spring morning which gradually clears.  Act Two takes place the following fall during an evening traffic jam as the commuters are on their way home from work.  As the act begins the rain has just stopped.  The highway and cars are wet (having been sprayed during intermission) and the windshield wipers are on.  By the time the play ends it is dark and the only sources of light are the interior lights of the cars, a reading light in one car, and a flashlight—at the very end of the play the cars are started and the headlights and taillights are turned on.

Adele Shank wrote in a “Playwright’s Note” in the play text: “None of the cars need have engines, although it would be desirable if one car in each act could start.”  You can see where that comes into play, and in Hyperrealism, it wouldn’t do to use a recording of an engine turning over to substitute for an actual car starting in the performance area in front of the audience.

(In the Magic’s production, it seems that all the cars were operable.  Except for one, says the director, they were borrowed from him and the actors.  Spiffed up, tricked out a little for the show, and polished to a showroom sheen, they were as real as any street-worthy car in San Francisco.)

Here’s more of how that worked:

Simple effective solutions for the required sound effects were devised by Al Agius-Sinerco.  As an overture to each act and to help make the transition into the performance, two-track stereo tape recordings of cars passing on a freeway were heard going from West to East in Act One and from East to West on wet pavement in Act Two.  The two channels were fed into two Bose 800 speakers, one at each end of the performance enclosure.  At first the cars travel at highway speeds past the audience, then they slow down, gradually come to a stop with engines idling, horns honk, and engines are turned off.  At the end of each act cars are heard starting in the distance, then cars nearer are heard starting, and finally the cars on stage are started by the actors.

Ted Shank describes several other sound effects employing cassette tape recorders in each car for various purposes (along with some other audio tech such as a PA system and a siren in one car), and then he concludes:

The hyperreal setting, cars, sound, the use of car lights, and the unusual perspective from which the performance was viewed created a theatricality which led the audience to perceive the common place [sic] objects as well as the characters and events in a fresh more acute way. . . .  Having entered the unique seating area audience expectancies were aroused.  The sounds of cars passing on the freeway began, house lights dimmed, and the stage lights came up on a surprising view of a freeway with real cars stuck in a traffic jam.

According to Theodore Shank, the hyperreal painters who were Adele Shank’s models emphasized “the materialism in our culture by painting in more-than-usual objectified detail which helps keep the spectator’s focus on the surface materiality of the objects represented—often cars, storefronts, or rooms in middle-class houses.”

This, Ted Shank asserts, was also the playwright’s aim.  He explained:

As with the hyperreal painters, the accumulation of detail in our productions creates a distance which tends to keep the focus on behavior, on appearance rather than on psychology, social analysis, or emotion.  Traditionally, realism in the theatre has been used to draw the audience into a subjective relationship with the characters, their desires and predicaments.  The spectator becomes psychically absorbed into the fictional world rather than being distanced from it.  Instead of perceiving acutely the events presented, the spectator is psychically suspended awaiting what is about to happen.  In our hyperreal productions the use of accumulated detail is an attempt to create a distance which puts the spectator in the position of observer or voyeur rather than psychic participant.  In this condition each audience member is forced to focus on present events and is able to perceive them more keenly.  Spectating becomes more an act of perception than emotional involvement.  It is as if one were looking through a window watching unknown people and gradually coming to understand how they are related and why they behave as they do.  Although interested in the fictional situation, the spectator is not made to want a particular outcome because each spectator is a detached observer.

Interestingly, to my ear, this sounds positively Brechtian.  What Ted Shank is describing is an application of the Verfremdungseffekt, the distancing device Bertolt Brecht applied in his Epic Theater that’s often Anglicized as the “alienation effect” (a translation I dislike; I favor “defamiliarizing effect”).  (Of course, this is Ted Shank’s exegesis so it may be he who’s the Brechtian.)

I’ve never read that Adele Shank was specifically influenced by Brecht, but lit manager Jenner wrote that Adele Shank’s “Brechtian side is warmed with compassion and humor,” which I think is accurate.

The playwright herself observed, “There is a very distanced relationship between the spectators and the characters.  We in the audience have almost no emotional involvement with the characters.”  But she also acknowledged that “there is a recognition of the characters by the audience, not an emotional identification.”

Jenner also used another Brechtian principle to characterize Adele Shank’s Hyperrealism.  The playwright “intends her audience to ‘look at’ but not ‘feel with’ her characters,” the lit manager wrote.  “To this end,” she continued, “she manipulates various distancing devices within a generally realistic context. . . .  [A] web of realistic behavioral and contextual detail keeps audience attention  on the surface of the action.”

Another painter whom Adele Shank’s hyperreal works evoke, at least for one analyst, is David Hockney (b. 1937).  Bonnie Marranca, now the publisher and editor of PAJ (formerly the Performing Arts Journal) and a theater professor at The New School, compared SUNSET/SUNRISE to “people picnicking in a David Hockney set,” invoking “the non-explosive, past[el] shadings of Hockney,” a pop artist, photographer, and set designer for plays and operas.  He’s sometimes considered a forerunner of the Photorealists.

Ted Shank outlines several techniques his wife used in her dramaturgy to accomplish her aims, but one that especially interests me is his and Adele Shank’s approach to acting in a hyperreal play.  In part, this is because I mentioned acting earlier and in part because I trained as an actor and have taught it.  In any case, Ted Shank says his and his wife’s goal is “to increase performance detail.”

Specifically, he describes “an unconventional focus for the actors.”  This is the concentration not on the character’s “single center of interest,” but on his or her “specific interest  . . . at each moment.”  What Ted Shank is referring to here are what most actors call their objectives. 

The “single center of interest” is what Stanislavskians call their main objective or superobjective; it’s what the character wants to achieve.  For Hamlet, say, this might be “to unmask the murderer” or “to avenge my father”; for Lady Macbeth, it might be “to make my husband king.” 

(In some other acting systems, this has alternative labels: Bernard Beckerman called it the project and Aaron Frankel called it the character’s action or the main character action.  Director Harold Clurman called it the spine—both of the play and of each character.)

The “specific interest” for each moment is the individual objective for a scene or beat.  In Stanislavskian acting, these momentary objectives are derived from the main action, which is overarching.  What Ted Shank is proposing is that the actors all essentially eschew the main action and focus solely on the objectives for each scene.  This is the hyperreal detail translated into acting technique.

The rationale, according to Shank, is that because the specific interests might be different from an overall interest, this technique makes “for several simultaneous centers of interest thus creating an impression of complexity and the absence of dramatic contrivance.”

This dramaturgical technique appears in another context as well.  In conventional Western theater, conflict drives the drama; it is the engine that carries the play from the beginning to the conclusion.  There is often a protagonist and an opposing antagonist with conflicting objectives: Macbeth wants to be king of Scotland, but Macduff wants to prevent that. 

As another literary manager said in her evaluation of SUNSET/SUNRISE in 1979: “This is a play which doesn’t have strong dramatic conflict but rather a series of encounters.”  She added later that “several little dramas are evolving.”  This is certainly a product of the actors concentrating on the momentary objectives rather than a superobjective for the play as a whole.

Shank went on to provide more specifics about Hyperrealism in his wife’s plays:

The more-than-usual detail, the lack of an obviously-directed focus, and the use of simultaneous conversations and action [those Altman-esque tactics I mentioned earlier] give the audience the impression that they are discovering the details of action and setting for themselves as they do in the real world.  Because the spectator’s focus is not forcefully drawn to each detail that is seen, the details seem not to have been contrived for perception but left to chance discovery.  And because the spectators are put into a frame-of-mind for observation rather than emotional involvement, they are able to make these discoveries.

Playwright Shank had a final admonition about the scope of Hyperrealism on stage.  While some analysts have commented on what her husband characterized as “the bizarre elements” in her plays (the daughter’s communicating through a CCTV rig in SUNSET/SUNRISE), or the “non-realistic, magical elements” (the specter of that ancient catastrophe at the pot farm in The Grass House) as Jenner described them, the writer insisted, “Hyperrealism is not at all the same thing as documentation.” 

SUNSET/SUNRISE is not a blow-by-minute account of family life in Davis, California.  It is a contrived and structured play presenting an illusion of reality, based on observations.  Like hyperrealist painting, I have attempted . . . to make the spectator observe acutely, [not] become involved in the psychology or emotions of the characters. . . .  The play focuses attention to things we don’t usually notice.

[ROTters interested in learning more about theatrical Hyperrealism should turn to the two essays mentioned above.  Ted Shank’s TD&T article is accessible on line at https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/hickmanbrady/tdt_1982summer/index.php; he discusses many more details about the physical production of Stuck as well as more specifics of hyperreal theater. 

[“Hyperrealism in the Theatre,” the interview of Adele Shank, is only available on the ’Net in California Plays on Google Books, but it’s slightly edited.  When libraries reopen, back issues of TD&T should be in many collections, but West Coast Plays 4 was hard to find 25 years ago, so I expect it will be harder still today.

[Adele Edling Shank was a long-time member of the faculty and chair of what is now the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.  A native of Litchfield, Minnesota, she grew up on a farm 50 miles west of Minneapolis..  In 1953, her father got a job with the California Agriculture Department and the Edlings moved to Sacramento, California.

[Adele Edling enrolled at the University of California, Davis (BA, 1963; MA, 1966), where she met Theodore Shank; they were married in 1967,  She joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1981 as a lecturer and was named to the permanent faculty in 1984.  Shank and her husband, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UCSD, established the Adele and Theodore Shank Professional Playwriting Residency Award at the university.  The endowed position funds internship positions for master of fine arts students at UCSD with theater companies around the U.S.  A theater on the university campus is named in honor of the Shanks.]

"Waiting out a pandemic — and for our 'King Lear'"

 by Peter Marks

[The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on all aspects of our lives all around the world.  Among the hardest-hit industries, following the health field, has been live entertainment, including theater.  In November of last year, Peter Marks, the principal theater writer and reviewer for the Washington Post, published an essay in his paper about how artists and writers might address this crisis by creating art in the mode of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, which Marks observes was written in the midst of the 1606 bubonic plague in London. 

[Marks’s column appeared on 8 November 2020 in section E (“Arts & Style”) of the Post.  (Online, it was posted as “Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’ during a plague. What great work will emerge from this pandemic?” as part of the “Road to Recovery: Perspective” feature on the Washington Post website on 6 November 2020 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/great-artistic-works-during-plagues/2020/11/05/6575cac2-1d29-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html.] 

More than 400 years ago, as epidemics raged in London, forcing theaters and other public places to shutter, William Shakespeare was busy crafting stories of kings going mad and thanes coveting power. He was, scholars believe, in the midst of an astonishingly potent creative period, one that produced some of the most extraordinary tragedies ever written — “King Lear” and “Macbeth” among them.

It was a remarkable achievement, one that got me thinking about our current moment and the possibility that during this pandemic, society’s artful dreamers might find their own inspiration and make similarly groundbreaking creations. “The great work begins,” playwright Tony Kushner wrote as the final words of “Angels in America,” his sprawling dramatic diptych of another terrible modern epidemic.

In perilous, isolating times, we hunger with a special zeal for great work by artists who can capture the experience for us. The coronavirus that has infected nearly 50 million people worldwide and killed 1.2 million — including more than 233,000 in the United States — has also created a vacuum in live entertainment of all kinds. That includes the performing arts, whose theaters and studios have been forced to shutter for months as organizations also furlough or dismiss scores of the 5.1 million arts workers in this country.

All at once, the curtains closed on hundreds of plays, ballets, concerts, musicals — as well as the in-person classes in drama, music and dance that feed the future of these forms. Though some arts lovers have followed their favorite companies to the Web, where videos of old productions and super-skeletal versions of new projects are being tried out, one can’t avoid a certain hollow feeling — a cultural deprivation unprecedented in our lifetimes. Pause for just a moment from reflecting on the terrible losses inflicted on so many families by the coronavirus, and imagine another type of devastation: a life’s dream of seeing your new play onstage, or appearing in a recital marking the launch of your career, washed away in a tidal wave of worry about contagion in public places.

What, I wonder, is the fate of so many of these projects and events, some of them topical and inordinately perishable? With arts groups across the country deprived of ticket revenue and focused myopically on survival, where goes the impetus for the sorts of ambitious dramas, operas and other productions that put a stamp on an era?

And when at last we emerge from this cultural drought, is recovery a matter of picking up where we left off, with the work that had to be canceled or interrupted? Or does the energy arising from the experiences of 2020 — the sorrows unleased by this disease, the agony sparked by the killings of Black men and women — lead us in entirely new directions?

In other words: Does the great work begin?

I raise these questions out of curiosity about what goes on creatively at a time when very little is going on. In his mid-century novel “The Plague,” Albert Camus describes in stunning detail the torpor of a city, Oran, Algeria, as it seals itself off from the world to try to contain the bubonic plague. The story concerns a doctor, Bernard Rieux, as he ministers to the stricken population. But through another character, Joseph Grand, the author delves into a kind of imaginative stasis brought on by the epidemic that borders on the absurd: Grand, a city clerk, is writing a novel and can’t seem to get beyond the opening sentence.

He worries that line to death, obsessing for pages of Camus’s novel over every word. “Next he showed some anxiety about the adjective ‘handsome,’ “ Camus notes, suggesting in Grand’s equivocations a case of terminal writer’s block — a shutdown, if you will, of the creative mind.

Not that the times when public gatherings present health risks necessarily have to be devoid of inspiration. Consider the perseverance of Shakespeare during those outbreaks of plague and what might have been going through his mind. Although he alluded poetically to the epidemics, most famously in dying Mercutio’s curse — “A plague o’ both your houses” in “Romeo and Juliet” — experts such as Columbia University’s James Shapiro note that the impact on Shakespeare of these disasters can’t be known.  [See “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” by Kirk Woodward, posted on Rick On Theater  on 17 November 2020.]

“While his personal life must have powerfully informed what he wrote,” Shapiro observed in a 2015 article for London’s Guardian newspaper, “we have no idea what he was feeling at any point during the quarter-century that he was writing — other than, in circular fashion, extrapolating from his works (which largely steered clear of plague, no matter how profoundly he may have experienced its impact.)”

Still, his life and extraordinary productivity remain fair game for enlightened guesswork. Earlier this year, novelist Maggie O’Farrell published “Hamnet,” a work of historical fiction in which she posited that Shakespeare’s young son of that name died of “the pestilence.” “The father cups a hand to the son’s chill cheek,” she writes. “His fingers hover, trembling, over the bruise on his brow. He says, No, no, no. He says, God in heaven. And then, crouching low over the boy, he whispers: How did this happen to you?”

One is allowed to imagine in such highly speculative accounts that the pestilence would have enveloped Shakespeare profoundly in anguish, of a sort that might have found expression in his plays. A half-out-of-his-mind Lear raging on the stormy heath at the injustices he’s suffered comes readily to mind. “Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters!” Lear exclaims. It would be hard for a father to come up with a more terrible wish for his children.

In “Lear” and “Macbeth,” the grotesqueness of the violence — conjured in grief, perhaps? — is unmatched in his other great tragedies: “Macbeth” features the slaughter of Macduff’s children, and in “Lear,” Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out onstage by Cornwall. A plague on Gloucester’s house, indeed. In some productions, his suffering is so graphically depicted that audience members avert their own eyes.

The frenzied eruptions in Shakespeare would find a concordant fury centuries later in massively influential works such as Kushner’s “Angels in America” and Larry Kramer’s scathing drama “The Normal Heart.” Both were written in the 1980s and early ‘90s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The conservative Reagan administration’s lassitude in addressing the disease killing thousands of gay men fueled Kushner’s and Kramer’s incendiary prose. The ring of ineffectual, even detrimental official action in response to an epidemic is familiar, no? One wonders what artists of all stripes will have to say about this, and where the concurrent plague of white supremacy will figure in, as well.

The big dramatic statements about these immense issues are on hold. The paradox of the ubiquity and accessibility of art online is that little screens simply don’t do justice to epic unfoldings of great themes. Watching “Lear” or “Angels” on an expansive stage with 1,000 other people makes the heart pound harder; you are ideally meant to hear a resonant echo in the speeches of Shakespeare’s and Kushner’s characters. A laptop in the midst of a plague is better, though, than what Camus’s denizens of Oran in the 1940s have to work with, as they are left incommunicado with the outside world. Even letters are suspected of conveying disease.

Until the theaters and performing arts palaces reopen, we’ll continue to get small spoonfuls each week of what art is yet to come. A Washington company, Theater Alliance, for example, just completed a mini-festival of plays of Black protest, original playlets online that included stories about the impact of police shootings on the Black community. On Nov. 12, Theater of War, a group that typically dramatizes Greek tragedies to spark conversations of contemporary issues, will feature Bill Murray and Tracie Thoms in a digital evening of “Poetry for the Pandemic.” The work of Joshua Bennett, Mahogany L. Browne and Juan Felipe Herrera, among others, will be recited.

We who eagerly await the next big thing from one of the great imaginations of our time will have to contain our impatience. We have to sustain ourselves with the belief that the great work has begun. I like to imagine that some writer or composer right now is taking time to reread the plays of Henrik Ibsen — maybe “An Enemy of the People,” his timeless drama of a doctor who is ostracized for warning his community about a pestilence in the water supply. And who knows? Maybe when we all can gather again, we’ll assemble in a big concert hall for the premiere of “Fauci, the Opera.”

[Peter Marks joined the Washington Post as its chief drama reviewer in 2002.  Previously, he worked for more than nine years at the New York Times, where he was a drama reviewer, theater reporter, metro reporter, and national correspondent during the 2000 presidential campaign.  He was also a feature writer and reporter at Long Island’s Newsday, where he was a member of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.  

[Marks started his career at the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Home News and also worked for the Newark Star-Ledger and the Record of New Jersey’s Bergen County.  He has chaired the Pulitzer Prize drama jury four times and is co-author of the book Good for the Money: My Fight to Pay Back America (St. Martin’s Press, 2016).

[I am grateful to my friend and former professor Robert Youngblood for sending me Marks’s column.  He’s contributed the article “The Theater Problem in Education” to ROT, posted on 21 November 2011, and wrote the introduction to William Hutchings’s “Teaching What Shakespeare Didn’t Write: A Dramaturg’s Perspective In The English Classroom,” 24 August 2014.  Bob’s interest and support for my endeavors, including the blog, has been consistently gratifying.]

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.]