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.] 

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“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.]