Two Theater Personages of Note: Ralph Lee (1935-2023)

 

[When I read of the death of Ralph Lee, the mask- and puppet-maker who also created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, I wanted to post something in his memory, but I didn’t want just to republish his obituary.  A few days later, the report of the passing of playwright James de Jongh appeared, and I decided to post an homage to the two theater artists together.

[I began assembling various articles and reports to accompany the two obituaries.  As I developed the memorial post, it began to grow longer and longer, eventually outgrowing my maximum length for a stand-alone post.  So, now the memorial to “Two Theater Personages of Note” has become two posts.  I’m starting with Ralph Lee and the homage to James de Jongh will be posted on Monday, 12 June.] 

“RALPH LEE, FATHER OF PUPPETS AND A NEW YORK PARADE, IS DEAD AT 87”
by Neil Genzlinger 

[Niel Genzlinger’s obituary of Ralph Lee, designer of costumes, puppets, masks, and stage sets, and the creator of the iconic Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, ran in the New York Times on 18 May 2023.  I’m posting it on Rick On Theater with a history of the Parade from its producing organization’s own website and a review of an exhibit of Lee’s theater artistry at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. which I visited back in 1998.]

In 1974 he decided it would be fun to parade through Greenwich Village with some of his creations on Halloween. A tradition was born.

Ralph Lee, a creator of giant crustaceans, lizards, skeletons and sorceresses as well as one enduring New York tradition, the Village Halloween Parade, died on Friday [12 May 2023] at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

His wife, Casey Compton, confirmed the death. She said his health had been declining for several months.

Mr. Lee was an actor, writer, producer and director, but above all he was one of puppetry’s most prolific and inventive designers. His evocative masks and figures were seen in productions by his own Mettawee River Theater Company and in shows by the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Shakespeare Festival [now the Public Theater], New York City Opera, Theater for the New City and various dance troupes and stage companies.

His menagerie ranged from hand puppets to fantastic figures that towered over the audience and were controlled by multiple puppeteers. One of his most famous puppets ate Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin and others — it was the “land shark” that turned up at unsuspecting women’s doors in a 1975 “Saturday Night Live” sketch and returned several times over the years. [Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws was released on 20 June 1975.]

Masks were another Lee signature; his designs could be scary, sorrowful or phantasmagorical.

“There is something mysterious about masks,” he told The New York Times in 1998, when the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts was given over to an exhibition of his work [see Mel Gussow’s review of this show below], “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011.]

Mr. Lee brought all his skills and interests to bear in creating the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village, which he first staged in 1974 with production help from George Bartenieff and Crystal Field of Theater for the New City. A modest announcement in The Times promoted the event.

“Starting at 5 p.m., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square,” the announcement said. The parade was to be “a transient entertainment” with musicians, giant puppets and floats. Children were invited to wear costumes and join the procession. [TNC eventually moved to 1st Avenue in the East Village.]

It was not an instant success.

“There were not many people around besides us — maybe bums,” Mr. Lee said in 1998. “And here we were, all holding sparklers, kind of looking at each other.”

But the next year the parade grew, and so did the audience, earning Mr. Lee an Obie Award [1975]. Soon it was a flamboyant fixture of the city’s October calendar, so big that in 1985 it had to be moved off the narrow side streets of the Village and onto the Avenue of the Americas. Mr. Lee stepped aside from running the show around that time, but it has continued across the decades.

“Halloween is for the kid in all of us,” he said in 1982. “It gives people, especially adults, permission to act any way they want.”

Ralph Minor Lee was born on July 9, 1935, in Middlebury, Vt. His father, William, was a dean at Middlebury College, where his mother, Mary Louise (Minor) Lee, taught dance.

He grew up in Middlebury, getting his first few years of education in a one-room schoolhouse, where he appeared in his first play. He portrayed a cat policeman, he said in a 2016 interview for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project, and he particularly remembered delivering one line, catlike: “I have neeews.”

“The news was that I was going to be in the theater,” he recalled, “because I was really hooked.”

Puppetry was also an early interest.

“When I was about 12 years old I started making puppets, and I developed my own little puppet theater with all hand puppets,” he said in an oral history recorded for the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. “I used to perform for school assemblies and birthday parties, things like that.”

He graduated from Amherst College in 1957, then studied dance and theater in Europe on a Fulbright scholarship before trying his hand at theater in New York.

He had small parts in three Broadway shows, starting with “Caligula” in 1960, and later in the 1960s began working with the experimental Open Theater troupe [founded by Joseph Chaikin]. After that group disbanded in 1973, he made his way back to Vermont, taking a teaching job at Bennington College.

It was at Bennington in the spring of 1974 that he staged an innovative theatrical event called “Casserole,” which The Bennington Banner described as “a dramatic piece which confronts the audience with a variety of levels of reality and illusion.” Its scenes, which incorporated Mr. Lee’s puppets, were staged all around the campus, with the spectators transported from one scene to the next in hay wagons.

“I’d never done anything like that before in my life,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “And it was the first time that I had actually seen any of my puppets outdoors, and it seemed like they took on a kind of life outdoors that they just didn’t have inside.”

From there it was a short leap to the Halloween parade, and for decades Mr. Lee continued to stage theater productions outdoors as well as in. He became artistic director of the Mettawee River company shortly after it was formed by some Bennington theater graduates (including Ms. Compton) in 1975, and it staged shows in all sorts of places over the ensuing decades — Moreau Lake State Park in upstate New York, the lawn of the Putney School in Vermont, Windsor Lake Park in Massachusetts, Central Park and the garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, and many more.

[The Mettawee River Theatre Company, founded in 1975, is based in Salem, New York, a town in Washington County 200 miles north of New York City in eastern New York State on the border with Vermont.  Bennington College is in Bennington, Vermont, 30 miles south-southeast of Salem.]

Those works and others Mr. Lee presented often drew on traditions and mythologies from a diverse range of cultures. For years he traveled to Mexico to work with Sna Jtz’ibajom, a writers’ group that seeks to preserve Mayan culture, creating a new theater work with the group each time he visited.

[Sna Jtz’ibajom is headquartered in the city of San Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas. The name means ‘the house of the writer’ in Tzotzil, a Mayan language spoken in the region.]

“Most of our shows are based on folk material from one culture or another, and I find that very inspiring,” he said in the Folklife Center oral history. “You’re dealing with forces of nature and how they operate and how they clash with each other, and how things become resolved.”

In February [2023], he and Ms. Compton received a lifetime achievement Obie Award for their work with Mettawee.

Mr. Lee’s first marriage, to Stephanie Lawrence Ratner in 1959, ended in divorce in 1973. In addition to Ms. Compton, whom he married in 1982, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Heather, Jennifer and Joshua Lee; a daughter from his second marriage, Dorothy Louise Compton Lee; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

Mr. Lee’s puppets were generally carefully made works of craftsmanship that bordered on art. But the Lee creature that might have been seen by more people than any, the “S.N.L.” land shark, was, he said, thrown together from foam, cloth and rubber laminate he had lying around the house.

“People still know about that shark,” he told The Post-Star of Glens Falls in 2003. “For many people, it is my claim to fame.”

“When I was making it,” he added, “I thought it would get used once and shucked.”

In his 1998 interview with The Times, he acknowledged that some of his work could be ephemeral, but he said that when he carved wooden masks for puppets, he was hoping for something more.

“The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,” he said. “I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.”

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

*  *  *  *
“HISTORY OF THE PARADE” 

[Lee founded the now-perennial—and iconic—Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in 1974.  The “modest announcement in The Times” (“GOING OUT Guide” by Howard Thompson, 31 October 1974 on page 50) to which the obituary above refers read as follows:

AWAY THEY GO Starting at 5 P.M., a pageant‐parade will spill forth from that Off Off Broadway citadel, Theater for the New City, at Jane and West Streets, winding across Greenwich Village for a Round Dance in Washington Square. The parade, sponsored by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, produced by the theater and designed by Ralph Lee, will be a transient entertainment with its own musical score, singers, giant puppet figures and floats, apples and candy for children, who are invited to wear costumes and join the procession along the way.

Among the participants will be Tammy Grimes, John Guare, Joel Oppenheimer and Barbara Carson, the Active Trading Company, the Margot Colbert Dancers, the Open Eye Musicians and the Renaissance Street Singers. Procession stops en route to the Washington Square dance are at Abingdon and Sheridan Squares, the Washington Square Methodist Church and the Judson Church.

[A few pages earlier, among a collection of Halloween-themed articles, nary a word was written about the soon-to-be beloved annual event.

[The following history of the parade is from the Village Halloween Parade website (http://halloween-nyc.com/about.php), posted on 27 July 2014; I updated some of the details to 2023.]

Started by Greenwich Village mask maker and puppeteer Ralph Lee in 1974, the Parade began as a walk from house to house in his neighborhood for his children and their friends. After the second year of this local promenade, Theater for the New City [then located in the West Village] stepped in and produced the event on a larger scale as part of their City in the Streets program. That year the Parade went through many more streets in Greenwich Village and attracted larger participation because of the involvement of the Theater. After the third year, the Parade formed itself into a not-for-profit organization, discontinued its association with Theater for the New City and produced the Parade on its own.

Today the Parade is the largest celebration of its kind in the world and has been picked by Festivals International as “The Best Event in the World” for October 31.

After the 8th year [1981], when the crowd had reached the size of 100,000 Celebration Artist and Producer Jeanne Fleming, a long-time participant in the Parade took over the event. She began working closely with the local Community Board, residents, merchants, schools, community centers and the Police to ensure a grass-roots, small “Village” aspect of the event, while at the same time preparing for its future growth. Now, 30 years later [2013], the Parade draws more than 60,000 costumed participants and spectators estimated at 2 million. [Another 1 million watch the Parade on local television in New York City.]

[In 1985, Lee withdrew as producer of the Parade.  “In its early years,” he told the New York Times (“Neighborhood Report: greenwich village: The Parade: Too, too? Or Too Much?” by Andrew Jacobs, 29 October 1995 in “The City” section), “the parade had a wonderful spontaneity between onlookers and marchers, and there was no firm line between the two. But the number of onlookers began to overwhelm the participants, and that's what killed it for me.”

[Jeanne Fleming, Lee’s assistant, took over and the Parade continued.  In 2016, however, the puppeteer asserted in the New York Post (“He's TRICKEd OFF Father of Village Halloween Parade disowns creation” by Raquel Laneri, 30 October 2016): “What had started out as a community event had become a city event. The spectators were standing six or seven deep — it just seemed like they had become total onlookers.”]

Originally drawing only a postage stamp sized article in the New York Times [see above], now the Parade is covered by all media—local, national and worldwide. [WPIX television (channel 11) in New York City has broadcast the Parade live.]

The Parade has won an Obie Award [1975] and been recognized by the Municipal Arts Society [1985] and [inducted into the] City Lore [People’s Hall of Fame in 1993] for making a major contribution to the life and culture of New York City. In 1993 the Parade was awarded a major NEA Grant for Lifetime Achievement and in 1993 and 1997—it’s 20th and 25th Anniversary Years— it was awarded Tourism Grants from both the Office of the Mayor of the City of New York and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in recognition of its economic and cultural contribution to New York City. Additionally, the Parade has been the subject of many books, scholarly dissertations, independent films and documentaries due to its position as an authentic “cultural event.”

In 1994 The Mayor of the City of New York [Rudolf Giuliani] issued a Proclamation honoring the Village Halloween Parade for 20 years of bringing everyone in the City together in a joyful and creative way and being a boon to the economic life of the City. The Proclamation concludes: “New York is the world’s capital of creativity and entertainment. The Village Halloween Parade presents the single greatest opportunity for all New Yorkers to exhibit their creativity in an event that is one-of-a-kind, unique and memorable every year. New Yorkers of all ages love Halloween, and this delightful event enables them to enjoy it every year and join in with their own special contributions. The Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village is a true cultural treasure.” In that same statement, the Mayor declared the week of October 24-31 to “HALLOWEEK in NYC in perpetuity.”

Perhaps our greatest honor came only 7 weeks after the tragic events of 9/11, when Mayor Rudolf Giuliani insisted that the Parade take place stating that it would be a healing event for New York. With the eyes of the world looking at us, we created a giant Phoenix puppet rising out of the ashes.

Hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide watched as the Parade provided tangible evidence that NYC was enduring, safe, surviving, and spirited in the face of great tragedy and hardship.

In 2005 we paid tribute to New Orleans and invited all Katrina evacuees to join us in a Funeral Procession Tribute to the stricken city. Over 8,000 evacuees showed up for the Parade and Benefit. [On 29 August 2005, Katrina’s storm surge breached various flood protection structures in and around the greater New Orleans area, inundating 80% of the city.]

In 2010 the Parade commissioned Haitian Karnaval Artist Didier Civil to make traditional Haitian Carnival figures in a themed element entitled “Memento Mori!” [Latin for ‘remember you must die’] in support of his efforts to rebuild the Art School in Jacmel, Haiti’s center for Carnival. Again, thousands of Haitians participated in the Parade to mourn and remember all those lost in the [12 January 2010] earthquake.

In 2012 Super Storm Sandy [which hit New York City on 29 October] forced an unprecedented cancellation of the Parade, prompting us to call for public support to save the Parade after it suffered serious financial losses.

[Less than four hours after eight people were killed six blocks west of the parade route in the 2017 New York City truck attack, the parade proceeded as scheduled. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo marched in the parade.

[(On 31 October at 3:05 p.m., Sayfullo Saipov swerved a rented pick-up truck into the Hudson River Greenway, a protected bike lane, at Houston Street. He killed eight and injured seven others. Saipov was sentenced on 17 May 2023 to eight consecutive life terms without parole and two concurrent life terms plus 260 years and is currently incarcerated)

[In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the parade was canceled for the second time. The parade organizers cited concerns that social distancing would be impossible with the high crowds that the parade typically saw.]

[Unlike most parades in New York City, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is unique.  It’s semi-organized, unlike, say, the famous Easter Parade, which is really just an open promenade along the stretch of 5th Avenue that runs in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  Participants flaunt their spring finery, especially the vaunted Easter bonnets, which are often elaborate and fanciful.

[Second, unlike, say, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, anyone may join the march up 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village—as long as she or he wears a costume.  There are a few other rules (no alcohol, for instance, and marchers must follow the Parade’s designated route), but it’s free (both to march and to watch) and there are no other qualifications.

[Third, it’s a nighttime procession—the nation’s only night parade.  After all, it is Halloween!  What self-respecting goblin comes out in the daytime?

[The costumes can be simple and are often homemade, but they can also get quite elaborate—remember, Lee was also a costume and mask designer, so his confreres are drawn to the Parade.  So are the LGBTQ+ community, whose garb can be quite outrageous—and entertaining.  There’s also often a little (or even a lot) of politics on view—mostly of the lampooning variety.

[The usual Parade path goes up 6th Avenue—the place of congregation before the march used to be Washington Square, but the Parade has grown too big to be accommodated in the short distance from the park to the mid-teens, so it’s been extended down to Canal Street—and then turns east onto my street as the procession breaks up, and participants walk back down to the Village via 5th Avenue.  They pass right under my apartment windows as they make the turn from eastward bound to southward.  Of course, the raucous noise accompanies the marchers in their get-ups.] 

*  *  *  *
“FLEETING BEASTS COLLECTED IN A FANTASY HEAVEN”
by Mel Gussow 

[From 4 February to 2 May 1998, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center was the site of Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs, an exhibit of Lee’s multifarious design work.  Mel Gussow’s review of the show ran in the New York Times of 13 March 1998.]

“Ralph Lee: Masks, Festival Figures and Theater Designs,” an exhibition that includes whimsical and scary images from theatrical productions created by Mr. Lee.

Fiery dragons and horny-toed demons, a mountainous boulder that turns into a giant, lords of death and destruction and a gigantic spider that for many Halloweens danced merrily on the facade of the Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich Village as the arachnidan version of King Kong – these and other fantastical creatures fill the main gallery of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. This phantasmagoric cavalcade, which runs through May 2, is the invention of Ralph Lee, for more than 35 years a master mask maker in the American theater.

Tomorrow at 12:30 P.M., Mr. Lee will lead a tour of the exhibition, one of a series of tours free and open to the public.

In his creations for theater and dance companies, pageants and parades, Mr. Lee also acts as puppeteer, designer and director, dramatizing folk tales and legends from diverse native cultures. In the past, his work has often been seen fleetingly in shows that offer a limited number of performances at places that range from La Mama (masks in the 1986 revival of “The Emperor and the Architect” by Fernando Arrabal) to the New York City Opera (a dancing rooster for the 1977 production of “Ashmedai”).

Collected under one roof, the mystical and metaphorical beasts seem to raise that roof, ready to fly into some outer space of Mr. Lee’s vivid imagination. Those who visit the Lincoln Center show may feel as if they have entered a world of dreams and nightmares. Standing in the middle of the exhibition, with his sculptured white hair and beard, the 62-year-old mask maker could himself have posed for a portrait of a mythological figure, somewhere between Pan and Neptune.

Although he has created towering totemic creatures like those that march for social progress for the Bread and Puppet Theater, his work is not overtly political. With its emphasis on the folkloric, it is closer to the puppetry of Julie Taymor. In common with Ms. Taymor, Mr. Lee draws inspiration from Indonesian, Japanese and Latin American sources. Most of his work begins with his Mettawee River Company, a traveling troupe whose home base is in Salem in upstate New York. His latest play, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky,” based on an Iroquois story, will be performed in May at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx and in September in the garden at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Because his work is often supplementary to dance or drama, it can easily be undervalued. In Mr. Lee’s hands, masks become embodiments of character, emotion and motion. “There is something mysterious about masks,” he said, “and the core of that mystery is that an inanimate object takes on a life. You really want the masks to be able to breathe. The mask has a fixed expression, but if it’s manipulated properly you would swear that you can see the expression change.” [See “The Magic of Masks,” referenced above.]

In demonstration, he stopped at an exhibit of his production of “The Tempest,” which Mettawee presented on tour in 1996, and put Caliban’s mask over his head, swimming his arms and transforming himself into a scaly amphibian emerging from the sea. Then he switched to the face of Stefano and, lolling his head, became a drunken sailor. His production used a cast of seven actors, doubling and tripling in roles, rushing on and off stage to change masks and characters.

Across the room are characters from “The North Wind,” a Yupik Eskimo story in which a Lee puppet played the title role, manipulated in performance by three puppeteers, two of whom billowed the wind’s sky-sweeping train. High over the exhibition is a 30-foot snake, inspired by an 18th-century cartoon depicting the American Colonies as a snake divided into 13 pieces with the slogan “Join or Die.”

As he moved among the displays, Mr. Lee talked about the mystique of mask-making: “When you’re wearing a mask, you have to find the way that mask would move -- the rhythm, the shape and the dynamic behind the movement.” Just as myths inspire him to expand the world of living creatures, “masks allow the performer to explore realms that he couldn’t reach by using his own face.” At the same time, he acknowledges that especially expressive actors like the late Zero Mostel can, in effect, turn their own faces into the equivalent of masks.

Necessarily, some performers are more adept than others at performing behind masks. When Mr. Lee was doing “Popol Vuh,” a Maya creation story, for his Mettawee company, he held auditions in which actors were asked to improvise with a toadlike mask, a “totally gruesome and despicable character.” One man put the mask on and the effect was “incredible – marriage at first mask.” Actors can feel possessed by masks or they can feel robbed of their own personality.

The boundary between masks and puppets is narrow. Generally masks “are inhabited by the performers and puppets are not,” but many of Mr. Lee’s most fanciful puppets are manipulated by shadowy puppeteers in the style of Bunraku or become costumes to be worn by actors. Similarly, masks are related to makeup, especially so with Chinese opera. For Mr. Lee, makeup means “painting a mask on your face.”

Several years ago when Mr. Lee had a smaller exhibition in a gallery at the City University of New York, he was stopped by an admiring student who said, “You have voodoo in you.” He took that statement as an affirmation of the magic in his art.

Ever since his childhood in Middlebury, Vt., Mr. Lee has been involved in theater. On exhibit at Lincoln Center is his first puppet stage, built when he was 14. After majoring in theater at Amherst College, he briefly studied dance and mime while continuing his interest in puppetry. In 1960, he shifted to masks, designing them for productions at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Conn., and the New York Shakespeare Festival. He also worked as an actor and designer with the Open Theater and other experimental companies.

In 1974, in collaboration with Theater for [the] New City, he created the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, a friendly neighborhood pageant that filled narrow downtown streets and brownstone balconies with a vast theatrical panoply. A dozen years later, he stopped working on the parade as it became more of a citywide tourist attraction than a community celebration. Still, he is known more for the Halloween parade than for any individual production. Many of his colorful figures have been recycled into other roles and have become members of Mr. Lee’s extended family. They return to life at the Lincoln Center exhibition.

His most intensely creative artistic relationship was with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. With his “wonderfully bare-bones approach” to choreography and design, Hawkins was, he said, a primary influence on his work and a constant spur to Mr. Lee to challenge himself. At the Hawkins display, he put on a raccoon mask from the dance “Plains Daybreak,” a facial fringe with a halo of feathers. With a quick shift of his body, he mimed the movement of a dancing raccoon. During the exhibition, Hawkins dances (with masks by Mr. Lee) are shown on video monitors.

Under the supervision of Barbara Stratyner as curator, this is a comprehensive retrospective. But it can offer only a sampling of the mask maker's work, much of which still inhabits his Westbeth studio and home as well as his farmhouse in Salem. In their home, he and his wife (Casey Compton, who is also his collaborator) are surrounded by a menagerie of realized figments of Mr. Lee's imagination. ''They start to take over,'' he said.

[Westbeth is a subsidized development of living and studio space for artists at the intersection of West and Bethune Streets in Greenwich Village.  It was also TNC’s first home, so the theater and Lee were neighbors.  (TNC moved to another nearby venue in the West Village by the time the Halloween Parade started.  Later it moved to the East Village, working in several different spaces before settling into the 1st Avenue location it currently occupies.)]

Hanging on a wall is a lobster the size of an octopus, jettisoned from a production of Sam Shepard's ''Cowboy Mouth,'' and perched atop a bookcase is a squat, bulbous puppet of Hadrian VII. Hidden in crannies and corners are other small and large lurking creatures. Mr. Lee's studio has enough bamboo to feed a giant panda. Bamboo, papier-mâché, clay and wood are his raw materials, along with objects he finds on the street, in hardware stores and in fields and forests.

Most of all, he likes to work with wood. Carving masks and puppets, he acts as a sculptor. Although he knows that by nature his work is ephemeral, he aims for solidity and durability. ''The sculptor in me wants to be immortalized in his work,'' he said. ''I think I always had the urge to build things for eternity.'' As the Lincoln Center exhibition proves, Mr. Lee's chimerical visions can have a longer life than the theater and dance pieces in which they first appeared.

[Mel Gussow (1933-2005) was a theater and movie reviewer, and author who wrote for the New York Times for 35 years.  He joined the Times in 1969 and over his 3½-decade career wrote more than 4,000 reviews and articles.  In 2008, Gussow was inducted posthumously into the American Theater Hall of Fame (see my post on Rick On Theater on 10 February 2020).

[Long associated with Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, the traditional home of experimental writers, Gussow championed the writing of many of the major playwrights of the theater of the post-World War II period, and was among the first to take the young, emerging playwrights seriously. 

[A native of New York City, Gussow grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Middlebury College (where Ralph Lee’s father was dean and the future mask- and puppet-maker grew up), and in 1955, he earned a bachelor’s degree in American literature and a master's degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1956.]

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.]

Two (Back) Stage Pros

[When most people who aren’t part of the theater world—what one of my teachers fondly called “civilians”—see a play, they think of actors, singers, dancers, maybe directors, occasionally choreographers.  Spectators may see the sets, the costumes, the lights, and all the parts of the show known as “spectacle” or “production values,” but I suspect most just figure they arrive as they appear on stage by magic.  The artists and technicians who create, build, maintain, and handle those important aspects of a show are often entirely unknown outside the business.  Even though there are Tonys and Obies for the work these talents perform, many who watch the awards shows zone out during the “technical” awards, I think.  Well, attention must be paid!  Not long ago, the New York Times and the Washington Post each ran articles on one of the professionals who do this work for the stage: Eugene Lee, one of the American stage’s most renowned and respected set designers, and Paul Huntley, the designer and maker of many of the hair pieces worn by stars, featured actors, and even chorus members on stages across the country.  It’s time ROT honored some of the artists who make the visual force of theater a vital part of the experience.  So I’m going to see to it that it does just that.  ~Rick]

“HOME & GARDEN: AT HOME WITH EUGENE LEE:

MAKING A SCENE, ONSTAGE AND OFF”

by Sandy Keenan

[This article was originally published in the “Home” section (section D) of the New York Times on 3 April 2014.]

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — For years, the crystal chandelier that Eugene Lee salvaged back in the 1980s, when the original Helen Hayes Theater in Times Square was being demolished, presided over Studio 8H at Rockefeller Center, adding a little elegance to the rarefied air around “Saturday Night Live” cast members like Eddie Murphy and Dennis Miller.

But eventually the opulent fixture was replaced, and Mr. Lee, a celebrated designer whose recent projects include the set for “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and the new Broadway show “The Velocity of Autumn,” lugged it home on his weekly commute up Interstate 95 to his Georgian Revival house on College Hill. Now it hangs in the foyer here, brightening all the other things that he and his wife, Brooke, a painter, have collected over the years.

Just walking into the beautifully proportioned house, built in 1912 for the daughter of a Rhode Island governor, can cause a temporary sense of vertigo. There is so much to take in: layer upon layer of objects large and small, useful and not, all of them with a similar vintage and patina.

Mr. Lee, 75, collects utilitarian things like old typewriters, Art Deco sprinklers, old canes and roll-top desks. Mrs. Lee, 65, favors post-1900 tin globes (she has about 200), wooden stacking toys, colorful British china and silhouettes (her collection is so extensive that the framing shop offered her a bulk discount). The enormous pair of tailor’s scissors hanging in the doorway between the living and dining rooms was a joint acquisition.

“We were always great junkers,” Mr. Lee said. “Not to get all artsy or anything, but it’s a lot like painting. You pick, you choose, but you don’t add willy-nilly.”

Mrs. Lee added: “We like the real thing, but we’re not crazy. I don’t spend all day in my pajamas changing the way things are arranged.”

In any case, there is no time for that. Not while Mr. Lee, who was admitted to the Theater Hall of Fame in 2006, continues to be so much in demand.

You may not recognize his name, his kindly face or his spiky white hair, but you almost certainly know his work: In addition to “The Tonight Show” studio and set, Mr. Lee has designed sets for numerous Broadway productions and has won Tony Awards for three of them (“Wicked,” “Candide” and “Sweeney Todd”). He remains the resident design guru for “Saturday Night Live,” one of only a handful of inaugural staffers from the 1975-76 season still at it 21 weeks a year.

And this year has been particularly frenzied: At the moment, he is creating the look of Maya Rudolph’s pilot for a variety television show, while simultaneously collaborating with the writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg on a new version of “The Nutcracker” and designing for Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s musical, “Bright Star.” All told, he is working on the sets for eight productions around the country. And this week, “The Velocity of Autumn,” his 25th Broadway show, opened in previews at the Booth Theater.

“It’s fun to have things going on all over town,” he said modestly.

But the busier Mr. Lee is, the less time his wife has to spend on her watercolors, which are scattered throughout the house, because she does his bookings and billings and even handles his small talk. As she said, “I maintain relationships, and I keep Eugene organized.”

While much of his work is based in Manhattan, the Lees have never considered leaving Providence, where his career began in 1967 as a designer for the Trinity Repertory Company, an organization he continues to be associated with as the resident designer. But during the weeks that “Saturday Night Live” is in production, Mr. Lee catches the train on Wednesday morning, arriving at NBC in time for the afternoon story meeting and, like the rest of his design team, works almost around the clock until the show goes live. Meetings are routinely held at midnight or later, and Mr. Lee lives spartanly, sleeping when he can at the nearby Yale Club (he got his M.F.A. at Yale).

It is nearly impossible to keep up with him as he scurries through the bowels of the enormous building, ducking and weaving, and tiptoeing around frenetic set painters. The studio, which he designed when the show was being hatched, is more like an elevated house than a TV set, and under his management, the sets are still built the old-fashioned, expensive way: from scratch, using real wood, genuine antiques (for the White House skits) and (when necessary) live animals. Authentic, realistic, sometimes seedy — the way he prefers everything.

Al Franken, the senator from Minnesota who spent 15 years with the show, credits Mr. Lee with changing the look of television comedy, which had been going in a campier direction in the early 1970s, with “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” and “The Carol Burnett Show.”

“The look of the show is probably a larger piece of its success and iconic status than most people realize,” Mr. Franken said. “Eugene made it elegant, and never got in the way of the comedy.”

Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and executive producer, agreed. “Comedy was getting all glossy; they called it the Infinity Look,” he said. “New York was very different back then. Eugene designed what he saw, decay and all.”

Mr. Michaels hired Mr. Lee after seeing his work on “Candide,” a decision he said he has never regretted. “I always say Eugene is the only actual genius I’ve worked with,” he said.

Not everyone has always felt that way. The cast and crew of “Dude,” Mr. Lee’s first Broadway musical, in 1972, took to calling him Helen Keller because he was so shy he was all but mute. (Fortunately for Mr. Lee, the show closed in less than two weeks and the nickname didn’t stick.)

That image is hard to square with the reputation he has developed for taking a bold, even radical approach to set design, ripping up existing sets to create something that better suited the new play. Good riddance to proscenium theaters; he wanted audiences to experience the work at hand, not simply observe it.

For “Slave Ship,” a drama at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that he designed the sets for in 1969, he built a platform that replicated the nausea-inducing motion of a boat on the sea, and placed audience members right beside the actors being tossed about and tortured. And in the early 1970s, for a Manhattan Project production of “Alice in Wonderland,” he had patrons crawl through tiny doors to get into the theater, like Alice trying to fit through an opening too small for her.

“I just have my own funny ideas,” he said. “Set design is not about picking molding.”

Thirty minutes before “Saturday Night Live” starts, Mr. Lee is out the door to meet a driver for the three-hour ride home, a luxury he recently afforded himself after the success of “Wicked,” which is now in its 11th year on Broadway, with touring companies all over the world.

When he is working at home, which is often, the commute is a lot easier: All that’s required is rolling out the back door, through the yard, and up to the second floor of the carriage house at the end of the driveway, where the cramped space is warmed by an old potbellied stove that Mr. Lee feeds with wood and then a steady supply of coal. “Nice dry heat,” he said.

A congregation of old pendant lamps dangles from the ceiling of his studio, and there are more than enough clocks to represent every time zone in the world, all of which need to be wound daily. On an oak filing cabinet is an early model of the Jimmy Fallon set with a balcony, a mock-up done before Mr. Lee decided it ought to be a more intimate space.

Mr. Lee has made some difficult choices about what kind of work he takes on. He has done a few movie sets, but he didn’t like being away from Mrs. Lee and sons Will, now 40, and Ted, 31, when they were growing up. Doing more films would also have meant saying no more often to theater people, whom he also considers family.

On a recent tour of the house, Mrs. Lee pointed out some favorite things, many of which were acquired while Mr. Lee was “propping” his projects. “These are not bazillion-dollar paintings,” she said, referring to the hundreds of artworks they’ve collected. “Most were from fairs, $25 at the artist’s table.”

Their sons recall countless family trips to summer flea markets around New England and visits to salvage yards in industrial cities. And the difficulty of buying gifts for such avid collectors, which is continuing: What do you get the couple who has everything?

Will, who is now a teacher in Vermont with his own children, said it is taboo to give his parents anything new — but if something is old, chances are it’s already part of their collection. “If they see something they like, they’re going to own it,” he said. “So you have to find things they’re not going to find. That’s the challenge.”

Last year, he gave them a miniature model of an Airstream trailer and was happy to see it prominently displayed the next time he visited.

His younger brother, an artist and record store owner in Northampton, Mass., likes to joke about regifting them something that’s already in the house.

“They’d never know it,” he said. “And they’d be thrilled to have another one.”

[Sandy Keenan is a reporter for the New York Times “Home” section.]

*  *  *  *

“EASY LIES A HEAD THAT WEARS HIS WIG”

by Ann Greer

[On 25 April, I posted my ROT report on David Ives’s The Heir Apparent, his adaptation of an 18th-century French farce presented by New York’s Classic Stage Company.  I made particular note of the wigs worn in that production and the artist who designed and made them, Paul Huntley.  In “Easy lies a head that wears his wig,” Ann Greer describes in the Washington Post the artistry of Huntley as it was applied in a recent Shakespeare Theatre Company presentation of Henry IV.  This article was originally published in the “Arts & Style” section of the Washington Post on 4 May 2014.]

When floozy Doll Tearsheet, played by Maggie Kettering, enters a tavern scene in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s “Henry IV, Part 2,” your gaze is drawn to her crowning glory. Ringlets in extraordinary hues from rust to ruby cascade down her shoulders to perfectly cap her bawdy, worn attire.

This fantastical wig, one of the more than 60 human hair wigs and facial pieces in the productions of “Henry IV, Part 1” and “Part 2,” is the handiwork of designer Paul Huntley. He and director Michael Kahn settled on a contemporary vibe for the wigs, including a Rastafarian motif for high strung Hotspur (John Keabler).

“There’s a slightly modern approach, incorporating what you see in everyday life. It’s a contrast with Shakespeare’s words,” Huntley said by telephone from his base in New York. “I made the wigs a little wild in some ways, as the characters are all a rough and tumble lot.”

Huntley, in his 80s and a native of England, began his life in theater as an actor. He created wigs for the likes of Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh before moving to the United States in 1972. His workshop has four staff members, with others added as needed. Huntley designed wigs for the original Broadway productions of “Les Miserables,” “Sweeney Todd,” and “Hairspray,” among others; his current Broadway shows are “Bullets Over Broadway,” “All the Way” and “Cinderella.” In 2003, he was honored with a lifetime achievement Tony Award.

Not all of Huntley’s wigs have been for actors. In the mid 1970s he made a dozen or so wigs of varying colors, lengths and styles for a man who was not forthcoming about their use. He did say that they were not for a play or movie, and that they should be of the finest craftsmanship and not detectable as wigs. Huntley worked with the man for five or six years, teaching him how to put on the wigs and their accompanying eyebrows and other facial hair. The man, who was middle-aged and graying, was made to look younger with some wigs, in a crew-cut style and a tousled, long-hair hippie look. He transported the wigs in a special suitcase and eventually divulged that he was involved in undercover government work and traveled to other countries. Then, without a farewell, he never returned to Huntley’s studio.

Wig design, as with other design elements in a production, entails familiarity with the script and research into the time period and types of characters. Focused work with the director and costume designer follows, along with input from the actors who will wear the wigs.

Stacy Keach, who plays Falstaff in the Shakespeare Theatre production, last performed the role of the jolly, dissolute knight 47 years ago, when he was 27. He wanted to recapture that look, so Huntley worked from photos to create a wig of silvery white waves with bushy muttonchops. For Ted van Griethuysen’s feisty Welsh warrior Owen Glendower, Huntley contributed to an almost show-stopping entrance with a wig that perfectly compliments the character developed by the actor.

“He adored it,” Huntley chuckled. “It is sort of magnificent, isn’t it? Ted suddenly felt like this grand character; we all thought he should be in ‘Lord of the Rings.’ We went for an untamed look that would also give him majesty with his costume.”

With van Griethuysen and the other actors, Huntley said that wigs give them a complete picture physically of what they have created during rehearsal.

“It’s the last thing they see before they go on stage — themselves in the mirror from the neck up,” he said. “Suddenly they see the character, and it gives them an enormous amount of confidence, it really makes them feel the part.”

[Ann Greer is a freelance writer.]