Scene (and Lighting) Design in American Theatre

Scene (and Lighting) Design in American Theatre. Although the decorative aspects of theatre are essential to the complete enjoyment of a play and to the understanding of our theatre's history, no full‐scale study of American set design and set designers, along with costumes, lighting, and their creators, has yet been published. Only individual artists have been researched and documented. Until such a complete history appears, only a cursory outline of developments can be offered, and this must of necessity neglect the almost wholly uncharted developments and figures away from New York. Virtually nothing is known about the scenery employed in the very earliest American theatricals, although it can be assumed that it was a possibly primitive version of the wing‐and‐drop or wing‐and‐shutter variety used in English playhouses. The first relatively sophisticated settings probably appeared when the elder Lewis Hallam and his company sailed from England to establish a traveling company in the colonies. There is reason to believe that Hallam brought much of his scenery with him and that it had previously been used at London's Goodman's Fields Theatre. A notice printed in the Virginia Gazette at the time of Hallam's arrival nonetheless claimed “the Scenes, Cloaths, and Decorations, are entirely new, extremely rich, [and] being painted by the best Hands in London, are excelled by none in Beauty and Elegance.” Despite the period settings of some of the plays Hallam offered, his costumes were undoubtedly contemporary, in the fashion of the time, and his generalized settings, which had to be used in various plays, lit by candlelight. If we cannot be certain of the quality of Hallam's scenery, we can be even less certain of what it represented. Within a few decades most playhouses retained at least five basic settings—a rich interior, a simple interior, a garden, a woodland scene, and a street scene—but whether the limited space available to Hallam and the exigencies of frequent travel allowed him the luxury of even these few settings is unknown. Certainly after the revolution, when Lewis Hallam Jr. headed the Old American Company, a temporary decline in quality may have become evident. In 1787 the New York Advertiser complained, “Frequently where the author intended a handsome street or beautiful landscape, we only see a dirty piece of canvas. . . nor is it uncommon to see the back of the stage represent a street while the side scenes represent a wood.” Yet the final years of the 18th century saw the emergence of the first great American set designers with the work of the European‐trained Charles Ciceri in Philadelphia and New York and Monsieur Audin in Charleston. Indeed Ciceri, who worked in Paris and London before coming to America, is credited with bringing here the first transparent scrim. At the same time, so far as American theatre was concerned, the hesitant introduction of architecturally conceived scenery, as opposed to mere painted flats, may have occurred in Boston in 1797 with the production there of John Daly Burk's Bunker Hill, in which the hill was “raised gradually by boards extended from the stage to a bench.” The English‐born John Joseph Holland, long connected with New York's Park Theatre, is sometimes credited with being the first American set designer to attempt historical accuracy in his work, but it was not until two decades after his death that a burgeoning movement toward realism ushered in two major developments. The first was the box set, which allowed playgoers to imagine themselves as viewing a room from an invisible fourth wall. This new treatment of interiors received instant and widespread attention because it was introduced in conjunction with the most successful play of the era, Dion Boucicault's London Assurance (1841). Five years later the visit of Charles Kean, far more than Holland's tentative efforts, established the notion that theatrical period pieces should be accurately set.

The older tradition of standard settings built in the wing‐and‐drop style received a further blow with the erection of Edwin Booth's ill‐fated theatre in 1869. Booth dispensed with the exaggeratedly raked stage, which made realism difficult; with proscenium doors, which had been used for entrances and exits that were difficult or at least artificial by the wing‐and‐drop designs; and with the huge apron in front of the proscenium. None of these changes originated with Booth, but the actor's distinguished reputation gained them immediate acceptance.

The 19th century also saw the two major basic changes in lighting come about. The introduction of gas lighting is believed to have taken place at Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Theatre in 1816, although the expense of installing the gas works, which required an elaborate distillation of coal, prevented gas from becoming commonplace for nearly two decades. For example, the first New York house to convert was the Chatham in 1825. The first practical spotlight, known as the limelight, the calcium light, the oxyhydrogen light, or the Drummond light, while perfected in Europe in the 1840s, came into general usage here only about the time of the Civil War. There is reason to believe it was first employed in New York in the 1866 production of The Black Crook. Primitive electric lighting began to gain a foothold in the 1880s and grew into a standard method of illumination far more rapidly than gas had. These brighter methods of lighting gradually helped eliminate the exaggerated makeup and acting that darker stages had required.

Although architecturally conceived scenery became increasingly frequent throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century, most scenic effects were achieved by careful painting, and set designers were therefore usually known as scene painters, a term not necessarily demeaning. A partial list of the great American scene painters during these years would include Ernest Albert, D. Frank Dodge, Philip Goatcher, the Grain family, Ernest Gros, George Heister, George Hielge, Henry E. Hoyt, Richard Marston, Thomas G. Moses, Joseph Physioc, James Roberts, Russell Smith, Edward G. Unitt, William Voegtlin, and Charles Witham. That these men worked largely in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia suggests not that these cities excelled in set design but that our knowledge of scenery and scene painters elsewhere is sadly scant.

The movement away from realistically painted flats and toward more stylized, suggestive, and architecturally conceived sets, usually enhanced by imaginative lighting, began to gain prominence around the time of World War I. Many historians agree that it was the work of Robert Edmond Jones for the 1915 production of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife that “sounded the note that began the American revolution in stage scenery.” Other designers of distinction whose work from the 1930s on have been notable and influential included Boris Aronson, Lemuel Ayers, Watson Barratt, Howard Bay, Norman Bel Geddes, Aline Bernstein, Stewart Chaney, William and Jean Eckart, Ben Edwards, Frederick Fox, Mordecai Gorelik, David Hays, George Jenkins, Jo Mielziner, Donald Oenslager, Livingston Platt, Lee Simonson, Oliver Smith, Cleon Throckmorton, and Joseph Urban. Their work was often made even more attractive by the artistry of modern lighting designers, though some of these designers created their own lighting effects. Indeed, with the increasing use of transparent scrims and skeletonized settings, lighting frequently became an integral part of the stage picture rather than serving merely to illuminate it. In a few avant‐garde instances lighting served as the primary scenery. Recent seasons have seen such technically elaborate scenery, especially in imported English musicals, that computers have been needed to control it. By the last decades of the 20th century, the busiest and most accomplished scenic designers included John Lee Beatty, John* Conklin, David Jenkins, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg, Heidi Landesman, Peter Larkin, Eugene Lee, Ming Cho Lee, Santo Loquasto, David Mitchell, Douglas Schmidt, Robin Wagner, Tony Walton, and the British Bob Crowley and John Napier. Among the noteworthy lighting designers during the last decades of the 20th century are Martin Aronstein, Ken Billington, Peggy Eisenhauer, Abe Feder, Jules Fisher, Paul Gallo, John J. Gleason, David Hersey, Tharon Musser, Richard Nelson, Jean Rosenthal, Thomas Skelton, and Jennifer Tipton.