Oenslager, Donald Mitchell

Oenslager, Donald Mitchell (1902–75), American scene designer, who worked under George Pierce Baker at Harvard. In 1923 he went to Europe to study scenic production there, and on his return to America worked with the Provincetown Players and the Greenwich Village Theatre. With Robert Edmond Jones, Jo Mielziner, and Lee Simonson, he may be said to have contributed to the creation of a new age of stagecraft in the United States, and he left a permanent mark on the contemporary theatre there. He designed sets for a number of major drama productions (as well as operas and ballets), among them Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937); Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma in 1941 for Katharine Cornell, Pygmalion in 1945 for Cedric Hardwicke, and Major Barbara in 1956 for Charles Laughton; also for Ibsen's Peer Gynt in 1951, Coriolanus in 1954, and Spigelgass's A Majority of One (1959). He was active up to the time of his death, and was for many years Professor of Scenic Design in the Yale Department of Drama.