Robert Edmond Jones

Robert Edmond Jones 1887-1954, American scene designer, b. Milton, N.H. With his design in 1915 for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, a new era of scene design began in the United States. His use of color and dramatic lighting enhanced his imaginative sets. Some of Jones's most notable designs were for Macbeth, Richard III, Hamlet (for John Barrymore), and The Green Pastures. After work with the Washington Square Players, he joined Kenneth Macgowan at the Greenwich Village Theatre; working in conjunction with the Provincetown Players, he created sets for the plays of Eugene O'Neill. Jones did the designing for the early three-color-process film La Cucaracha (1933). He wrote Drawings for the Theatre (1925), The Dramatic Imagination (1941), and, with Kenneth Macgowan, Continental Stagecraft (1922).

Bibliography: See The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones (ed. by R. Pendleton, 1958).

Jones, Robert Edmond (1887–1954), designer. One of the most influential figures in 20th‐century American theatre, the New Hampshire–born designer, producer, director, and lecturer was educated at Harvard. He began designing sets in 1911, but it was his work for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1915) that is said to have “sounded the note that began the American revolution in stage scenery.” Jones rebelled against the various forms of realism that dominated set design at the time, in particular the meticulously painted flats in general use or the careful reconstructions of David Belasco. “The artist,” he was later to write, “should omit details, the prose of nature, and give only the spirit and the splendor.” Not all his sets were so strikingly poetic, but after his death John Mason Brown was to remember “The Renaissance glories of his backgrounds for The Jest; the ominous outline of the Tower of London which dominated his Richard III; the great arch at the top of the long flight of steps in John Barrymore's Hamlet; the brooding austerity of his New England farm house in Desire Under the Elms; the background of mirrors, as bright as Congreve's wit, in Love for Love . . . the bold bursts of Chinese Red in Lute Song; or the George Bellows‐like depths and shadows of his barroom for The Iceman Cometh.” In 1925 he joined forces with Kenneth MacGowan and Eugene O'Neill to produce O'Neill's and other fine plays at the Greenwich Village Playhouse. Among the productions he directed were Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (1924), and O'Neill's The Fountain (1925) and The Great God Brown (1926). Most critics felt his direction was less innovative than his design work. With MacGowan he wrote Continental Stagecraft (1922). Biography: The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones, Ralph Rendelton, ed., 1959.

Jones, Robert Edmond (1887–1954), American writer, lecturer, director, and above all scene designer, whose first designs, for Ashley Dukes's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife in 1915, began a revolution in American scene design. His ability to integrate his designs with all the aspects of the play made his work memorable, particularly when he also directed the actors, as he did in The Great God Brown (1926) by O'Neill, with all of whose early plays he was connected through his association with the Provincetown Players. He was responsible for the décor of a number of Shakespearian productions, his Othello in 1937 being much admired, and of such modern works as Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures (1930), Maxwell Anderson's Night over Taos (1932), and Sidney Howard's adaptation of a Chinese play, Lute Song (1946).