Stage Design

The agonized wail of police sirens called Manhattan's attention to one of the most important art events of the season last week. Nearly 4,000 persons jammed their way into the Museum of Modern Art with a popping of flashlights and a grinding of sound cameras that made it look like a Hollywood opening. Totally unable to see what the museum had to show, the guests milled slowly up & down stairs and looked at one another. Besides Soviet Ambassador Alexander Antonovich Troyanovsky, they included: Mary Pickford, Otto H. Kahn, Dolores Del Rio, Leopold Stokowski, Henry Seidel Canby, Lord Duveen, Frank Sullivan, Katharine Hepburn, the young ladies of the Ballet Russe, Charles A. Lindbergh and most of the Rockefellers. Most critics went back next morning for a quieter look at the best exhibition of stage decor and costume ever held in the U. S.: 700 costume plates, plans, drawings and illuminated stage models, tracing the development of theatre art from 16th Century Venice to Broadway 1933. Assembler of this art show was Lee Simonson.

Opinions vary as to whether Norman Bel Geddes, "Lee Simonson, Robert Edmond Jones or Jo Mielziner is the ablest scene designer in the U. S. But all critics agree that swarthy Artist Simonson is the most rationally articulate. A. B. Magna cum Laude at Harvard (1908), he loves a well-chosen word as well as a shrewdly-drawn line. Onetime editor of Creative Art, he has written innumerable essays, delivered hundreds of lectures. His latest book. The Stage is Set,* is not only a beautifully written history of the art of stage decoration but a Ph. D. thesis full of assorted bits of original research ranging from the itemized cost of production of a 15th Century mystery play ($1,000 to $3,000; to the bulk of a Sunday edition of the New York Times (459 sq. feet, 2 lb. 6 1/2 oz.). To carry scholasticism still farther, the elaborate catalog of the present exhibition which Assembler Simonson and the Museum of Modern Art have published contains no less than six learned introductions.

Mr. Simonson was careful to keep his exhibition a history of the development of stage design, not a history of the drama. The work of all the best known U. S. designers was represented but, more often than not, settings for their best known plays were lacking. People looked in vain for Robert Edmond Jones's The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, The Jest, Mourning Becomes Electra; for Bel Geddes' Miracle or Lysistrata; for Jo Mielziner's Street Scene.

Considered as a history of stage design the show had a few glaring omissions. There was no example of the work of the late Joseph Urban, whose electric blue backdrops for the early Follies brought the first stirrings of good taste to U. S. musicomedies. In the antique section of the show there were neither settings nor costumes of the important commedia dell' arte. Most important of all there were no examples of the whole school of late 19th Century realism that reached its height in the spectacular Drury Lane melodramas in which frail heroines were pursued through burning forests and over real waterfalls, in which locomotives and galloping horses cluttered the stage. Nor was there any exhibit to remind spectators of the painfully accurate productions of the late David Belasco. The entire modern school of stage design stems from a reaction against the fustiness of these spectacles.

On the other hand the show was most effective in demonstrating how different designers handle the same play. There were settings for Hamlet by the Soviet Nicolai Akimoff, the Austrian Oscar Strnad; the Czechoslovakian Vlastislav Hofman; the German Hans Poelzig, Robert Edmond Jones, Donald Oenslager and Lee Simonson of the U. S. Emperor Jones was set by Cleon Throckmorton, Donald Oenslager of New York; Walter Rene Fuerst of Paris; Vlastislav Hofman of Prague. Other highlights among the exhibits:

Six original designs by Inigo Jones (1573-1652), first of Britain's stage designers, producer of Ben Jonson's elaborate Elizabethan masques.

Twelve drawings by Duke George II of Saxe-Meiningen (1826-1914), who in his designs for his court theatre first made the grouping of actors an integral part of the stage picture.

Excellent examples of the work of Adolphe Appia, as Swiss pioneer, with Gordon Craig and Robert Edmond Jones in the use of the modern electric switchboard as successor to the scene painter.

Drawings from The Beggars' Opera as designed by Claude Lovat Fraser which sent British theatregoers rushing out to Hammersmith in 1920.

*IIarconrl Brace, 1932, $5.

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