Abstract
In a 1944 New York Times interview, Robert Edmond Jones bemoaned the continued commercialization of the American stage. The New Stagecraft may have legitimized the design profession and brought renown to its artists but, he conceded, it had failed to inspire a truly innovative modern American theatre. In the minds of many audiences, the New Stagecraft had been merely one scenographic style among many, a movement that was “over and done” because it became “fashionable.”1 He described a conversation at a cocktail party with a woman raving about a recent production that included a “real icebox” and “real ice cubes.” “This gave me something to think about,” Jones mused. “My mind ranged back thirty years to the famous Childs Restaurant which David Belasco set boldly on the stage of his theatre in the third act of ‘The Governor’s Lady,’ complete with real coffee urns and real waiters and real butter cakes. Here we are, I thought, after thirty years, face to face with the old conflict between realism and imagination in the theatre.”2 For Jones, “Belascoism”—the wholesale insertion of “real” items onstage to represent “real” locations offstage—was the antithesis of an imaginative design process that embraced the stage as a canvas open to interpretation. It failed to reach the same artistic standard as the New Stagecraft, he argued.
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Notes
Robert Edmond Jones, “Thirty Years Behind: A Veteran Scenic Artist Calls for More Imagination in the Theatre,” New York Times, August 6, 1944.
Sheldon Cheney, The New Movement in the Theatre (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 152.
Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 20.
Macgowan cites Arthur Hopkins’s How’s Your Second Act? (New York: Philip Goodman, 1918).
Orville K. Larson, for example, sets up a visual contrast between Belasco’s realism and Jones’s modernism, using the differences between their aesthetics to mark the origin of American design. See, Scene Design in the American Theatre from 1915 to 1960 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989), 50.
Arthur Feinsod also uses The Governor’s Lady to exemplify the type of extreme realism that prompted the New Stagecraft’s partiality toward simple stages and subjective expressions in The Simple Stage: Its Origins in the Modern American Theatre (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 41–42.
Thomas Alan Bloom’s discussion of these productions in Kenneth Macgowan and the Aesthetic Paradigm for the New Stagecraft in America (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 29; 37.
Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1995), 1.
Portions of this chapter’s analysis of Belasco’s and Jones’s design images were originally published in Christin Essin’s essay “Designing American Modernity: David Belasco’s The Governor’s Lady and Robert Edmond Jones’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife” Theatre History Studies 29 (2009): 32–51. Portions are integrated and reprinted here by permission of the editor, Rhona Justice-Malloy.
William W. Demastes, Beyond Naturalism: A New Realism in American Theatre (New York: Greenwood, 1988), 16.
William W. Demastes, ed. Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1996), x.
J. Ellen Gainor, “The Provincetown Players’ Experiments with Realism,” in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, ed. William W. Demastes (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 61.
Brenda Murphy, American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 31.
Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16; 24.
Gainor selects quotations from Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988).
as well as Sue Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988).
Elin Diamond’s essay “Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism,” TDR 32, no. 1 (1988): 82–94.
Also see Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 93.
William Winter, The Life of David Belasco (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1918), 377–79.
Richard Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro: The American Restaurant Then and Now (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 61.
Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 61.
Also Craig Timberlake, The Bishop of Broadway: The Life and Work of David Belasco (New York: Library Publishers, 1954), 319.
Alice Bradley, “The Play of the Month: The Governor’s Lady,” condensed version published by Hearst Magazine 22, no. 3 (1912): 113.
Childs cafeterias, lobster palaces were upscale restaurants where those who wanted to be seen could purchase lobster themidor served on gilded platters. The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2004), 27; 35.
George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1993), 9–10.
“Barker’s Season Happily Launched,” New York Times, January 28, 1915, sec. 9, 3.
Orville K. Larson, “Robert Edmond Jones, Gordon Craig, and Mabel Dodge,” Theatre Research International 3, no. 2 (1978): 125–33.
Arthur B. Feinsod, “Stage Designs of a Single Gesture: The Early Work of Robert Edmond Jones,” The Drama Review 28, no. 2 (1984): 104.
Ruth Gotthold, “New Scenic Art of the Theatre,” Theatre Magazine 21 (May 1915): 248.
“Granville Barker May Head the New Theatre Here,” Theatre Magazine 21 (February 1915): 63.
Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1997), 9.
Curtis Hidden Page, “Introduction,” in The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife by Anatole France (New York: John Lane, 1915), 7. Anatole France originally wrote the play for a meeting of the Society of Rabelaisian Studies.
Francis Hackett, “Granville Barker in New York,” The New Republic, January 30, 1915, 25.
Dorothy Chansky recognizes how the tension between professionalism and amateurism provoked significant debates among the members of art theatres like the Provincetown Players. Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 46.
Brenda Murphy’s The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Isaacs, “See American First: Broadway in Review,” Theatre Arts Monthly 19, no. 12 (1935): 891.
Krutch, “Drama: Sure Fire,” The Nation, November 13, 1935, 576. “The Theatre,” Time, November 11, 1935, Job 338, Oversized Box 19, Folder i3, Norman Bel Geddes Collection, University of Texas at Austin Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX.
Stark Young, “Dead End I,” The New Republic, November 13, 1935, 21.
George Jean Nathan, “The Theatre of George Jean Nathan,” Life Magazine, December 9, 1935, 18.
Richard Watts, “The Theaters,” New York Herald Tribune, January 18, 1938, 14.
Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (New York: Praeger, 1974), 58.
Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 14.
Andrew Dokkart, Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street (Sante Fe: Center of American Places, 2006), 79.
Jared N. Day, Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 174–79; 186.
Jo Mielziner, Designing for the Theatre: A Memoir and a Portfolio (New York: Antheneum, 1965), 8.
Brooks Atkinson, “Affairs on the West Side,” New York Times, January 20, 1929, sec. 8, 1.
Stark Young, “Dead End II,” The New Republic, November 20, 1935, 49.
Sidney Kingsley, Dead End, in Sidney Kingsley: Five Prizewinning Plays, ed. Nena Couch (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1995), 107–8.
Hallie Flanagan, “Introduction,” in Federal Theatre Plays, ed. Pierre de Rohan (New York: Random House, 1938), xi.
Susan Quinn, Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Mad High Art out of Desperate Times (New York: Walker, 2008), 226.
John E. Vacha, “The Federal Theatre’s Living Newspapers: New York’s Docudramas of the Thirties,” New York History 67, no. 1 (1986): 72.
Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The History of the Federal Theatre (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1940), 211.
Arthur Arent, One-Third of a Nation, in Federal Theatre Plays, ed. Pierre de Rohan (New York: Random House, 1938), 13.
Jerry Leon Davis, “Howard Bay, Scene Designer,” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1968, 61.
Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 173.
Walter Ralston, “The Federal Theatre Treats Slum-Clearance,” New Masses, February 1, 1938, 28.
John Mason Brown, “One-Third of a Nation,” New York Post, January 21, 1938, 8.
Burns Mantle, “One-Third of a Nation, Daily News, January 18, 1938.
Brooks Atkinson, “Saga of the Slums,” New York Times, January 30, 1938, 151.
Brooks Atkinson, “The Play in Review,” New York Times, January 30, 1947, 21.
Joseph Wood Krutch, “Drama,” The Nation, February 15, 1947, 191.
Brooks Atkinson, “At the Theatre,” New York Time, February 11, 1949.
Mary C. Henderson, Mielziner: Masser of the Modern Stage (New York: Backstage Books, 2000), 303.
Anne Fletcher, Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 2–3.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1988), 3.
Bruce McConachie, American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 53.
Arthur Miller, “Introduction,” in Arthur Millers Collected Plays (New York: Viking, 1957), 22.
Steven R. Centola, “All My Sons,” in Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, ed. Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 53.
Also see Brenda Murphy, ed. Critical Insights: Arthur Miller (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2011).
Arthur Miller, Timebends (New York: Penguin, 1987), 133.
Arthur Miller, All My Sons (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), 68–69.
Barry Gross, “All My Sons and the Larger Context,” Modern Drama 18, no. 1 (1975): 16.
Alice Louchheim “Script to Stage: Case History of a Set,” New York Times Magazine, December 19, 1951, 24.
Jo Mielziner, “Scenery in This Play?,” New York Times, October 22, 1939, Art sec. 1.
Ronn Smith and Arnold Aronson have described Mielziner’s style as “theatrical” or “poetic realism,” phrases also used to express the lyricism of Miller Williams’ dramas during this period. Ronn Smith, “American Theatre Design since 1945,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. 3: Post-World War II to the 1990s, eds. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 516.
Arnold Aronson, “American Theatre in Context: 1945-Present,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. 3: Post-World War II to the 1990s, eds. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96.
Mary C. Henderson, “Post Mielzinerism, or What If,” Theatre Design and Technology 37, no. 3 (2001): 19.
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 11.
Kazan wrote that the design also significantly shaped his directorial vision. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 361.
Linda Kintz, “The Sociosymbolic Work of Family in Death of a Salesman,” Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman, ed. Matthew C. Roudané (New York: MLA, 1995), 103–4.
Quoted by Christopher Bigsby, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, ed. Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 3.
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present, revised and updated ed. (New York: Harper, 1995), 421.
Brooks Atkinson, “‘Death of a Salesman,’ a New Drama by Arthur Miller, Has Premiere at the Morosco,” The New York Times, February 11, 1949.
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© 2012 Christin Essin
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Essin, C. (2012). The Designer as Cultural Critic. In: Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137108395_3
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