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This season, Mike Nichols has done a magical resuscitation of the 1949 Death of a Salesman, recreating the original pitch-perfect set and sound designs by Jo Mielziner and Alex North for his new revival. Nichols’ choice lends his production an intense melancholy—the play’s innate sense of loss is compounded by designs’ reminder that lost theater is lost theater: barring productions like this Salesman, most shows live on only in memory or photography.
Or, for that matter, drawing. In 1965 Salesman designer Mielziner published Designing for the Theatre: A Memoir and a Portfolio. This remarkable book—an absolute must-own for any theater-enthusiast—features an astonishing collection of Mielziner’s sketches and paintings for some of the 20th century’s most iconic shows, among them the original productions of The Glass Menagerie, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Gypsy.
Here’s Streetcar:
And Guys and Dolls:
But the crown jewel of the book is unquestionably Death of a Salesman. An extended essay details its entire design process, and several pages feature beautiful, full-color paintings (the image at the top of this post also serves as the book’s cover).
There’s plenty of great backstage dish, as well as some preliminary sketches Mielziner worked out with director Elia Kazan in Boston, September 1948.
Even if the waves of time do wash playgoing into a sea of forgetfulness, books like these stay that process, at least a little. So flip through the drawings, take a whiff, and ride back to the plays of old. It’s a melancholy ride, but a good one, too.
Like this:
Someone must be focus-grouping hands these days…
Either way, Fiasco Theater’s “Cymbeline” is a wonderful off-Broadway jaunt. The antique scholars quoted in the program angrily remark on the “absurdity,” “confusion,” and “impossibility” of the play, one of Shakespeare’s late Romances, but Fiasco makes theatrical virtues out of these perceived downfalls. See it if only for the magical “bedroom scene,” one of the most beautiful and gripping scenes ever committed to the stage.
Vera Farmiga in "Higher Ground (L), Lily Rabe & Josh Hamliton in "A Doll's House," (R)
“The Walkout:” It’s an ideal 11 o’clock moment, that instant your hero shouts, “Enough!” then marches out the door, leaving the familiar behind for the unknown.
A film and a play recently made Grade A hay out of this conceit. The first, Vera Farmiga’s “Higher Ground,” examines one woman’s life journey in and out of faith; the second, “A Doll’s House” (which I saw in revival at Williamstown) presents a wife no longer at home with that title. Each woman makes a dramatic exit, and each gives a wrenching, final-hour address in why she’s leaving and what she clings to as – click click – her heels take her into uncertainty and solitude.
We’ve all seen what I like to call Sad Summer Shakespeares, limp little salads of productions wilted by their naïve enthusiasm and self-important claims of universalism. Mix your fork around in one of these creations too intently, sniff a little too hard, and the dramaturgy, acting, and storytelling reveal themselves as pallid cauliflower, rubbery carrots, and decaying lettuce. Waiter, thanks but no thanks!
The scene of the Sad Summer Shakespeare crime is usually a public park, a civics center, or a geriatric watering hole. “Accessible Shakespeare!” or “Shakespeare for everyone!” is the rallying call of their half-baked director-chefs. Throw together one of those old Bardic standards for The People, they seem to believe, and you’re golden.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this idea – on paper it sounds pretty ideal. (Sometimes it is: the Public’s free Shakespeare in the Park is often a heart-quickening confluence of space, audience, and thought—a Wolfgang Puck of a summer salad, as it were.)
