Abstract
Robert Edmond Jones’s collected papers at the Harvard Theatre Collection include numerous drafts of lectures he developed on practices of stage design and the state of the contemporary American theatre. In 1940, Jones traveled the country on a lecture circuit, speaking to students at a number of colleges and universities about his professional experiences and, more significantly, his projections for a future theatre that would capture the modern spirit of the nation.1 While many of his colleagues had by then left the theatre for lucrative opportunities in film or industrial design, Jones remained dedicated to an idealized vision of the American theatre, one that might still emerge from the hands of the next generation. He urged his audiences to create a “new and vital form of theatrical expression” that connected with contemporary spectators.2 What the modern theatre needed most were young artists with a “dramatic imagination,” the ability to help spectators see more beauty in the mind’s eye than on the literal stage, to lift them to a place of poetic contemplation and heightened awareness. Jones published a compilation of his lectures in The Dramatic Imagination (1941) in which he directly hailed young artists as his principle readership. He encouraged them to “take the little gift we have into the hall of the gods,” to use the stage to realize an American theatre that embodied the spirit of modern living.3
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Notes
Ralph Pendleton, ed. The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1958).
Robert Edmond Jones, The Dramatic Imagination (New York: Theatre Arts, 1941), 91.
Thomas Alan Bloom, Kenneth Macgowan and the Aesthetic Paradigm for the New Stagecraft in America (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 68–74. Baker’s influence in the American theatre was documented in Theatre Arts Monthly when Stanley Russell McCandless published a US map plotting the locations of Harvard and Radcliffe students working in professional or little theatres.
Jones is listed as a working designer in New York City. “The Baker Map,” Theatre Arts Monthly 9, no. 2 (1925): 106.
Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway designate publication as a “handmaid of nationalization and professionalization” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the United States “expanded geographically and consolidated economically.” A History of the Book in America, Vol. V: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 8.
In a 1923 publication, Oliver Sayler describes Jones as the most important native designer working in the American theatre and lists Simonson and Bel Geddes as Jones’s “chief rivals.” He not only hints at a friendly competition between the three designers, but also notes that they “work in a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect.” Our American Theatre (New York: Brentano’s, 1923), 153.
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author,” in The Essential Foucault, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 1994), 377.
John Rouse, “Textuality and Authority in Theater and Drama: Some Contemporary Possibilities,” in Critical Theory and Performance, eds. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 147
Jo Mielziner, Designing for the Theatre: A Memoir and a Portfolio (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 9.
Howard Bay, Stage Design (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1974), 8.
Clifford Eugene Hamar, “College and University Theatre Instruction in the Early Twentieth Century,” in A History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, ed. Karl Richard Wallace (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954), 572–94.
Kenneth Macgowan’s chapter, “The University Theatre,” in Footlights across America: Towards a National Theater (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), 107–31.
Shannon Jackson’s discussion of early twentieth-century university theatre programs in Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Mark S. Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 3; 9.
Richard Ohmann’s Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996).
James L. W. West, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 24.
Orville K. Larson, Scene Design in the American Theatre from 1915 to 1960 (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1989), 46.
Dorothy Chansky, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2004), 82.
Olga Taxidou, Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998,) 3.
Sheldon Cheney, “The Most Important Thing in the Theatre,” Theatre Arts Magazine 1, no. 4 (1917): 171.
DeAnna M. Toten Beard, Sheldon Cheney’s Theatre Arts Magazine: Promoting a Modern American Theatre, 1916–1921 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 4.
Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2.
Sheldon Cheney, “The Stage Designs of A. A. Andries,” Theatre Arts Magazine 1, no. 1 (1916): 23.
Sheldon Cheney, “Cloyd Head’s Grotesques,” Theatre Arts Magazine 1, no. 1 (1916): 15.
Hiram Kelly Moderwell, “The Art of Robert Edmond Jones,” Theatre Arts Magazine 1, no. 2 (1917): 50–61.
Hiram Kelly Moderwell, “A Note about Lee Simonson,” Theatre Arts Magazine 2, no. 1 (1917): 15.
Lee Simonson, “The Painter and the Stage,” Theatre Arts Magazine 2, no. 1 (1917): 6.
Sheldon Cheney, “The Exhibition of American Stage Designs at the Bourgeois Galleries,” Theatre Arts Magazine 3, no. 2 (1919): 81.
Rollo Peters, “The Newest Art,” Theatre Arts Magazine 2, no. 3 (1918): 120.
Herman Rosse, “Artificiality and Reality in the Future Theatre,” Theatre Arts Magazine 3, no. 2 (1919): 97.
Rollo Peters, “If I Must,” Theatre Arts Magazine 3, no. 2 (1919): 98.
Raymond Johnson, “The New Stage Designing,” Theatre Arts Magazine 3, no. 2 (1919): 122.
Norman Bel Geddes, “The Theatre of the Future,” Theatre Arts Magazine 3, no. 2 (1919): 123.
Bruce Bliven, “Norman-Bel Geddes: His Art and Ideas,” Theatre Arts Magazine 3, no. 3 (1919): 179–90.
Norman Bel Geddes, A Project for a Theatrical Presentation of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (New York: Theatre Arts, 1924), 7.
Kenneth Macgowan, “The Next Theatre,” Theatre Arts Magazine 5, no. 4 (1921): 310.
Bel Geddes was introduced to Craig’s theories through Moderwell’s The Theatre of To-day (London: John Lane, 1914).
Jennifer Davis Roberts, Norman Bel Geddes: An Exhibition of Theatrical and Industrial Designs (Austin, TX: Michener Galleries, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1979), 8.
Norman Bel Geddes, Miracle in the Evening, ed. William Kelley (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 248.
Norman Bel Geddes, Horizons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), 156.
Fredrick J. Hunter also describes Bel Geddes’s working process in “Norman Bel Geddes’ Conception of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy,’” Educational Theatre Journal 18, no. 3 (1966): 238–46.
Martin Puchner, “Manifesto = Theatre,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (2002): 451.
Sheldon Cheney, “The International Exhibition in Amsterdam,” Theatre Arts Magazine 6, no. 2 (1922): 140.
Christopher Innes, Designing Modern America: Broadway to Main Street (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 30.
Innes cites a series of publications that ran images of Bel Geddes’s Divine Comedy Design, including the journals Theatre Arts (1921).
Dana Sue McDermott, “The Apprenticeship of Robert Edmond Jones,” Theatre Survey 29, no. 2 (1988): 195.
Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 57–58.
Kenneth Macgowan, The Theatre of Tomorrow (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 13.
Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, Continental Stagecraft (New York: Harcourt, 1922), ix.
Lee Simonson, The Stage Is Set (New York: Theatre Arts, 1963), 17–18.
Lee Simonson, “Settings and Costumes in the United States,” in Settings and Costumes of the Modern Stage, with Theodore Komisarjevsky (London: Studio Limited, 1933), 95.
Lee Simonson, Part of a Lifetime: Drawings and Designs 1919–1940 (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), 67.
Raynette Halvorsen Smith, “Where Are the American Women Scene Designers?,” Theatre Design and Technology 24, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 54.
Aline Bernstein, Three Blue Suits (New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1933), 10.
Aline Bernstein, “Scissors and Sense,” Theatre Arts Monthly 9, no. 8 (1925): 515–16.
Richard Kennedy, “Forward,” in My Other Loneliness: Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Aline Bernstein, ed. Suzannne Stutman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), xix.
Aline Bernstein, The Journey Down (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), 130.
Aline Bernstein, The Martha Washington Doll Book (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1945), n.p.
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© 2012 Christin Essin
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Essin, C. (2012). The Designer as Author. 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_2
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