“As you get older, you begin to gather all these models,” world-famous set designer Ming Cho Lee lamented. “And what the hell do you do with them?”
Lee found an answer: He allowed those models — intricate scale models of theater sets he as done over the past 40 years for theaters all around the country — to go on display at Yale University.
The exhibit, Stage Designs by Ming Cho Lee, is at the Yale School of Architecture’s Paul Rudolph Gallery at 180 York St. through Feb. 1. It will be followed this spring by a 300-page hardcover art book, Ming Cho Lee — A Life in Design, written by Arnold Aronson and published by Theatre Communications Group.
Even with the School of Drama and the School of Architecture, as well the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, joining up to plan the Stage Designs exhibit, a “what the hell do you do with them?” element remained.
“This is the only space in New Haven that could show the work,” Lee explained while leading a private opening-reception tour of the exhibit this past Thursday night. “Others can’t show three-dimensional stuff.” The set models are box-bound dioramas, layered and detailed and about a foot deep. They can’t be stacked up or hung on walls. You need some space around them so you can appreciate them from different angles, just as you might perceive a play differently depending on which section of the auditorium you might sit in.
Lee, who is generally considered one of the most influential stage designers of the late 20th century, explained how he and the exhibit’s curators have arranged the designs thematically.
A whole section is devoted to the shows he designed over a period of 12 years (from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s) for Joe Papp’s New York Public Theater.
Another section that’s just Shakespeare plays, and another of operas, and another of the many designs Lee has done for regional theaters around the country.
Clear enough. Yet each section shows such diversity and breadth that no categories could properly contain them. The designs range from virtually bare stages (whether for Shakespeare’s Macbeth or for an evening of Samuel Beckett one-acts) to a tunnel of archways (for the ballet The Firebird) to fantastical color-filled landscapes (Ibsen’s epic odyssey-play Peer Gynt, Alberto Ginastera’s Spanish opera Bomarzo) to hyperrealism (Eugene O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten, a co-production for New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre and Hartford Stage).
At the opening event, Lee told long, involved stories about several of the productions he designed, while constantly noting the indispensable contributions of all the other people designed in the theater-making process. He discussed the rare times when, instead of the usual practice of being asked to design a set for a show that had already been chosen and scheduled, he was allowed to help in the selection process. “There’s nothing worse than when a designer is in a leadership position,” Lee warned. “Because you are not. You are not in charge of the actors.” The labels displaying information about each model don’t stop with the title of the production; they list the playwright, the director, the lighting and costume designers, and the assistant designers who helped Lee with his own aspect of the collective vision.
Christopher Arnott Photo
The pedestals for some of the models are also stenciled with Lee’s own comments on his career. “Still in my white period,” one reads. “Always wanted to do a black and white Othello,” reads another. “Set in 1941 — it worked remarkably well.”
Lee paused for a few minutes at a series of models from various scenes he designed for Deborah Rogin’s The Woman Warrior, a play based on works by Maxine Hong Kingston. “This was the first time I dealed with an Asian theme,” the designer noted, then launched into anecdotes about his Chinese upbringing the experience of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Hear that fascinating autobiographical aside here:
While it’s hard not to look at a gallery exhibit of set designs and not salivate over what the entire productions of such exorbitant shows as Don Juan (at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage in 1979) or Boris Gudunov (for the Metropolitan Opera Company in ’74) must have been like, Ming Cho Lee’s designs also stand alone as fine works of art. Fellow set designer Michael Yeargan, a colleague of Lee’s at Yale, noted that not just the designs but the scale models which extol them are gallery-worthy. Today, such models are made quickly with laser-cutting techniques and other shortcuts, Yeargan said. “All these models were hand-done. They have a glow around them that contemporary models don’t.”
In fact, Ming Cho Lee has always told his students to get professional art training, beyond the tehnical and architectural skills required for set design. He recalled how “fantastic” it was for him as an undergrad at Occidental College in the late 1940s, being able to draw nude figures, at a time when Harvard students weren’t afforded the same live-model resources.
The Yale exhibit acknowledges Lee’s prowess as an artist outside of prosceniums and auditoriums by devoting a whole wall of the gallery spaces to a couple of dozen watercolor paintings he’s done. Lee, who turned 83 last month, joked that he stopped painting in this manner because “they were too good. They didn’t look like they were done by an old man.”
There’s certainly little that outdated or jaded or old-school about the art of Ming Cho Lee. His sets, his paintings and his career as a teacher are imbued with a special vitality. It’s the ever-lively quality of passionate collaboration — with other designers, with directors, with producers, with audiences, and now with curators.