Rebellious Birds, Deer Heads, and Other Stuffed Obsessions: An Annotated Portfolio of Work by Marsha Ginsberg

I first met Marsha Ginsberg in the fall of 2001 at Dartmouth College, where she was a visiting designer. Ginsberg's training is in the visual arts; as an undergraduate at Cooper Union she focused on conceptual photo and text-based art, influenced by mentors Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger. After graduating, Ginsberg spent a year as a studio artist in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and then moved to London where she began to develop an interest in theater, attending productions such as Peter Stein's The Hairy Ape and Giorgio Strehler's Arlequino. After receiving her M.F.A. at N.Y.U., Ginsberg began to design for the stage and, in 1992, received a TCG grant to apprentice with numerous American directors and designers, including Robert Israel, Martha Clarke, George Tsypin, Robert Woodruff, and Robert Wilson. Since then, Ginsberg has designed for the Tectonic Theater, Target Margin Theater, Theater for the New City, the Long Beach Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and the National Theater of Mannheim.

Rooted in installation art rather than traditional scenography, Ginsberg's aesthetic investigates enclosed architectural spaces—domestic, industrial, and bureaucratic. Some of her designs foreground a house on stage, whether split down the middle, as in Elektra, or presented panoramically, as in Bluebeard's Castle. In these productions, "home" becomes an uncomfortable site, a place where the voyeurism of theater is questioned by the staging of domestic spaces. Formally, Ginsberg approaches many of her designs as a photographer, by looking through a camera lens and viewing space as a grid. From portrait to still life to interior, her extensive photographic work—either exploratory or autonomous—enables her to approach space rhythmically. The subject of many of her theater designs is the slicing and representing of different depths of enclosed spaces. At once intimate and chaotically violent, her designs, as architect Michael Maltzan points out, "both rely upon and simultaneously dismantle the Modernist project." Perhaps this approach stems in part from Ginsberg's strong engagement with contemporary German and Swiss theater and opera, inspired by the work of directors Josi Wieler, Christoph Marthaler, and Frank Castorf, and designers Anna Viebroch and Bert Neumann.

Recently, Ginsberg designed the set and costumes for In Mahler's Shadow, a compilation of staged performances of Mahler's "Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen" and "Symphony No. 4" in chamber transcriptions by Schoenberg and Stein, produced by the Eos Orchestra at the Ethical Culture Society in New York. The opera was conducted by Jonathan Sheffer and directed by Christopher Alden. Photographs of Berlin taken by Ginsberg on a recent visit proved invaluable to her design formulation, which presented a dilapidated room pasted with torn, stained wallpapers. Midway through the performance, a visual tapestry of tattered stuffed animals was pinned to the upstage wall, a parodic pastoral image set against the last movement of Mahler's "Symphony No. 4." The two singers, like the room they inhabited, were represented as if in the process of becoming extinct, their bruised bodies testifying to the ruins of Mahler's world.

When I spoke with her, Ginsberg was working on a design for Bizet's Carmen, also directed by Christopher Alden, scheduled to open in June 2003 at the National Theater in Mannheim. Her model for the opera presented...