Stage Designers in Early Twentieth-Century America: Artists, Activists, Cultural Critics by Christin Essin (review)

“As a visual language that increasingly bridged theatrical stages and everyday landscapes, design emerged as a significant presence and influence in American culture,” writes Christin Essin (12). In this book, Essin breaks with traditional style-based approaches to design in favor of a cultural historical survey. Five chapters identify novel aspects of designers’ influence: authorship, cultural criticism, activism, entrepreneurship, and global cartography. Through case studies of projects from 1912 through 1964, Essin convincingly argues that designers “actively critiqued and shaped Americans’ perception of the era’s changing social landscapes” (4).

The first chapter asserts that designers “gained legitimacy as modern theatre artists” through authorship (19). Essin reads Theatre Arts Monthly as a primary venue for designers to share work and engage in lively debates. She then argues that other print publications continued to expand discourses of scenic modernism in the 1920s, both domestically (Norman Bel Geddes’ 1921 The Divine Comedy) and abroad (Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones’s Continental Stagecraft). Final examples contend that Lee Simonson’s publications documented professional practices, especially The Stage Is Set (1932) and Aline Bernstein’s novels and children’s publications were an alternative authorship strategy to the work of her male peers. Essin productively analyzes authorship in light of growing magazine audiences and the 1910s publishing marketplace. However, the discussion of 1930s and ’40s authorship, particularly of Simonson’s work, lacks similar contextual detail.

Essin’s next chapter effectively shows how scenic design work was “cultural criticism.” Through three pairs of designs depicting city life, the chapter asserts that designers “challenged audiences to see the places they represented through modern eyes” (53). Discussion of David Belasco and Jones disavows the naturalism/abstraction paradigm typical of such comparisons, instead crediting both artists with critique of urbanism: Belasco by reproducing the “convenient, consistent, and efficient” Childs restaurant, and Jones by juxtaposing commercial/public and domestic/private spaces in The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. Bel Geddes’ Dead End and Howard Bay’s One-Third of a Nation are seen to critique housing policy, and a further case study compares Mordecai Gorelik’s design for All My Sons and Jo Mielziner’s Death of a Salesman design as versions of suburban domesticity. This chapter is especially successful because of Essin’s apt explanation of designers’ processes, insightful readings of design as visual metaphor, and generous support with renderings and photographs.

Chapter 3 finds that designers contributed to modern political causes through the somewhat ambiguous category of “scenographic activism”: “scenography produced in affiliation with an organization dedicated to sociopolitical action” (97). While the examples considered are new and instructive, the chapter sidesteps discussion of designers’ individual political views, and as a result the designer’s activist voice becomes conflated with that of the producing organization. Jones’s Paterson strike pageant design, Bernstein’s teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and Bay’s Power design garner needed attention here. Essin’s discussion of Federal Theatre Project photographs is especially notable; images of theatre laborers back on the job during One-Third of a Nation “celebrate the fundamental worth of the American worker and their right to earn a living wage” (120). By linking labor documentation to Bay’s design, Essin synthesizes Living Newspaper aesthetics and the economic history of Depression-era labor.

Chapter 4 bridges designers’ scenic artistry with their extra-theatrical commissions, introducing “design entrepreneurship” as a conceptual link between typically unassociated elements of designers’ careers. Joseph Urban’s designs for Ziegfeld revues become the impetus for marketing his commercial designs in fashion and home goods, and Bel Geddes’ immersive staging of Max Reinhardt’s 1924 The Miracle is identified as an influence on his industrial design output. While the link between theatre and commercial design has been well-covered by Arnold Aronson, Christopher Innes, and Marlis Schweitzer, Essin’s study argues that theatre expertise was not merely a prelude to commercial success, but integral to it. By...