Episode 107: Tracing the Rise of the Professional Scenic Designer w/ Dr. David Bisaha

0:00Hi, and welcome to the Theatre History Podcast. I'm Mike Leaguer. There are many roles and jobs in the modern theatre that we might assume have always existed, more or less the same as they are now.

0:30But there's a history behind many of the positions whose existence we just take for granted, including the job of scenic designer. Today, we're joined by Dr. David Bissea, whose new book, American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism, explores how scenic designers established their own specific roles in the American theatre, differentiating themselves from other workers, such as scene painters and carpenters. David is an associate professor at Binghamton University, and the curator of the Theatre History Collection there.

1:01David, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Mike. It's a pleasure to be talking to you. As I mentioned in the intro, the role of scenic designer is actually pretty new in the history of the theatre. What was scenic design like, maybe at least in the American theatre, before the 20th century? One of the first things to think about is that scenic design was always happening in the theatre. Kind of like it's often talked about in directing, even before there was someone known as the director, there was someone doing the work of directing.

1:33In the American theatre for scenic design, most of that work was done by people called scenic artists. They thought of themselves primarily as painters. They specialized in painting drops and flats for theatres. And it was a lot more like easel or fine art painting than scenic design as we now think of it. It was primarily two-dimensional. What made it good was having accuracy to the real world, or multiple points of interest in the same frame, something like that. And the way you got that scenery, the way it was made, sort of depended on which theatre you were at.

2:07So if you were, say, outside a big city or at a smaller theatre, in the 19th century, you probably ordered your scenery. You probably went to a catalogue and looked at the forests and the castles and the inns that you had, and you said, I'll take Forest 3 and Castle 2, and that was what you had. You might have had a painter on staff to do a couple of special things. You might have pulled some furniture from stock. But by and large, there was a sort of mail-order business. And you get the scenery in, you unpack it, you hang it, and you go. In bigger theatres, say, in New York City or in other major theatre centres in late 19th, early 20th century,

2:43you would have a scenic artist on staff. And that scenic artist might look at a new script and design something new. Actually, it was more often they would look at an outline for a script rather than the full script. You have a lot of instances of scenic designers doing work before they even see the whole thing. And that's quite a bit different than the way we think about design today. These scenic artists were either working for a scenic design company in New York City, kind of like the catalogue companies, or they were working for a producer. And that model looked a lot like, I don't know if you're familiar with the movie The Producers, when the director brings all of his designers down who were on staff.

3:16It was kind of like that. And so the scenic artist would read the script or the treatment, do a couple of sketches, build a model. And the model was actually the primary communication artifact, if you want to think of it that way. The carpenters and the painters who worked, worked from models, not from renderings, as they would now. And then that would be built and put onto stage. A couple of other exceptions here for melodramas, for instance. Melodramas that had big machinery, had completely new sets, and they were really elaborate. A lot of engineers worked on those. But your regular shows, your typical shows, your traveling shows, variety shows, anything like that,

3:51would have been in one of those two systems. And what's backstage is really, or upstage, I should say, is really background. It's a painting that is a background for the action. And that means that people who are doing it are thinking themselves as painting artists rather than designers. So that's the situation really kind of up to the end of the 19th century. And then in the early 20th century, we get something called the New Stagecraft. What was that?

4:21And how did it reflect how the standards for theatrical scenery, scenic design, how those things were changing by the early 1900s? So New Stagecraft is the term for the American sort of import of modernism, modern art, modern art aesthetics into the American theater. It starts somewhere around 1910 or 1915 when it starts to show up in major cities like Boston and New York. But it's something that had been going on, this modernism on stage in Europe.

4:52And that's where you look to people like Edward Gordon Craig, the director designer, Adolf Appia, the director Max Reinhardt, for instance. All of these individuals from their own positions were trying to do a different sort of thing with their scenery on stage. So it wasn't just about realism. It wasn't just about, you know, those points of interest or the sort of pictorial composition of the scenery. It was about creating a scenic environment that could add content, add idea, theme, mood to what was going on on stage. And in many cases, it's a lot more abstract as well, sort of in line with modern art, European modern art, I should say, aesthetics in the early 20th century.

5:29So some of those productions, Reinhardt's in particular, tore to the United States in the 1900s, 1910 or so. And people see them and get excited about this new style. In some other cases, there are designers or directors that actually go to Europe and look at a bunch of things happening in England and France and Germany and all of those places and then want to bring that modern abstract style back. And so a designer like Joseph Urban, who was actually an Austrian born and trained designer, comes and does new stagecraft-ish things first in Boston and then New York in that decade.

6:00Robert Edmund Jones, an American designer, who's often cited as the sort of father of new stagecraft, does a production in 1915 called The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, which is an interesting title, I guess, but had a sort of Bauhaus-y, art deco-y set that was also seen to be very modern and sort of kicked off this movement. It's also happening at the same time that American playwriting is modernizing and a different type of entertainment, the sort of art theater is also getting going in New York and elsewhere.

6:32So there are a bunch of designers who are working in this new way, doing more modern, more abstract, more sort of creative or interpretive designs on stage. They are all doing designs tailor-made for each production. They're doing that suggestion and thematic work behind the scenes as they're developing it. And then that continues through. It sort of takes over Broadway and then becomes very much the way that design is taught and practiced in the sort of early to mid-20th century in the U.S.

7:03It almost sort of sounds like it's this whole new job, in a sense, that they're creating. And in fact, in the intro to your book, you say, and here I'm quoting you directly, from approximately 1915 to 1940, scenic designers established themselves as a new type of creative artist. So how did they do that? How do you sort of create a whole new type of artist? And what did that mean for how they saw themselves in relation to the various other groups of theater workers? It has a lot to do with labor, and it has a lot to do with the sort of economics of what people are expected to do and how they get paid for it.

7:42So these new stagecraft designers like Robert Edmund Jones and Urban, other people like Lee Simonson or Mordecai Garelic, Norman Bel Geddes, mostly what they say they're going to do is work as what we now call the designer. This is someone who specifies what a set should look like, but is not primarily responsible for making it or supervising other people who are making it. So those scenic artists before also did the painting, or they were in charge of a group of people who also did the painting, and they sort of made sure that it worked.

8:12The new stagecraft designers are supervisory to an extent. They visit, they see things in practice up on the paint frame. But their main job is to create the blueprints, to create the documentation that will help other people create the set. And so in that way, it's a lot like the way we think of an architect, as someone who designs the building but is not responsible for actually building the building. Once this idea becomes popular in the art theaters and moves to Broadway, it gets written into labor contracts from the union. Again, producers find they want to work this way with a designer that comes on maybe a little bit earlier, maybe a little bit more influentially in the process.

8:50And the designer becomes a part of what we now call the creative team on a commercial show or a Broadway show. So it's a little bit hard to say exactly how they did it, except by requiring that that was the way that they were going to do it. If you want this new style of set, here's how we work. And then that new style of working became codified as it was repeated by multiple producers hiring them and as it was inscribed in sort of the union's regulations for how designers ought to work.

9:21Yeah. And in particular, you sort of talk about how this model of work is changing. And as these scenic designers emerge as professionals, as this new sort of type of artist, they also become freelancers rather than salaried employees of one particular theater company. What happened there? And what effect did that have? Yeah, the term freelance, I think, is important for us to understand what they were doing. And it's in the title of my book, but it's not a period term. So the word freelance wasn't used much at the time.

9:52And when it was, it was like a political term. It wasn't really used to talk about to talk about artists. But when we use the term freelance, we're talking about someone who was sort of in charge of their working life. And new stagecraft designers' working lives looked a lot like current day scenic designers' working lives. They had their own studios that they maintained in their home or in a place of work that was separate from their contracting theaters. They worked with assistants and other staff in some cases. They worked for multiple productions and producers at once.

10:22So they're sort of running all over town, meeting with this production that is starting up and checking on this one that's in progress and going to see a show at night. So that sort of concept of someone working for themselves and working on many productions at once, I think, is best encapsulated by the term freelance for us. So what that did is it sort of changed the way that design was thought of in the theater. It put creative authority, creative responsibility on these designers' shoulders, if you want to think of it that way.

10:58Some designers started to get name recognition because you saw them not just with one producer, but now as a kind of brand, maybe, or a kind of identity. Oh, this is a Robert Edmund Jones set. Oh, this is later a Joe Malziner set. There was a style that you could identify with them. So that's one of the big effects. You know, the designers sort of separate from being backstage labor that's mostly invisible to something that's more visible, not just on the program or the marquee, maybe, probably not, but something that people saw.

11:30It also tended to collect a lot of labor. And this is maybe a little bit more of a historical point. But because you're a freelancer and you're no longer tied to a producer or tied to one company, you can do more shows at once. And there's a consolidation around maybe six to ten designers in the 20s and 30s that are doing a lot of the work. This is both positive and negative. It's positive because it sort of allows them to make those changes that I was talking about in their labor. It allows them to advocate within the union. They have more sway with the producers in getting, say, increased fees or, you know, this new model gets accepted faster because there are fewer people doing it.

12:07And they can sort of all move and lockstep together and ask for these things. But on the negative side, fewer people are working. And the people who are working are tending to do more things. They're sort of swallowing up a lot of the air. And so if you're a younger designer that's coming up behind those sort of big new stagecraft designers, it was quite a bit more difficult to get work. And there's also quite a bit of sort of in-group bias that leaks in as well. And I talk about that in the book as well. Yeah. And you sort of touched on this a moment ago. So some of these designers, as that field consolidates and as they become a bigger deal, some of them kind of almost become theatrical celebrities of a sort.

12:45Why and what effect does that have? Some are known in the theater because they have a sort of distinctive way of looking at things that the theater literati or theaterati, I guess, are interested in. But others sort of intentionally make a step outside into other types of either the society pages or production of goods. A couple of examples. So I mentioned Joseph Urban, the Austrian designer who comes and does work in Boston and then does a lot of work through Ziegfeld, actually, in New York in the 20s.

13:20So he didn't stay with theater and he was trained as an architect in Austria. So he did interior design. He did fashion design. And his name became associated with luxury goods in the 1920s, largely through his association with the Ziegfeld Follies and some of his other work. He actually designed the interior decor and exterior decoration, I guess, for the Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, which we may know about. Marjorie Post, the serial heiress, built it and got Joseph Urban, this well-known luxury product designer, to come down and do her estate.

13:58I also talk a little bit in the book about Norman Valgettis, who was more sort of a middle class figure. He did a lot of industrial and product design. He was responsible for introducing streamlining to America. He did sort of theme entertainment design, quite famously. At the 1939 World's Fair, he designed with Ford's sponsorship a theme attraction called Futurama that is largely responsible for creating car culture in a lot of people's minds, for envisioning the highway system.

14:28You sort of were in this Disney style, before Disney, theme ride that tracked along the city of the future. And there were all of these highways going through. And this was all Valgettis' design. So both of those men, Urban and Belgettis, sort of started in theater, then took that expertise in theater into more national, let's say, well-known, you know, not theater-specific styles. And that move into, you know, I can do all of these things with design. I'm not just a theater designer. I'm a designer of all types. Sort of bled over into other theater designers, too.

14:59So some of the other designers that we see who stay more to the theater are also doing Thanksgiving Day parades, or they're doing advertisement. A number had their costumes or pieces of their design in department stores in the 20s and 30s. So everyone is trying to access a little bit of this corporatization, perhaps, a little bit of this diversification. And that's possible because they have made themselves responsible for the designs and made people know that they're responsible for those designs.

15:31It's that idea of the creative genius that is starting to get going. And then you buy your, I don't know, Belgettis cocktail shaker or your Lee Simonson hat or whatever it is. So as the sort of profile of the scenic designer gets elevated, as it becomes this professional discipline, that means that there now has to be, of course, some sort of educational training program at the college level, which is where Donald Owenslager comes in. Who was he? And how did his course at Yale reflect the changes in how scenic designers thought about their career paths?

16:04Donald Owenslager was one of these new stagecraft designers. He had a lot of work on Broadway in the 20s and 30s. And importantly, he was the head of the scenic design program at the Yale School of Drama from its beginning as the Department of Drama in 1925, and Owenslager retired in 1970. So he worked there for 45 years, and he set up the scenic design curriculum. This curriculum became really influential, first to his students, but also to people who were looking to create their own MFA programs, their own design programs or even bachelor's level study.

16:39There hadn't been university level, well, sustained university level study and design before Yale created it, really. And Owenslager took from his own experience. He borrowed from the architecture department. He borrowed from some other places and sort of built the idea of how you do studio-based design education at the graduate level. And this is pretty important to, well, theater and, you know, people who now have or are in BFA and MFA programs, certainly. But it's also important to thinking about the idea of professionalism and how professional careers are made.

17:13We sort of accept that professions have professional schools like a business school, a law school, a medical school, those types of things. But it can be something that we just sort of acknowledge or see is out there in the world and don't really, really think about. Universities are making investments in a particular type of professional school to raise their profile. Particularly, this is the case with Yale, who was really going out on a limb in, you know, 1925 to build the School of Drama. No one else had done that. There was undergraduate study.

17:43There were a couple of other departments where you could do theater. Theater, often that was attached to a speech department or a literature department. But Yale is saying, and they actually do say this in some of their archived newspapers announcements for the School of Drama. They say, you know, we're going to create a school like a law school. We're going to make a school for professionals of the theater. And I think even just a statement like that, and of course, the existence of a school is pretty important in saying theater people can be professionals or professionalized. And here is how you do it.

18:14We are going to show you how to do that. So George Pierce Baker, who founded the School of Drama at Yale in 25, what's now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. I feel like I have to say that for some reason. So he brings in Owen Slogger. He brings in Owen Slogger, who he knows, who actually had gone through a different education program to some extent with Baker at Harvard, where he was before Yale. And Owen Slogger says to George Pierce Baker, OK, I will come, I will do your program, but I will not give up my career.

18:47I am not going to be a professor that stays close to Yale and doesn't have the four, five, six productions on a year that I expect to have. And indeed, he did have later on in his career. So after a couple of years of figuring this out, Owen Slogger cuts this deal where he teaches on campus at Yale and New Haven once or twice a week. He takes the train up for very long days and the rest of his week is spent in New York City designing, running his studio, going to shows. And he sets this model for students, I think, especially for design students, about what their responsibility is.

19:20In Yale, the School of Drama's archives, there are lectures that Owen Slogger gave. And one of the first lectures he gives in his first year design student class is, you know, your job is to study here. And over the course of your time here, I think what he says is transition from Yale to New York. You need to be looking at the New York season as the goal, not what we do here on campus. This is training. But what is real is what I am doing, what you see me and other professors, many of them doing and building this professional career.

19:53And that's, again, quite a bit different than what other universities were providing, capitalizing also on the proximity of New Haven to New York City and this ability to do that. People talk a lot about, you know, how special Yale was in the sort of history of theater education. And it absolutely was. And from the design perspective, I think it's in part because Owen Slogger was modeling this professional career. Yes, you can teach. That is a part of what you do. You are also maintaining this career where you have openings on, you know, a Thursday night after you've taught all day on Thursday and you take the train down, which is grueling and, you know, not accessible to everyone.

20:31But it also kind of set a model that a lot of his students in those classes, a lot of people who were looking to him who maybe weren't at Yale were also teaching design students at the time. Now, as this new sort of professional class of scenic designers is emerging, you're mentioning how it's consolidating. It's really not maybe more than a dozen people or so. And beyond just the fact that a smaller group like that is going to exclude people, some of the people who got left out were left out for reasons that didn't really have anything to do with their ability to do scenic design.

21:04How did this play out in the first half of the 20th century? And who usually got left out of this new exclusive group of designers? We may not think about this directly, but just the idea of professionalization is exclusive. A professional group of people exists because they share some characteristic and it may be a characteristic that we sort of agree is good or useful, like a degree or skills or, you know, interest in the field or adherence to sort of ethics and good behavior.

21:37But there are always criteria for membership in a professional organization. And in many cases, especially in the early 20th century, it's possible for other forms of exclusion to sort of creep in. And indeed, they did into the union, into some of the other institutions that have held design professionalization. So I'm talking about racism. I'm talking about sexism. And it was quite a bit more difficult for women designers, for black designers, for other designers of color to get a sustained professional career, to join the union, which was a requirement for this highest tier, highest paying tier, I should say, of Broadway work.

22:14And this tendency of professional organizations to, I think, rightfully, but also problematically, protect their own interests tended to create this vast majority of white, mostly Christian men who were in charge of the union in the early 20th century. Now, I also need to say that there were places that women and black artists, other artists, workers of color were able to work. They were able to join unions. But in many cases, those contributions were contingent in some way.

22:44So, for instance, in Washington, D.C., there was a long running what was called auxiliary local of IATSE, the stagehands union. It was called IATSE 244A. 244 was the white union and 244 auxiliary was the black union. And this segregation existed, I think, until about 1980 in Washington, D.C. So not fully because of the law, but just because of the power of tradition and these professional groups to look out for their own interests. And it took a long time for this de facto segregation to to go away.

23:18244A in D.C., the stagehands union was a paid dues to its, quote unquote, parent union. And that kind of permission granting contingency control from power is a pattern we see a lot, not just in IATSE, but also in USA, the United Scenic Artists. In there, it's clear, for instance, in the way that the costumers were able to join in the 30s. They also joined, in this case, under associate status, which didn't have all the rights of the full member, but allowed them to do costume work and to be represented in the union.

23:49There were all of these, again, sort of contingencies that were put on groups that were seen to be supportive or seen to be subordinate in some way. And in many cases, those were either, you know, seen to be gendered at the time, like, for instance, the costumers. Or it was, in the case of, you know, 244A, overt racism, overt bias and exclusion. One of the things I really like about the structure of your book is that in most of your chapters, you're kind of going over some of the big picture developments that we've been discussing.

24:20And then you provide something of a counterpoint later on where you say, hey, and here are some of the talents that were being marginalized or, you know, not entirely excluded, but weren't taking center stage, so to speak. There's a whole host of really interesting figures that you mention, and I want to talk about a few of them, beginning perhaps with Aline Bernstein and Perry Watkins. Who were they and why are they important? So Aline Bernstein was the first woman designer member of the Scenic Artists Union, local USA 829, and Perry Watkins was the first Black full member of the union.

25:01And I qualify those because there are other ways, you know, other people, especially women who were a part of the union before Aline Bernstein, but they either were not given full status. In some cases, a few women were just allowed to work because they were skilled, but were never allowed to be a part of the union, and they just sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudged their way, or the union wink, winked at them, and they allowed them to work. So Aline Bernstein, who was a costume and scenic designer, made herself a part of the union in the mid-1920s. She did so after a career primarily, or maybe most significantly, I should say, at the Neighborhood Playhouse, which was an art theater that was outside union jurisdiction and was professionalizing, was becoming more professional, and therefore she needed to have union membership in order to work in this, what was now designated as a commercial theater.

25:50She encountered quite a lot of resistance, she threatened a lawsuit, she brought a lot of social pressure into the union, and this is a story that's been told in a couple of design histories and other histories of Aline Bernstein. A lot of her history, if you happen to Google her, is eclipsed by the fact that she was married to the novelist Thomas Wolfe, and so there's a lot of Thomas Wolfe history that has Aline Bernstein as a supporting character. There's actually a movie with Nicole Kidman and Jude Law in it called Genius about Thomas Wolfe, and I don't know.

26:20We don't give Aline Bernstein quite her due, in part because she's a little bit less legible. So we have the story of her joining the union and doing professional work. We see her working in the 20s and 30s, but she was sort of pushed into costume, away from scenic design, and she did other type of work that maybe wasn't under union jurisdiction as well. She was part of an all-women producing company called Actor Managers Inc., which was founded by Helen Arthur, the sort of producer and performer, from like the mid-20s until the end of the 30s.

26:56And this was a company that was run entirely by women. Aileen Bernstein was the lead designer. Other women were taking roles as directors and producers like Helen Arthur. They produced in Newport, Rhode Island, and in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Wonderful. Also possible because it's a place that is sort of outside this sphere of control that the New York unions have. So I think that's one of the ways that we can look at maybe in particular the careers of women. If we expect to see a long trajectory of the same type of work, and that's what means a good career, that might be the wrong perspective, particularly for these people who have been marginalized.

27:33And in the case of Bernstein, we see a bunch of different types of work, work that is prolific sometimes and not as prolific in other times. She goes through sort of phases in her career, and it's geographically disparate. Perry Watkins joined the union as well in 1939, also as the result of a lawsuit. And also because he was being asked to design on Broadway after some work with the Federal Theater Project that was really well received. He worked, for instance, on Orson Welles' – it's called the Voodoo Macbeth that he did at the Federal Theater Project.

28:05He designed that. And based on that, he was asked to design a Broadway show called Mamba's Daughters in 38, 39, and therefore needed to join the union because you have to be a union member in order to do a Broadway design. In the 30s, the union was trying to protect its labor, and it wasn't letting people in. It was the middle of the Depression, there wasn't a whole lot of work, and they were really resistant to new members because they had this policy of sort of spreading out available work among active members, and they didn't want to sort of dilute that. And that's what they say prevented Watkins' membership, but it was really racism and not wanting to include a Black designer, in this case, in the union.

28:41But he was able to join, he engaged legal help, he had a lot of social pressure from white and Black artists, designers, but also performers, and other members of the theater sphere at the time. He did a lot of work, again, that wasn't always in design after he was a member of the union. He became a producer and did a couple of well-received Broadway productions. That's another way to get around, to sort of be your own producer in some ways. He didn't actually design those productions that he produced, but he was finding other work.

29:13And while he was working, he also paved the way for other Black artists to join the union and encouraged that, although it took a couple more decades before we have additional Black designers who were joining USA 829. So what I think is important about looking at Bernstein and looking at Watkins is that professional organizations don't just become more equitable naturally, or at least they didn't in history. Maybe they do now, maybe they don't, but these designers sort of pushed their way in to the club.

29:43And in a lot of the histories that I was reading about Bernstein or Watkins, which you can find on the internet and in the scholarship, give the suggestion that people just became nicer. Oh, it is now time to accept a woman into our membership. And that probably was not the case. And indeed, when you look at it, it in fact was not. So I wanted to adjust that and invite all of us to rethink the ways that we're negotiating what we look for when we look for a successful career, professional career, particularly with designers who are members of one of these marginalized groups. Yeah. And just to expand on that a little bit more to that point about some of these would-be scenic designers finding other ways to work, some of the ways in which perhaps the union and the people who controlled, who got to be in, who got to be out, didn't just become nicer spontaneously.

30:28You also talk about the careers of Peggy Clark and Emmeline Roche. Who were they and maybe how do they sort of help round out that picture of who got excluded, who got included in the world of scenic design? So here are two more designers who were also sort of found their ways of working around as history and the field sort of changed around them. So Peggy Clark began as a scenic designer. She studied at Yale with Owen Slogger and became more known as a lighting designer. Some of her maybe best known credits are in mid-century musicals and some dance work.

31:03She did Bye Bye Birdie. She did Wonderful Town. She did a bunch of others in sort of the 50s and 60s. In any case, she moved into lighting because lighting like costume was also seen as one of these supportive roles. In the very early days of new stagecraft, scenic designers also did their own lighting. And the emergence of the lighting designer, which is a whole nother story, probably a whole nother book, comes out because there is specialization within that field of design. And at first, people like Peggy Clark were able to access that because it was seen to be subordinate and supportive and therefore more appropriate for women.

31:37Clark and Emmeline Roche, another scenic designer who was around at the time and we'll talk about in a little bit, worked at the Stage Door Canteen. Now, the Stage Door Canteen was a nightclub during World War II in New York City for servicemen. So many soldiers or servicemen on their way to the European theater of war, leaving through New York, could go and have some nightclub entertainment. And there were a lot of celebrities that went and it was just a good time. There's a whole film called Stage Door Canteen that was made about this and recreates the set.

32:08And you can see all of that. So Clark and Roche were the technical supervisors. They designed the space and they maintained the sort of physical architecture. They were sort of the property managers, I guess, or the technical managers of the space for the three or four years it was open. One of the unfortunate things, though, in that history, and it actually has to do with the film, is that their designs were copied in the film and credited to somebody else. So the director, Saul Lesser, wanted to do a film about Stage Door Canteen and hired an art director to recreate the space.

32:40Clark and Bernstein sued because they felt it was their intellectual property that was being created. They ended up in sort of a muddy middle. The union refused to support their suit because they did not design for the theater. They designed a space and it was outside union jurisdiction and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And they were unsuccessful in defending their intellectual property in this case. Roche and Clark are a good example of some of the ways in which women had more of an opportunity for doing things they wouldn't normally have during World War II.

33:14Gendered sort of expectations for service were changing as a result of the war. There were a number of women in the Scenic Designers Union who came to leadership positions in the war. But when the soldiers came home, when World War II ended, it was difficult for them to hold on to those positions in the same way that maybe men did. One of the things that's unfortunate is that women in these service positions were sort of expected to do that type of work, whereas men could parlay some of that service into a greater network or, you know, got more acclaim for essentially the same service.

33:50Emmeline Roche, just to give her a little bit of time, was also a designer. And she ended up getting sort of pushed into costume. She had equal facility in Scenic Design and Costume. She trained and worked with a number of those other new stagecraft artists. But as I talk about in the book, she had difficulty finding her footing, I think, in part because of the pressures of sexism in the field. She was a technical supervisor for a whole lot of work. She did costume at the New York City Center for a while.

34:21There were other things that she did, but she wasn't able to be seen as a peer in quite the same way. So I wanted to include her in the book, in part to show that this other set of approach, this sort of counterpoint way of looking at things wasn't always successful. And looking at careers that we might see as less fruitful than some others can also give us valuable occupational or institutional history, looking at the sort of labor history of these designers.

34:52She did some beautiful work. I think she was, was it, she's Tony nominated for her work in Anna Christie, I believe. Beautiful costume work. Yeah, that's sort of why I wanted to include her alongside some of these other women like Clark and Bernstein, who maybe were able to surmount some of the difficulties using those alternate paths. So you point out, really throughout your book, how a lot of these developments that we've been talking about in terms of the emergence of scenic design as a discipline, this has had real long-term repercussions.

35:24You can draw direct lines from some of these historical events right to how scenic design works as a profession today. Could you maybe sort of elaborate on that and sort of help us to sort of understand those connections? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. In general, ideas about labor, professionalism, or the business, if we want to talk about it in theater terms, they're really sticky. People tend to do things the way they were taught. They may make some changes and adjustments along the way. But the basic model of, say, the freelance lifestyle that I was talking about earlier in this conversation do endure, more or less.

36:01They tend not to be questioned because they're working. They tend not to be questioned because theater is always seen as on the brink of extinction, contingent, under threat. You're lucky to be working in this job anyway, and there's not a lot of room for maybe imagining something different. So some of the continuity that I see has to do with this idea of a more or less coherent professional career that's now starting to change, I think. But has endured since that, you know, establishment with the new stagecraft artists in the 30s and 40s.

36:33What does that career look like? I mean, broad strokes, beginning with some kind of education. That education tends to live in the university system. There's a movement through assistant and associate positions. So you build a career by working with designers, maybe in short or long-term associations, and then moving up into your own design. In many cases, those first contracts are at smaller regional theaters, theaters outside of New York. And then maybe you make your move into commercial theater or larger scale regional theater or, you know, film, television, that sort of thing.

37:07The importance of network continues. The importance of moving from job to job continues. There's a lot of teaching. You know, we can look to Owens Lager for a model here, and many, many designers are combining their professional design work with some form of teaching, whether that's with a formal association, with an institution, or something else. And many designers also are looking to hire assistants or to work continually with assistants. So that path, while it's not, you know, set in stone for anyone, is much clearer than it had been in, you know, 100 years ago.

37:40We still depend on the union. The union defines a lot of the expectations of labor. We still depend on the city of the freelancer, like I was talking about. And we still think of this body of knowledge as living close to the university or the conservatory system. So as that sort of changes and is challenged right now, there's a little bit of resistance to thinking about other ways of packaging expertise, other ways of paying for design or not paying for design, which is bad.

38:13And I'm interested to see how this idea of the freelance professional, which is sort of a capitalist idea based in intellectual property. You know, I made this, I own this, it is my property, I can decide, you know, whether you can use it for the touring production or not. That model is still underneath the way that designers work today. But it's being challenged with a lot of things and not just sort of post pandemic recovery of theater type things. But I'm thinking about AI and we've seen a lot with AI and design.

38:46I'm thinking a lot about the strikes that are now ongoing in film and television and the way that they are also, you know, how do we interface with streaming? How do we interface with artificial intelligence? You know, how might the unions protect creative expertise? All of this is a reimagining of labor that I think has started and is just going to accelerate. How can we make the field more equitable and diverse to repair harm and wrong in the past? But while still holding on to what design is and the value that design expertise brings.

39:24I don't have a lot of answers to that. But what I do think, I guess because I'm a historian, is that knowing a bit about the past, that these were things that were formed. They weren't, you know, freelancing wasn't always around. The union wasn't always around. Knowing how professionalism was built helps us build something else. What professionalism gives us, what it maybe has cost. And I think we need to acknowledge that, you know, there is a dual, a double-sided, double-sided sword, a double-edged sword element to this.

39:54I think our best bet is to stick with a unionized labor model, but to really reckon with some of those exclusions and some of the bias that has been part of that. And to sort of think with clear eyes about, you know, what kind of design expertise is really going to serve us as things become more automated, intelligent, whatever else is coming up, coming up next. And I look forward to thinking more about that as the world changes.

40:25We'll post links that will let you learn more about David's book, American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism, as well as information about the designers we discussed in this episode. David, thank you so much. Thank you. If you'd like to continue today's conversation, please visit theaterhistorypodcast.net and follow at Theater History on social media. Please note that, while we usually spell theater T-H-E-A-T-R-E, it ends in E-R on our social media handle.

40:55Our theme music is The Black Crook Gallop, which comes to us courtesy of the New York Public Library Libretto Project and Adam Roberts. Thanks as well to Tip Kress, who designed our logo. And finally, thank you for listening.