The Man Behind the Scenes

Designer Ming Cho Lee, Setting the Stage - and a Very High Standard

 

By Nelson Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 21, 2001; Page G01

 

"My Broadway career is so bad," laments legendary set designer Ming Cho Lee. Indeed, look Lee up in the textbooks -- his work is the subject of entire chapters and even covers -- and you get listings like this one in the "Cambridge Guide to American Theatre": "Despite his importance, he has designed little on Broadway."
"It sometimes kind of gets on my nerves a little bit," Lee allows.
Lee, now 70, had a hit with the musical version of "Two Gentlemen of Verona" in 1971, but otherwise his Broadway scorecard is bizarrely full of flops, despite consistently glowing notices for his sets. His one-night wonders include "La Strada" and "Billy" in 1969 and, the year before, Michael Kahn's staging of "Here's Where I Belong." (Kahn, whose production of Friedrich Schiller's "Don Carlos" opens tomorrow night at the Shakespeare Theatre with settings by Lee, laughs about it now.)
Back in 1968, Clive Barnes wrote: "The most distinguished aspect of 'Here's Where I Belong' is the scenery by Ming Cho Lee. But no one ever walked out of a theater humming the scenery."
Since he hasn't designed long-running mega-musicals or walked away with armloads of Tony Awards, Ming Cho Lee may not be as well known outside theater circles as he ought to be. But his career has been astonishing. Kahn -- the Shakespeare Theatre's artistic director and collaborator there with Lee on the recent "Peer Gynt," "King John," "The Merchant of Venice" and "Mourning Becomes Electra" -- calls Lee "the dean of American theater design," and he indicates that's just the discussion's obvious starting point. Lee was in the thick of things in the 1950s and 1960s when design began to move away from box sets and painted backdrops and toward sculptural approaches and abstraction.
As a teacher in Yale's MFA design program (which he co-chairs) since 1969, he has trained a generation of highly successful scenic artists -- John Lee Beatty, Tony Straiges, David Mitchell, Derek McLane, Walt Spangler, Heidi Ettinger and many others. One of the things Lee is famous for is an event informally known as "Ming's Clambake," an annual showcase in New York in which the top student designers from across the country get to display their work for producers and directors.
Says Kahn: "His students can imitate his accent and everything he says. For 30 years I feel I've been hearing his voice."
Lee's lone Tony Award came for putting a mountain onstage in Patrick Meyers's "K2." The design has been revived this season at Arena Stage, where it premiered in 1982 before going to Broadway. (The show runs there through next week.) It's one of the rare examples of a literal place being re-created onstage by Lee -- although as he points out, walking into the Kreeger Theater and seeing a towering, realistic-looking mountain on the stage is pretty abstract in itself.
Lee's work has been characterized as minimalist and formalistic, and he acknowledges that he hates clutter onstage.
"Or perhaps I'm just lazy and I don't want to deal with all that stuff."
Not likely, based on his reputation for detail. Arena's founding director, Zelda Fichandler (who first brought Lee to Washington in 1966), cites the carefully chosen objects that hung from his set for "Our Town," or the research that led to his setting the trial scene of "Inherit the Wind" outdoors in the heat, where the life of the rural town could come into play. Both sets were part of the landmark Arena Stage tour that went to Russia in 1972.
Douglas C. Wager, who spent more than 20 years at Arena (and who succeeded Fichandler as artistic director there from 1991 to 1998), testifies to the endless time spent pursuing the right shades of red, white and blue for the "Execution of Justice" set in 1985. When Wager directed "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at Arena during the 1994-95 season, Lee surrounded the Fichandler stage with a glowing rectangle that Wager describes as "very Ming in the sense that it wasn't just a moat with lights." Wager compared the result to a Robert Wilson design (one of many influences that Lee freely acknowledges): The moat had "texture, it had depth, but no surface." It took three kinds of material to get that effect, something that allowed the designers to change the time of day and the mood of the performance. Driving home the point that the monochromatic imagery was far from naturalistic, Wager says that the spare show's wicker furniture "was painted gray-green again and again, to blend in with the shade of the floor."
Says Allen Lee Hughes, who designed the lighting for "K2," "The Faraway Nearby" and other Lee creations: "His sets are very painterly. Ming is still of the brush and canvas. I think that's one reason his sets are so much fun to light, because the paint takes the light and it's so much fun to manipulate."
Lee -- whosegray and white clothing, with three pens in his jacket pocket, gives him an elegant, professorial look -- says he likes to treat the stage as a stage: a confined space where the limitations are full of exciting possibilities, and where the audience can sense that an action is about to take place. That's why Wagerdevises the term "theatricalism" to describe Lee, and if that doesn't sound terribly defining, then that's part of the challenge of talking about a man who has spent more than 40 years designing theater, dance and opera all over the world.
As Lee says, designers have to be "very adaptable. We don't have handwriting that is so strong that we can only do one kind of work, no matter how people typecast us."
Lee was born and raised in Shanghai. His family was Westernized; his father graduated from Yale in 1919 and returned to China as a businessman working for Occidental Life Insurance Co. Lee's parents divorced when he was 6; his mother eventually moved to New York and remarried, while the boy stayed with his father. The elder Lee anticipated the rise of communism and gradually transferred his business to Hong Kong. In 1949 the young Ming Cho Lee, ready for college, came to the United States.
"Running away from the communists," says Lee, sitting in the lobby of the Shakespeare Theatre. "That's about the size of it."
He knew he wouldn't be going back to China.
"I essentially became a refugee because I had no place to go back to," says Lee. "Hong Kong at that time was not an easy place to get back in."
Lee had demonstrated skill at painting from an early age, and his mother had taken him to a number of theater and opera performances when she was still in Shanghai. Those two things helped nudge him toward set design during his years at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then as a grad student at UCLA. His work was impressive, and connections led to an introduction to Jo Mielziner, who was then the dominant designer on Broadway. (Mielziner's formidable credits include the original productions of "A Streetcar Named Desire," "Death of a Salesman," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Carousel," "South Pacific" and "Guys and Dolls.")
Soon he was brought on as Mielziner's assistant. "I reached a point of no return," says Lee, who also worked for a time with Boris Aronson, another titan of design. "Even I was surprised he took me in. Jo was a god."
Lee's nose was leading him toward Brechtian drama and Eastern European design, work that he felt was "more adventurous, riskier, more abstract, much more metaphoric in its approach, rather than using design strictly as an illustration of place." In 1962 Joe Papp hired Lee as the resident set designer for the Public Theatre, a position he kept for 11 years. That, plus a long tenure with New York City Opera in the 1960s and 1970s,frequent work with the Joffrey Ballet and at Juilliard, and the 25 productions he has designed at Arena, constitute his steadiest gigs.
In person, Lee is friendly, soft-spoken and frank. Asked whether the "K2" set is his most acclaimed, he says: "If it is, then I would be a little bit disturbed by it. This time going back, I have to say it's pretty impressive-looking. And the fact that it's there is almost a little shocking. But did it really break new ground in terms of design? I'm not sure. Did it break new ground for me? I'm not sure. Should it have that kind of public attention? I'm not quite sure. It felt like, for me, it's the beginning of spectacle theater; that came right along with 'Cats' and all that. And I'm not a big fan of spectacles. Spectacle for its own sake tends to dehumanize the event. It tends to make the human smaller, subordinate to the spectacle."
For Lee, "the exciting design is a design that caught the very essence of the play." He adds: "The bottom line is that the set has got to look good. That's accepted fact. If the set looks bad, all bets are off."
Lee, who cites "Guys and Dolls" as one of his favorite shows (he designed a production last season in Dallas), also says: "I don't mind people applauding scenery when it's called for. If you have a big scene change and it's supposed to come to this art deco ballroom and nobody applauds, you know you have failed, because the number needs that applause to propel it."
The natural flow of Lee's conversation -- in which questions get detailed, essaylike answers -- leads to brief but fervent speeches about the demise of liberal arts education in America, the tepidity of a lot of modern American playwriting and the peculiar timidity of artists in the face of controversy.
"I think his influence is way beyond design," says Kahn. "It's imparting ideas about the theater and art."
One student at Yale reports that Lee exhorted his students to vote last fall and even offered to excuse his charges from class should they need to return home to register.
Fichandler says, "He believes the future is in their hands, and it better be a political as well as an aesthetic one."
The "Don Carlos" set will be the last the theater sees of Lee for a while; he has resolved to take a year off from design, though not from teaching. The only thing that might change his mind in the immediate future is a chance to amend that annoying Broadway record, but otherwise Lee says he's at peace with this decision.
"It didn't seem to make me nervous," he says. "You stop designing, and you worry that no one will call you after a year. But it seems okay. So we'll see."