I’ve kept this souvenir program since 1954.

At age 6, I was driven into Los Angeles one night in 1954 to see Mary Martin in Peter Pan. We always sat, I was to learn, in the cheaper seats, and my mother kept her protective eye on me, as children were known to make attempts to fly from the front of the balcony of the Philharmonic Auditorium in response to Mary Martin’s exhortations. My mother probably should have worried far more about other vulnerabilities. Yes, I wanted to fly, and yes, I wanted to fly on the not completely invisible wire that came out of some mysterious bunchiness in the back of some costumes, but more disturbingly I ‘got’ scenery for the stage.  I knew it began and ended in the wings, I pondered why they used the painted groundcloth on the revolve only the first time we saw Neverland. I could see that a particular style of painting amplified the built mouldings, and that there was a definite plan to the whole thing. I realized things had to be practical and imaginative at the same time, and there was an extremely practical use of space and placement, and a Peter Pan-specific ‘take’ on the world.  The scenery for me did not go by in a blur, but was observed intently.  I was on top of it.  Almost literally, from our balcony seats.

Mary Martin, as Peter, was also a boy and a mother figure at the same time. And Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook was enormously effete and overdone. Clearly this was a game with a new set of rules. I certainly wanted to fly, I even did so in my dreams, and certainly made a potentially fatal attempt at wiring myself to fly from a tree branch, but the scenery was where I landed. And it was scenery in the theater.

There was a joyful emotional transference between the actors and the audience, but there was also an emotional relationship between the audience and the scenery. I certainly felt it. I had seen a few Shakespeare productions by this point, but this fully theatrical production of Peter Pan was when the lightbulb in my head went on, caused by the discovery of the alternate universe of stage scenery. I can still see my mother’s face as she observed me becoming charged. I was supposed to sleep in the back of the station wagon on the way home, but I was buzzed, changed.

As a young child, I was also taken to quite adult movies, and like so many of my generation, a childhood viewing of The Red Shoes burned into my consciousness. “A ballet movie, perfect for children! A fairy tale!” If my mother had thought it would be harmless, she had been wildly misinformed … Again it was the mysterious alternative world of the theater, and again it played by another set of mysterious rules.  Beautiful, artificial, disciplined, extremely dangerous, scary to a child, the stuff of nightmares, but also completely seductive.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that a major character in The Red Shoes was a set designer.  Or should I say that I became ‘conscious’ that a major character was a set designer. He certainly went to a lot of meetings with the kinds of people that I was to meet in my future designing life. In a painful scene some of his scenery was cut onstage. He watched everything silently in the background.

And I should say, The Red Shoes is a perfectly good cause of adult nightmares as well. It mirrored theater life in an overtly technicolor way, but my nightmares today are of a similar nature.

For better or worse, these experiences burned into me my perception of what theater was. Artificial, sexually mysterious, deeply emotional, technical, yet fraught with danger and joy.  On so many productions I have designed, I realize I am always searching to recreate the sensation of entering a new magical, emotionally freighted world.

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Childhood-Sketch-1-Built-Theater-Model-in-Garage
A sketch of my model theater in the garage. I built My Fair Lady, Peter Pan, and a bit of The Mikado.