\t\t\t\t\t\t [aesop_image force_fullwidth=”off” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” credit=”ORIGINAL SKETCH BY JOHN LEE BEATTY” caption=”The Sisters Rosensweig at the Mitzi Newhouse, Lincoln Center Theater” captionsrc=”custom” align=”center” imgwidth=”100%” img=”https:\/\/performingartslegacy.org\/beattyjohnlee\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/251\/2021\/11\/The-Sisters-Rosensweig-2.jpg” panorama=”off”]\n
<\/span><\/p>\n I was surprised to be asked to design playwright Wendy Wasserstein\u2019s The Sisters Rosensweig <\/i><\/b>directed by Dan Sullivan. I had seen an early script of it lying on a file cabinet at Seattle Rep<\/b> and snuck a peek at it during a coffee break \u2014 very important, coffee in Seattle. I had no idea I would even read the script let alone design the play. There <\/span>was no description of the set in the script I read that day \u2014 I thought the play would be designed by another team. Even in a casual read, I realized it was a domestic Jewish-American take on The Three Sisters<\/i><\/b> by Chekhov.<\/span><\/p>\n Many months went by and Artistic Director Andre Bishop from Lincoln Center called to ask me to read it. It was being offered to me to design, directed by Dan Sullivan. The production was to be done in the \u2018thrust\u2019 style intimate theater downstairs, the Mitzi Newhouse<\/b>, where Dan and I had done Jon Robin Baitz\u2019s The Substance of Fire. <\/i><\/b>This<\/span> <\/i><\/b>meant using this intimate space to put together a new play. I felt both honored and trusted to be asked to do this play \u2014 a Wendy, Dan, Andre event. Lots of past history for them.<\/p>\n One soon found that Wendy was a \u2018culture hero\u2019 to many with a great following for her humor and feminist politics. It was actually sometimes quite hard to walk down the street with her, as she was so popular and recognized. Little wonder that Rosensweig<\/i><\/b>\u2019s great success would only increase her visibility.<\/p>\n Rosensweig<\/b><\/i> was a departure for Wendy, Dan explained, as it was to follow a more traditional form, respecting the theatrical \u2018unities\u2019 of space and time more than any of her previous work. It was really to be a riff on an older form, the \u2018drawing room comedy,\u2019 where upper class types chat wittily about love and current events. Wendy was in agreement about this approach, but, to be honest from a designer\u2019s point of view, she was a bit \u2018dyslexic\u2019 about scenery. Years later she was to tease me about having ignored the one scene she wrote that was intended to take place in the garden. I truly had forgotten it, dismissed it, in fact, adding a garden scene wouldn\u2019t make for a unified approach. Dan and I were creating a solid reality for these characters.<\/p>\n What I did add to the script was a dining room. The Three Sisters<\/i><\/b> allusion was so strong that I couldn\u2019t help but joke to Dan that all designers could tell if a regional theater had done the famous Chekhov play when we visited prop storage \u2014 its the only play needing so many dining room chairs. The upstage dining room riff stuck and indeed was folded into the creation of the event so much that you cannot do the play without it. The entire process was surprisingly \u2018organic\u2019 in the constant rewrites, redirection, relighting, re-costuming, and re-propping until the way we did it seemed inevitable.<\/p>\n The play took place in London, on a square, in a Queen Anne style row house. I became a temporary expert on Queen Anne decor. The lead characters were displaced American Jewish women, and indeed, though the play was set in England, it was a very American take on England. In its future life the play was rejected in England, and I was quite aware I was designing an American take on an American story. The real business at hand was constructing the machine for telling the story \u2014 and making the set a meaningful setting for the action.<\/p>\n Dan Sullivan made a really intelligent request for this production, that the sofa not be placed facing downstage. The room was configured in a way that was natural, so that it didn\u2019t feel like it was a proscenium play \u2018cheating\u2019 to be performed in a thrust. It was a commitment made by all, actors included, so that the blocking didn\u2019t cut out anybody. A low-backed sofa, that could be sat on in reverse was important, and finding a way for the actors to use the sofa in a totally informal way\u2014very American. Throw pillows would be disturbed!<\/p>\n As ever in a thrust production, \u2018features\u2019 \u2014 prop and actor magnets \u2014 were spread around specific points to draw the movement towards the audience. Jane Alexander, playing the lead, never entered or exited the stage without carrying hand props with her. She never made a mistake \u2014 a true properties hero \u2014 and even folded dinner napkins without missing a beat.<\/p>\n Another side to the production was also a result of Wendy\u2019s popularity. She was friends with seemingly everybody in New York who ever attended a dinner party. Mario Buatta, the famed interior decorator nicknamed \u2018The Prince of Chintz\u2019 was a buddy of hers and Wendy wanted me to design with his fabrics. And so I did \u2014 exclusively. There was a lot of patterned chintz disguising what was a very logical ground plan. Color blind folks had a bit of a struggle, as multicolored patterns are exhausting to their eyes. But, eventually, the roses on the wall were written into the spoken text, as Dan and Wendy went on working.<\/p>\n We were all working continuously \u2014 I think I was in the theater every day for two months, even on my day off. I would run into Wendy typing rewrites backstage as I sat next to her with a glue gun putting braid on lampshades. We were all working so much that when the phenomenally successful production moved to Broadway we decided all three of the designers should be remunerated at exactly the same rate as we all had our own challenges. Jane Greenwood had to make it easy for Madeleine Kahn, brilliantly funny onstage, intently methodical off, to get into a Chanel suit onstage while speaking Wendy\u2019s lines. Lighting Designer Pat Collins had to follow constant script cuts with precise re-timing of the lights, sunshine and rainstorms, and Dan\u2019s cleverly calculated, plot-induced transitions which had to be rehearsed as much as the body of the play. In a brightly cheery comic environment, no detail was left in the shadows \u2014 I was furiously sewing trim onto the backs<\/i> of the throw pillows just in case they flopped the wrong way in a transition.<\/p>\n The reward was an enormous popular success. Wendy had so many fans, and word of a funny Wendy play with stellar performances and great reviews led quickly to Broadway \u2014 and a wide proscenium stage. Of course this was the exact opposite of how the production was conceived. The show was a hit, and sightlines in all<\/i> of the seats must be perfect.<\/p>\n No pressure. Well, now the show and performances must be protected. Dan was cheerfully and amusingly demanding; he didn\u2019t want to change the basic blocking of the actors\u2019 movements, or the directions from where they came, and he created a new (and memorable ) rule: \u201cAfter age 50, an actor must not be seen exiting straight upstage \u2014 only on an angle.\u201d <\/i> Good rule. Hard to fold into the mix.<\/p>\n My eventual solution was to take the plan of the first \u201cMitzi<\/b>\u201d set and cut it into strips and fan it out until it met the proscenium edges of the Barrymore Theater <\/b>on Broadway. That kept all the relationships the same, and made most of the movements diagonal rather than straight up and downstage. I just had to find an architectural solution to back it up. I went far back into my childhood and remembered what I now realized was a Queen Anne house. It was our friends\u2019, the Darts\u2019 house on College Avenue in Claremont, California. I conjured up their angled fireplace, moved it to the Rosensweigs\u2019 and solved the problem.<\/p>\n [aesop_image force_fullwidth=”off” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” credit=”ORIGINAL SKETCH BY JOHN LEE BEATTY” caption=”The Sister’s Rosensweig at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, Broadway” captionsrc=”custom” align=”center” imgwidth=”100%” img=”https:\/\/performingartslegacy.org\/beattyjohnlee\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/251\/2021\/11\/GoogleDrive_The-Sisters-Rosensweig.jpg” panorama=”off”]\n When the Broadway version was erected onstage, we won the battle for sightlines, but the set gained by its size and detail an almost too extreme \u2018drawing room comedy\u2019 style. There was a Broadway bushel more roses on the wall. We hid the \u2018movie star\u2019 lights in the ceiling quite successfully, but the chandelier left over from the first production was almost too much glamor. It was all kind of yummy in a wedding cake kind of way. It worked well for the comedy, but it was more MGM than London\u2019s Chelsea. Now there was a curtain to go up, perfect for the drawing room comedy concept. The curtain went up and one young male theatergoer joked ironically to his partner, \u201cThat\u2019s just what my house looked like when I grew up!\u201d<\/i> That was funny for me to hear, but the drawing room was a bit overdrawn. It was one of my yummy \u2014 \u201cI just want to move in\u201d<\/i>\u2014 sets. To a \u2018T.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n The problem with a big hit is that the same team is assembled, almost always, for the next one. Wendy\u2019s popularity was so unabated that by 1997, I had taken to bringing pancake makeup with me to public meetings with her, as photographers would often appear at the meetings and I wanted to be as camera-ready as she was. <\/p>\n For her next play, she chose a rather more serious theme in An American Daughter<\/i><\/b>. She was angry about the really uneven playing field for an intelligent political woman. In retrospect we should have listened more closely to what she said in The Sisters Rosensweig<\/i><\/b>, as in that play she hid her anger rather more humorously.<\/p>\n Wendy had returned to what I called her \u2018dyslexic\u2019 settings\u2014one scene she wrote started in a garden patio, but curiously without a scene change seemed to end in a laundry room. Another scene set in a dining room somehow morphed into a living room. The play was all set inside (or possibly outside!) a Georgetown townhouse. There was a scene that either was or wasn\u2019t in a television studio. Was it meant to resemble a scene in her The Heidi Chronicles<\/i><\/b>?<\/p>\n Was the production to be multi-scened or not? The answer was both financially devised and also subconsciously based on Rosensweig<\/i><\/b>\u2019s success. The set became unified into a single living room that oddly had the same directional flow as the previous production: windows to the street stage left, to the garden stage right, dining room and kitchen up right, etc. We were used to that successful pattern. We had spent two years living in it. Successful Kaufman and Hart comedies often had the same basic ground plans, after all.<\/p>\n [aesop_image force_fullwidth=”off” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”left” credit=”ORIGINAL SKETCH BY JOHN LEE BEATTY” caption=”An American Daughter at the Cort Theatre, Broadway” captionsrc=”custom” align=”center” imgwidth=”100%” img=”https:\/\/performingartslegacy.org\/beattyjohnlee\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/251\/2021\/11\/An-American-Daughter-2.png” panorama=”off”]\n The look was part Georgetown research, part taken from a McMullan poster for the Hampton Library. Part was even from my academic sister\u2019s house. I associated the heroine with my sister\u2019s struggles as well. The play was written for Meryl Streep, who did the developmental reading and then decided to pass on it. Kate Nelligan, a wonderful actress, took it on, but , to me, was slightly off character, only in that once one imagined the original voice of Ms. Streep as Hillary Rodham Clinton, you were taken somewhere else. Lynne Thigpen was terrific in a role with the same entrance patterns, and some of the same life problems, as Madeleine Kahn\u2019s Gorgeous Rosensweig<\/b>. In fact, there were half-familiar characters walking in from other Wasserstein plays.<\/p>\n This play, which I liked so much, fared almost like the lead character \u2014 perceived as intelligent, a partial success, but rejected for the more apparent anger it expressed. And this play was the next play after the \u2018big one,\u2019 and it wasn\u2019t as ebulliently airborne. Wendy, in her darker days questioned all this too I know. We all have dark days in collaborations \u2014 when we question how we got to this place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [aesop_image force_fullwidth=”off” lightbox=”on” captionposition=”center” credit=”ORIGINAL SKETCH BY JOHN LEE BEATTY” caption=”The Sisters Rosensweig at the Mitzi Newhouse, Lincoln Center Theater” captionsrc=”custom” align=”center” imgwidth=”100%” img=”https:\/\/performingartslegacy.org\/beattyjohnlee\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/251\/2021\/11\/The-Sisters-Rosensweig-2.jpg” panorama=”off”] The Sisters Rosensweig & An American Daughter by Wendy Wasserstein I was surprised to be asked to design playwright Wendy Wasserstein\u2019s The Sisters Rosensweig directed by Dan Sullivan. I had seen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":2853,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-highlight"],"metadata":{"_edit_last":["273"],"_wpac_members_redirect_to":[""],"_wpac_show_in_search":["0"],"_wpac_show_excerpt_in_search":["0"],"_wpac_nonmembers_redirect_to":[""],"ase_chapter_enable_timeline":["off"],"ase_map_component_start_point":["a:2:{s:3:\"lat\";d:29.76;s:3:\"lng\";d:-95.38;}"],"_thumbnail_id":["2853"],"_wp_old_date":["2021-11-05"],"_edit_lock":["1642197279:273"]},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n<\/h2>\n
The Sisters Rosensweig<\/strong><\/em> & An American Daughter<\/strong><\/em> by Wendy Wasserstein<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
Had we done a disservice to Wendy\u2019s work by providing another drawing room comedy setting if the drawing room comedy wasn\u2019t going to be as \u2018comic?\u2019 What was truly intended? Or would it have done better if it were the one after the one after<\/i> the big one that succeeded so mightily? Or maybe if we hadn\u2019t started it directly on Broadway?<\/span><\/p>\n