ABSTRACT
Ming Cho Lee is generally considered one of the most significant figures in American design in the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1960s and 1970s he transformed the American approach to scenic design, moving it from a largely pictorial style dominated by the poetic realism of his mentor Jo Mielziner, to a sculptural, emblematic, and architectural approach. The decorative was emphatically rejected in favor of more spatial and architectonic decor; the horizontal gave way to a verticality virtually unknown in the American theatre. Along the way Lee explored new or non-traditional scenic materials to give the stage a more industrial or contemporary feel. There were multiple sources for his innovations, notably the Constructivist-inspired work of his other mentor, Boris Aronson, as well as his training in Chinese landscape painting which he studied as a teenager growing up in Shanghai. But ultimately the inspiration was Bertolt Brecht. Lee’s passionate belief in the political and social efficacy of art led to a functional, utilitarian design that emphasized the stage-as-stage. His impact was felt not only in theatre but in opera and dance—he designed for the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, Martha Graham and the Joffrey Ballet among many others— but his most immediate impact was on American Shakespearean production as resident designer for the New York Shakespeare Festival for eleven years, beginning with the opening of the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park in 1962. Starting in the late 1960s he also began designing for major regional theatres across the country, which often meant more Shakespeare. Lee’s career trajectory was closer to that of European scenographers—he did relatively little Broadway (despite a Tony award for K2 in 1983 he found little success there) but instead thrived in institutional theatres with their greater emphasis on classics. All told, from an undergraduate production of Much Ado About Nothing at Occidental College in 1953 through Antony and Cleopatra at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 2002 he designed some sixty productions of Shakespeare’s plays, not counting several operas and ballets based on works from the canon.
