Theatre Design & Technology - Dec 1969 - 20

Makers of Modern American Scenography:

A Howard Bay Design Potpourri
JERRY L. DAVIS
University of Kansas
"Settings by Howard Bay" is a familiar
credit to American playgoers. Study of
Bay's designs for over one hundred productions and conversations with several directors with whom he has worked will reveal
his concern for the "total production" and
his willingness to avoid pUlling a Howard
Bay trademark on each design. Concern with
fitting the design to the production has led
Bay to use a wide variety of techniques and
styles-each suited to the individual design
problem.

Howard Bay

Bay has, of course, designed a great many
"standard" box sets, including those for
The Little Faxes, The Corn Is Green, Ten
Little Indians, The Moon is Down, Chicken
Every Sunday, and dozens of others. The
setting for the original production of The
Little Foxes illustrates Bay's approach to a
box set and his ability to support the overall production concept (Figure 1).
This one room set did more than provide a
background for the play. It reflects the taste
of its occupants and tells something about
their status. The corners of the room present
hints of decay-just as the family is beginning to decay. The room is not furnished
in elegant good taste but combines the
"standard Southern inheritance and the
nouveau riche aping of the latest fashions
from the Northern drawing rooms." Bay felt
that to set the play in a traditional grand
Southern mansion would have been a mistake. In the story Birdie regrets having lost
the grand Lionette. If she is living in a
grand mansion, then what has she lost?
What is she talking about?
Slight variations on the standard box set
are the divided or simultaneous settings
which Bay used effectively for Brooklyn
U.S.A., Come Back Little Sheba, The Desperate Hours, and Autumn Garden. Come
Back Little Sheba is representative of Bay's
handling of the simultaneous selling (Figure 2). And it demonstrates his ability to
design settings which functionally reinforce
the action. Brooks Atkinson wrote of the
setting that Bay "has designed functional
scenery that catches the dreariness as well
as the hominess of an old house in a rundown neighborhood."

Bay has also designed thrust and open
settings. His thrust stage design for Man of
La Mancha, winner of the Antoinette Perry
Award for the best scene design of 196566, is well known. Toys in the Attic, a
Tony winner for the 1959-60 season, was
an open design although done on a proscenium stage. For the 1967 revival of The Little Foxes, Bay used an open design for the
thrust stage at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre: a design which also served for proscenium houses on tour (Figure 3). Although
the basic design concepts for both this and
the 1939 production are much the same,
Lillian Hellman has said she prefers the set
for the revival over the original.
The painted drop has long been a standard
method of setting musicals, and Bay has
used this technique in several productions
including Something for the Boys, Up in
Central Park, Michael Todd's Peep Show,
Jollyanna, Show Boat, and The Music Man.
The New York Tlines office drop from Up in
Central Park is typical (Figure 4). It and the
other drops for the production were painted
with engraving-like lines, and dye was applied over them in an attempt to convey the
visual flavor of steel engravings.
From the standard painted drop it is but a
short step to framed drops with three dimensional elements. Bay used this technique
effectively in some of his designs for The
Music Man and especially for the Forest
Scene of Carmen Jones (Figure 5). The
trees and leaves were framed separately and

Figure 1: THE LITTLE FOXES by Lillian Hellman. Directed and produced by Herman
Shumlin, February 15, 1939. (Courtesy of
the Theatre Collection The New York Public Library at Lincoln Center; Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations)

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Dec 1969