Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2018 - 10

Gigi (1973), Eiffel Tower (backdrop). This backdrop for the café scene is notable for the perspective and scale of the Eiffel Tower. It is a selectively translucent drop so that
the lamp posts and sky are illuminated from behind, adding a romantic glow to the dusk.

originals. The team determined that 21
fine art images and seven Diazo prints
would fit comfortably on 560 square feet
of wall space, about the size of the Theatre 2 Lobby Gallery at the University of
South Florida. Penn State theatre design
professors Daniel Robinson and Milagros
Ponce De Leon took the responsibility for framing the drawings and preparing them for touring to the University of
South Florida, the 2018 USITT National
Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, the University of Texas at Austin, and finally back to
Penn State where Sinisi agreed to their
exhibition in perpetuity.

Extraordinary Range

The current exhibit contains fine examples of Smith's extraordinary range,
from the backdrop elevations for On the
Town (1944), High Button Shoes (1947),
and Swan Lake (1967) to the Diazo print
drafting of the fire escapes in West Side
Story (1957). His realistic rendering of
the unit setting for Tennessee Williams
Night of the Iguana (1961) evokes the
heat of the tropics. The delicate Islamic

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THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

WINTER 2018

architecture motifs for Kismet (1976)
show Smith's versatility. He came up
with a simple and elegant cross-shaped
ground plan for Leonard Bernstein's
Mass, the opening production at the
Kennedy Center in 1972. The New York
Times reported that Smith considered
Camelot (two renderings in this exhibit)
his most elaborate production, "conjuring up a fairy-tale vision of the Middle
Ages with parks, terraces, jousting fields
and castles in colors that ranged from
soft pastels to sumptuous gold" ("Oliver
Smith, Set Designer"). Every theatre designer knows that drawings and renderings are not the end product, but a vital
step in communicating the visual elements to the director and other artist collaborators. Color elevations express the
scenic design in a way that enables the
construction and painting of the setting.
This exhibit includes a photograph of
Smith supervising the painting of a backdrop for Take Me Along in 1959 in Nolan's Scenic Studio while holding in his
hand the backdrop elevation displayed
beside the photograph.

This exhibit also contains a reproduction of Irving Penn's 1947 gelatin
silver print photograph of Oliver Smith,
Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles. Bowles
wrote the score for The Wind Remains,
which Smith had designed for the choreographer Merce Cunningham. Bowles
was Smith's cousin, and after Smith
moved to New York, he and Bowles lived
in the same rooming house, a brownstone located at 7 Middagh Street in
Brooklyn Heights and owned by George
Davis, an editor at Harper's Bazaar. The
house has a colorful history filled with luminaries from literature and arts including W. H. Auden (who collected the rent),
Carson McCullers, and Gypsy Rose Lee
(Shtier). Here, Smith began to make contacts that would further develop his career in theatre.
Smith supported himself in New
York with a series of odd jobs as a clerk
in retail stores, an usher in a movie
house, and a clerk at the Brooklyn Public Library. But he kept painting, and
you can see what he saw in two fine art
paintings in the exhibit, a Coney Island

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 2018