12 minute read
A Marvelous Compromise
The famed architect HUGH HARDY, who passed away in 2017, had a long and fruitful relationship with Lincoln Center Theater. Starting as an assistant to Jo Mielziner in the early 1960s, Hardy had a front row seat to the thrills and pitfalls of the Vivian Beaumont stage. He would continue to leave his mark on Lincoln Center with his design of LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater. Hardy sat for this interview close to twenty years ago, before he began work on the Tow.
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EDITORS: When did you start work on the Vivian Beaumont Theater?
HUGH HARDY: The early sixties.
ED: What was the working name for the theater?
HH: It was the Repertory Theater. The idea is that it would do repertory of classic American plays, always American. That it was going to be something better than Broadway, different from Broadway—that it would be worthy of the great idea of Lincoln Center. And it was something without precedent in the U.S. of A.
ED: Who came to you first with this idea? Was it Robert Whitehead and Elia Kazan?
HH: Well, they were involved. But the Board specifically selected them because they were the best of the era. They happened, ironically, to be the best of Broadway, though they were hired to do something different than that. That’s always been the great contradiction of the place.
ED: What were you doing in the early sixties?
HH: I was working for Jo Mielziner as a scene designer, although I had received an MFA in architecture. Because I had passed the Scene Design Union exam, I could work as a scene designer.
ED: Were you an architect then?
HH: No. I was stagestruck by Jo Mielziner’s work, which transformed American theater.
ED: And where did you study?
HH: At Princeton, for architecture. I didn’t study theater—I didn’t know anything about theater, but I got through Princeton painting scenery, building scenery, doing lighting and all the stuff you explore as an amateur. And so I knew the theater in that respect—I knew how they physically made it.
ED: And when you finished Princeton what was your first job?
HH: Well, I’d always kept track of Jo. I wrote him a letter, and he wrote back! I was just done in with delight—he was my hero, you know? So we kept up correspondence, and when I was in the Army I would go to Washington and sit there in technical rehearsals while he lit a show. That was pretty exciting. I wasn’t on salary; I was just there having a good time. So I pestered him (laughs), kept after him, and because I was credentialed as a scene designer I could go work in his studio. I worked there with Ming Cho Lee and Will Steven Armstrong. We were all drafting up a storm together. For instance, I drew the hotel for Gypsy. I was slightly embarrassed when people said, “What do you do?” And I’d say, “Oh, I work for a scene designer.” It probably would have sounded better to say, “I’m an architect,” but I wasn’t registered.
So when Jo got the job to design the theaters at Lincoln Center he came to me and said, “I’ve got a job, I need you.” Because I was a credentialed architect, not a licensed architect, I understood architecture. He was a scene designer collaborating with the architect Eero Saarinen, but Jo didn’t know the language of architecture. So I was the translator between these two titans. Two people often don’t mean the same thing even when using the same words. They would have these conversations, and I would have to say, “Now Jo, what Eero means is . . . ” (Laughter) And you know, I’m just this kid, so it was gutsy.
ED: So what were they talking about?
HH: About the nature of the theater. Saarinen believed in progress. He was tyrannically obsessed with how things work. And he believed in evolution; he believed that things were getting better. He believed that people used to ride around on horses, and then things got better because they could ride around in cars, and then transportation got better because they could ride around in airplanes—the world was improving. No doubt about it.
ED: And the theater?
HH: And the theater was evolving, too, and Eero believed that what Tyrone Guthrie did in Canada was the future of the theater. Anybody who thought otherwise was wrong. Now, of course in New York (laughs) there was no interest in any of that, and so there was this titanic struggle with Jo holding on to what he knew. But the business about the theater’s shape—proscenium or thrust—was never resolved, you see. In a sense, it was Eero who won. By shaping the Beaumont the way he did, he prejudiced it in favor of the thrust stage.
ED: And was Mielziner angry about that?
HH: Oh yes, all the time, all the time. (Laughter) Jo, however, did finally accept that this was a possibility. And that’s what led to the big turntable and all that machinery that Bernard Gersten has thrown away because it was so rigid. The physical result of all that apparatus had been tyrannical, requiring people to behave in a certain way.
ED: And did they determine where the curtain line was going to be? Was it going to be a drop curtain?
HH: There’s a big proscenium-style curtain line, and the rigging is there for a house curtain. If they want to hang one up, they can.
ED: Wasn’t there a discussion about a single-form stage or a multiform stage? So that, if there was a rep situation, they could use it on a proscenium one night and as a thrust the next?
HH: Yes, the rationale for that was this giant turntable—the idea was that the front seating section would slide underneath the stage. There were two bunches of machinery. One was Jo’s turntable, with a platform on the outside. He was the first one who created this business of platforms moving individually across the stage. By building separate platform stages on winches, you could move scenery laterally. The idea was influenced by film and work with Kazan. They loved this idea of scene dissolves and scrims—that’s the movies. In addition, which is even more amazing, if you had a platform that was the presentation for a proscenium production you needed to store it, and it could move in any direction, so that you could have three productions simultaneously ready to perform in repertory, and that’s why the stage is so huge. Nobody was ever going to perform all over there. It was made for live storage in repertory.
ED: What were your responsibilities?
HH: I was responsible for the initial program—how big are the dressing rooms, how many toilets should you have, where does the greenroom go, and so forth. But, I said, the first question should be, What is the ‘repertory’? But that was never answered. Nobody ever defined what they meant by ‘repertory theater.’ It meant everything to everybody. And so Lincoln Center ended up with this very expensive solution and this really quite weird theater, one which wasn’t a direct expression of any one person. It was a direct expression of the contest between two people.
ED: And was anybody happy with it?
HH: Not the people who used it first. They didn’t know what to do with it. Eero scaled the room to a two-story set, and it looked wonderful. Now, what happens if you don’t have a two-story set? That was never investigated. And when Joe Papp did some production—I can’t remember now what it was, but it had a big two-story set in the middle—things looked just fine. But, really, nobody knew how to use the place because it had been designed as a compromise.
Interestingly, about ten years ago Bernard Gersten did a major alteration on the Beaumont and we lowered and reshaped the volume of that room. It is, I think, much better, because now it doesn’t overwhelm the actors. And they have now learned, which was very brave, that you can have a single person standing on that stage in all that space, with a glorious result. But initially everyone was afraid to try that.
ED: The Beaumont is known for being a tricky house to work in. Why is that?
HH: It really was designed unlike any other theater, and therefore you need to use it unlike any other theater. It isn’t really a proscenium stage, and it isn’t really a thrust stage. It is somewhere in the middle.
ED: Well, Tony Walton, when he designed the set for The House of Blue Leaves, found that the back wall of the set would be the curtain line.
HH: Yes, because that’s where the focus of the room comes from.
ED: Do you think the challenge of the theater itself was responsible for Kazan’s failure?
HH: Yes.
ED: And Whitehead?
HH: In part, yes. But they were also responsible for this strange business of inventing something that didn’t exist in America. Something for which there was no precedent, something that isn’t Broadway. What measure of theater was there in New York except Broadway? This is before regional theater became so institutionalized and before Off Broadway was taken seriously. So the idea was that we were going to have a new form of American theater, and that we were going to hire the two best Broadway people to do it was odd.
ED: Peter Brook once said, “If you find the true center of that stage at the Beaumont, you’ll make it work. That’s the problem with the theater— nobody knows where the true center of it is.” He changed the space when he did Carmen in the Beaumont. Did the center of the stage ever come up when you were working with Jo?
HH: No.
ED: But the center of the stage is a way of describing where the inevitable heartbeat of the stage is, where the audience’s attention goes.
HH: That isn’t the language of architecture. It is the language of performance. And the form of the theater was really designed by architects, not by theater people.
ED: But would Whitehead and Kazan come in and sit in on meetings?
HH: Oh, they came to everything. They were wonderful. But they were more observers than participants.
ED: Over the years as you saw productions at the Beaumont, did you have an opinion about which designers solved certain things?
HH: Michael Yeargan’s big painted backdrops in South Pacific are essential to the presentation of the place, and that’s very Mielzineresque.
ED: You’re quoted as saying, “These stages, for instance don’t enhance scenery, they require it. . . . Those suggested fragments of realism, which in another theater would be scenically compelling and evocative, can easily appear paltry and even shabby on the Beaumont’s stage.”
HH: It’s a question of scale. You have to come to terms with the scale of the place, and now designers have. Coming to terms with scale implies that you have to only use great big things. But it’s not how big things are, it’s the scale of the presentation, the whole mise-en-scène.
ED: Did you give up the idea of working in the theater and move over to architecture as a result of working on the Beaumont?
HH: The experience of working with Saarinen caused me to a have a religious conversion. Saarinen did me in. I just thought, Wow, I could be an architect! That’s what I want to do. It was an opportunity to think about something. Jo was completely instinctive. He was amazing. Eero was intellectual. Everything had to have a rationale, had to be quantified. Eero asked Jo, “What is the ideal maximum distance from the audience to the actor in the theater?” Because he wanted to make sure that the Beaumont didn’t get any deeper, higher, lower, wider, than this magic dimension. Jo didn’t know, had never thought about it, because he worked in existing buildings. And then he decided that it was the last row of the Belasco because Julie Harris was there in The Lark, and her face was so small that he knew that if you could see her face in the last row you were fine. So sixty-five feet was the answer. In England, someone figured out the same thing—the same magic dimension—but they did it scientifically, by measuring sightlines, and they still came up with sixty-five feet.
ED: Was Mielziner disappointed that you left the theater?
HH: Yes, I think he was. Well, he asked me to be his assistant, and run his studio.
ED: Have you seen any particular scenic solutions in the Beaumont over the years that you found interesting?
HH: Well, certainly Bob Crowley’s mirrored floor in The Coast of Utopia for Jack O’Brien was one of the most fascinating recent ideas. That was pretty dazzling.
ED: What advice would you, Hardy the architect, give to Hugh Hardy the designer about working in the Beaumont?
HH: That simpler is better. And that you’ve got to think about the scale of the place in relation to people.
ED: Is that kind of scale a gut instinct, or is it scientific?
HH: No, it’s not scientific. I think if you work there more than once you would learn something about its dimensions.
ED: This theater really is a living organism.
HH: How true. I think because the Beaumont was spawned by a compromise, these two marvelous people didn’t completely recognize that they had made something without precedent. They both got less than what they wanted, and so they didn’t recognize that in the process they had actually made something quite extraordinary.
ED: Do you think it was extraordinary?
HH: Oh, I do. I do. I do. I do. There is no other such place.
Header Photo: The Lincoln Center Architects Group, (left to right) Edward J. Mathews, American architect Philip Johnson, French-born theater designer JoMielziner, American philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III, Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, American architect Gordon Bunshaft, American architect Max Abramovitz, Italian architect Pietro Belluschi, and American architect Wallace K. Harrison, as they pose around an architectural scale model of the proposed Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. November 28, 1959. Copyright: Arnold Newman/ Getty Images.
