In Memoriam He was also well known for having a very short fuse, often letting loose with a string of epithets to express his displeasure. A series of small strokes slowed him down a bit and made him impatient with himself, but didn’t curb his salty tongue and often harsh words for his students. No one seemed to mind. Ian Dunn, the School’s operations associate for facilities, worked with Hunter on the train exhibit at the Eli Whitney Museum in Hamden, Connecticut, when he was 13 years old. Ian remembers: Hunter treated it like his own little world. He was very proud of little details. He’d take a photo of a tree and want to reproduce it down to the apple lying on the ground. So we’d take glue and red paint to reproduce a fallen apple. He would swirl a paint brush around, and even though the painting was three inches tall, he put such detail into it. I learned all sorts of techniques in scene painting, making found bits of foliage look like huge trees. I also learned how to wash a paint brush. Hunter was very fussy about that. He’d say: “A paint brush isn’t clean unless you can suck on it.” He enjoyed being in control and watching us kids grow. Our small size was useful to him because we could reach places he couldn’t. He had us for dinner a few times as we got older. He cooked southern dishes that took four days to make. The man was a real cook. I kept up with him as I grew up. He was a good guy. Born on October 19, 1934, Hunter Spence died on January 12, 2013. He is survived by his son, Charles Haywood Spence.
Critic Stanley Kauffmann
Prop Master Hunter Nesbitt Spence Was there anything in the theatre that Hunter Nesbitt Spence (Former Faculty) couldn’t make by hand? In an era of advanced technology, Hunter used and taught techniques as old as the theatre itself. As a lecturer in technical design and production at Yale School of Drama, Hunter built props for Yale plays and created theatrical illusions that ranged from masks and fake fish to Shakespearean dream scenes and Yiddish folktale shtetls. He wove baskets, made dragonfly wings out of wicker, and even did upholstery and needlework. While a teenager in Virginia, Hunter learned taxidermy through a correspondence course and taught himself to use oil paints. He began painting ducks on burlap and could churn out three waterfowl scenes in a day, frame them in wormy chestnut, and sell them for $25 each. (These were skills that came in handy at YSD, notably in his construction of Chekhov’s seagull.) Hunter started college but left to join the Navy. He ultimately earned a degree in theatre at Richmond Professional Institute, then worked as an assistant technical director and set designer at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre. Hunter began as a carpenter for Yale Repertory Theatre in 1970. He married and had a son, Charles Hunter. When the marriage ended when Charles was seven. Hunter raised him, with the help of, more or less, the entire School. While students in the technical design and production department received instruction in operating high-tech machinery, from Hunter they learned small-scale, old-fashioned artisanship, including the design and construction of theatre props, mask-making, basketry, upholstery, casting, scene painting, and floral design. He was justly celebrated for the highly detailed masks he created for numerous Yale Rep shows.
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by Charles McNulty ’93, dfa ’95 Stanley Kauffmann (Former Faculty) will be remembered for his intellectually rigorous, neatly manicured film reviews—the meditative yin to Pauline Kael’s ecstatic yang. But as a drama critic, I’m especially grateful for his equally acute body of theatre criticism, which is a tonic to read in this age of trumped-up enthusiasms and attention-grabbing pans. Persons of the Drama, one of Stanley’s collections of essays, can usually be found in a pile on my desk with anthologies of theatre reviews by his friends and colleagues Robert Brustein ’51, mah ’66 (Former Faculty), Gordon Rogoff yc ’52 (Faculty) and the late Richard Gilman (Former Faculty), all of whom and helped educate generations of critics, myself among them. Stanley was born in Manhattan on April 24, 1916. He studied drama at New York University and graduated in 1935. He wrote short plays during his time at school and began writing novels in the 1940s; his first, The King of Proxy Street, was published in 1941. His 1944 children’s play, Bobino, was produced at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research and moved to Broadway, memorable for featuring Marlon Brando in his first professional performance. In the 1950s, in addition to writing two more novels—A Change of Climate (1954) and Man of the World (1956)—Stanley worked as an editor at Ballantine Books and Knopf, where he demonstrated the exacting aesthetic sensibility that would make him famous as a critic. During his time there he acquired modern classics including Ray