An inclusive history of the professionalization of American scenic design

The figure of the American theatrical scenic designer first emerged in the early twentieth century. As productions moved away from standardized, painted scenery and toward individualized scenic design, the demand for talented new designers grew. Within decades, scenic designers reinvented themselves as professional artists. They ran their own studios, proudly displayed their names on Broadway playbills, and even appeared in magazine and television profiles. 

American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism tells the history of the field through the figures, institutions, and movements that helped create and shape the profession. Taking a unique sociological approach, theatre scholar David Bisaha examines the work that designers performed outside of theatrical productions. He shows how figures such as Lee Simonson, Norman Bel Geddes, Jo Mielziner, and Donald Oenslager constructed a freelance, professional identity for scenic designers by working within their labor union (United Scenic Artists Local 829), generating self-promotional press, building university curricula, and volunteering in wartime service. 

However, while new institutions provided autonomy and intellectual property rights for many, women, queer, and Black designers were not always welcome to join the organizations that protected freelance designers’ interests. Among others, Aline Bernstein, Emeline Roche, Perry Watkins, Peggy Clark, and James Reynolds were excluded from professional groups because of their identities. They nonetheless established themselves among the most successful designers of their time. Their stories expand the history of American scenic design by showing how professionalism won designers substantial benefits, yet also created legacies of exclusion with which American theatre is still reckoning.

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference
 
THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 38
 
PART I: Studies in Theatre History
 
ELIZABETH COEN
Hanswurst’s Public: Defending the Comic in the Theatres of Eighteenth-Century Vienna


BRIDGET MCFARLAND
“This Affair of a Theatre”: The Boston Theatre Controversy and the Americanization of the Stage
 
RYAN TVEDT
From Moscow to Simferopol: How the Russian Cubo-Futurists Accessed the Provinces
 
DANIELLA VINITSKI MOONEY
So Long Ago I Can’t Remember: GAle GAtes et al. and the 1990s Immersive Theatre
 
Part II: The Site-Based Theatre Audience Experience: Dramaturgy and Ethics
                —EDITED BY PENELOPE COLE AND RAND HARMON
 
PENELOPE COLE
Site-Based Theatre: The Beginning
 
PENELOPE COLE
Becoming the Mob: Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson’s Coriolan/us
 
SEAN BARTLEY
A Walk in the Park: David Levine’s Private Moment and Ethical Participation in Site-Based Performance
 
DAVID BISAHA
“I Want You to Feel Uncomfortable”: Adapting Participation in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at San Francisco’s Curran Theatre
 
COLLEEN RUA
Navigating Neverland and Wonderland: Audience as Spect-Character
 
GUILLERMO AVILES-RODRIGUEZ, PENELOPE COLE, RAND HARMON, AND ERIN B. MEE
Ethics and Site-Based Theatre: A Curated Discussion
 
PART III: The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay from the 1038 Mid-America Theatre Conference
 
MICHELLE GRANSHAW
Inventing the Tramp: The Early Tramp Comic on the Variety Stage
 

A peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Introduction
—LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA, WITH ODAI JOHNSON, CHRYSTYNA DAIL, AND JONATHAN SHANDELL

PART I
STUDIES IN THEATRE HISTORY

Un-Reading Voltaire: The Ghost in the Cupboard of the House of Reason
—ODAI JOHNSON

Caricatured, Marginalized,
and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia’s Negro Unit of the FTP, 1936–1939               
—JONATHAN SHANDELL

Stop Your Sobbing: White Fragility, Slippery Empathy, and Historical Consciousness in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate
—SCOTT PROUDFIT

Asia and Alwin Nikolais: Interdisciplinarity, Orientalist Tendencies, and Midcentury American Dance
—ANGELA K. AHLGREN

PART II
WITCH CHARACTERS AND WITCHY PERFORMANCE

Editor’s Introduction to the Special Section
Shifting Shapes: Witch Characters and Witchy Performances
—CHRYSTYNA DAIL

To Wright the Witch: The Case of Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft
—JANE BARNETTE

Nothing Wicked This Way Comes: Shakespeare’s Subversion of Archetypal Witches in The Winter’s Tale
—JESSICA HOLT

Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom
—MAMATA SENGUPTA

(Un)Limited: The Influence of Mentorship and Father-Daughter Relationships on Elphaba’s Heroine Journey in Wicked
—REBECCA K. HAMMONDS

Immersive Witches: New York City under the Spell of Sleep No More and Then She Fell
—DAVID BISAHA

PART III
Essay from the Conference

The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2020
New Conventions for a New Generation: High School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s
—LINDSEY MANTOAN
 

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference