Background

Joseph Mielziner was born on March 19, 1901, in Paris, France. He was the second son of Leo Mielziner, a portrait painter, and Ella MacKenna Friend, a fashion and arts journalist.

Education

After the family's return to America in 1909, Mielziner's parents encouraged his talent for painting. At age fifteen, Mielziner left the Ethical Culture School in New York City, having received a scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In September 1918, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served briefly in World War I. In 1919, he received the Pennsylvania Academy's Cresson traveling scholarship for two successive years.

Career

Touring Europe, Mielziner observed revolutionary changes in staging and theatrical design, worked under Viennese designer Oscar Strand, and visited designer-visionary Gordon Craig in Rapallo, Italy. Having decided on a theater career, Mielziner worked in June 1921 as actor, stage manager, and assistant designer for Jessie Bonstelle's famous stock company in Detroit. Mielziner then apprenticed himself to three men who had introduced modernist design ("the New Stagecraft") to Broadway: he painted scenery in the New York studio of Joseph Urban, and when the Theatre Guild hired him in 1923 as a bit-actor and assistant stage manager, Mielziner worked under Robert Edmond Jones and Guild designer Lee Simonson. By 1924, Mielziner was working with the "frenetic haste" he would later decry. The Theatre Guild first hired him to design Ferenc Moln r's The Guardsman, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (1924). He did four plays that first season, and eight the next; commissions kept piling up. Mielziner later complained that staff costs forced designers "to accept more commissions than any man would wish to take on during a season. " Though he preferred to "brood" on a design project, he rarely found the time during his hundred-hour workweeks. By 1976, he had designed the sets, lighting, and often the costumes for more than three hundred (some count four hundred) productions. Given the pressure, the high overall quality of his designs is astonishing. Beginning his profession when few theater professionals understood the full potential of scene design, Mielziner had to learn for himself and then teach others the often subtle ways to enhance the script and the actors' work. Some early collaborators were hard to convince: in 1935, Maxwell Anderson wanted literal, realistic sets for the slum dwellers and gangsters in his verse tragedy Winterset; it took long arguments and a foggy-night walk near the Brooklyn Bridge to win his consent to Mielziner's poetically moody under-bridge view, a widely praised and reproduced stage design invariably pictured in theater histories and stage-design texts. Mielziner regarded lighting as an essential part of his work. Using miniature stage lights in his studio, he previewed their effects on the colors of his designs and then planned the production's lighting, saving grateful producers costly hours of lighting installation and rehearsal. Mielziner's concepts often reshaped new plays, as was strikingly demonstrated when his innovative solutions to the problems of staging and lighting Arthur Miller's radically innovative Death of a Salesman (1949) helped crystallize its emotionally stunning final form. Mielziner's design broke through the proscenium arch by extending a forestage platform into the audience, liberating Broadway stage design from its traditional "picture frame. " In World War II, as a major in the Army Air Forces (1943 - 1945), Mielziner wrote the technical manual on camouflage. In 1945, he was asked by the State Department to design the setting and lighting for the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco. In 1965, he designed a portable stage for the East Room of the White House.

Mielziner worked with Broadway's finest producers and creative talents for most of his fifty-year career, his design credits covering many of the period's best plays and musicals. Among them were Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928); Street Scene (1929) and three more plays by Elmer Rice; six plays by S. N. Behrman, including Biography (1932) and No Time for Comedy (1939); nine by Maxwell Anderson, ending with Anne of the Thousand Days (1948); Sidney Howard's Dodsworth and Yellow Jack (both 1934); actress Katharine Cornell's productions of The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931), Romeo and Juliet (1934), and Saint Joan (1936); John Gielgud's 1936 New York appearance in Hamlet; The Women (1936); Susan and God (1937); On Borrowed Time (1938); Robert E. Sherwood's Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938); Watch On the Rhine (1941); The Glass Menagerie (1945); A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and five others by Tennessee Williams; Mr. Roberts (1948); Tea and Sympathy (1953); Picnic (1953); and After the Fall (1964). Some of the musicals were George and Ira Gershwin's political satire Of Thee I Sing (1931); seven by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, including On Your Toes (1936), The Boys from Syracuse (1938), and Pal Joey (1940); Annie Get Your Gun (1946); Finian's Rainbow (1947); five by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Jr. , including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), and The King and I (1951); Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls (1950) and The Most Happy Fella (1956); Gypsy (1959); and 1776 (1969). At the time of his death in New York City, they had been separated for many years.

Achievements

• Jo Mielziner is known as the most successful set designer of the Golden era of Broadway", and he worked on both stage plays and musicals. He consulted on a number of major American theaters built in the 1960's, among them the Vivian Beaumont at Lincoln Center in New York City and the Mark Taper Forum at the Los Angeles Music Center. The first of Mielziner's five Antoinette Perry ("Tony") awards was unusual in honoring an entire ten-production season (1948 - 1949), one that included designs for Mr. Roberts, Summer and Smoke, Anne of the Thousand Days, Death of a Salesman, South Pacific, and A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1955 he received an Academy Award for his color art direction of the film Picnic.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Death of a Salesman (1949)

    (In the spring of 1948, Arthur Miller retreated to a log c...)

  • Designing for the Theatre: A Memoir and a Portfolio

    (Memoir and portfolio if Jo Meilziner, a set designer for ...)

  • The Shapes of Our Theatre

    (Dust Jacket is tattered at edges and sun-faded on spine. ...)

Connections

Mielziner married actress Jean MacIntyre in 1938; they had three children.

Father:

Leo Mielziner

Mother:

Ella MacKenna Friend

Wife:

Jean MacIntyre