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Robert Edmond "Bobby" Jones was born on December 12, 1887 in Milton, New Hampshire, United States. He was the second child born to Fred and Emma Jane Cowell Jones. Robert began taking violin lessons at the age of nine and eventually played in the Harvard Pierian Sodality Orchestra, but even as a child he had decided that he wanted to become an artist.
Jones attended Harvard University and graduated in 1910. In 1913 Jones and several friends sailed to Europe to study the new stagecraft with Edward Gordon Craig in Florence. The school in Florence would not accept Jones so he went to Berlin instead, spending a year in informal study with Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater.
Jones moved to New York (1912) where, with friends made at Harvard, he began to do small design jobs. For a 1915 production of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife directed by Harley Granville-Barker, Jones designed a fairly simple set that complemented the action and the other design elements of the production rather than overwhelming it.
His innovative designs for Vladimir Rosing's American Opera Company in 1927 and 1928 were praised by critics. Jones also brought his expressionistic style to many productions put on by the Theatre Guild, with innovative designs for The Philadelphia Story (1937), Othello (1943), and The Iceman Cometh (1946). Jones’s biggest commercial success was with The Green Pastures (1930), which, if we include its revival in 1951, played for a total of 1, 642 performances.
Jones' name is associated with the earliest days of the Provincetown Players.
Subsequently (1924 - 1926), he formed with Kenneth Macgowan and Eugene O'Neill a triumvirate directorship which took over the Provincetown and later the Greenwich Village Theatre.
There he designed many productions, and directed several, including Strindberg's Spook Sonata, Anna Cora Monatt's Fashion, Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, Congreve's Love for Love, and O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms.
Subsequent outstanding settings, marked by the simplicity and strong poetic mood that characterized his style, were O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Marc Connelly's Green Pastures, Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland, and O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.
He was one of the chief and earliest proponents of antinaturalism in American scene design, as evidenced by his first important setting, for Granville-Barker's production of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, by Anatole France.
His book The Dramatic Imagination is considered the definitive work on modern stage design in the first half of the 20th century.
Quotations:
"We have learned that beneath the surface of an ordinary everyday normal casual conscious existence there lies a vast dynamic world of impulse and dream, a hinterland of energy which has an independent existence of its own and laws of its own: laws which motivate all our thoughts and our actions. "
"[Our playwrights] are attempting to express directly to the audience the unspoken thoughts of their characters, to show us not only the patterns of their conscious behavior but the pattern of their subconscious lives. "
"We accept [motion pictures] unthinkingly as objective transcripts of life, whereas in reality they are subjective images of life. "
"On stage we shall see the actual characters of the drama; on the screen we shall see their hidden secret selves. "
"The theater is a school we shall never have done with studying and learning. "
"A stage setting is not a background; it is an environment. "
"I think [the theater] needs also actors who have in them a kind of wildness, an exuberance, a take-it-or-leave-it quality, a dangerous quality. "
"I am indebted to the great Madame Freisinger for teaching me the value of simplicity in the theater. "
"The sole aim of the arts of scene-designing, costuming, lighting, is, as I have already said, to enhance the natural powers of the actor. "
"As we work we must seek not for self-expression or for performance for its own sake, but only to establish the dramatist's intention, knowing that when we have succeeded in doing so audiences will say to themselves, not, This is beautiful, This is charming, This is splendid, but--This is true. "
He was one of the early members of the Provincetown Players.
In the summer of 1933 he married Margaret Huston Carrington.
