NEW YORK CITY — The modest four-room East Side Manhattan apartment of Ming Cho Lee and his wife Betsy is quiet now, but in its day it was a hive of domestic and theatrical activity, the setting for not only raising a family but for creating some of the most dramatic designs for the American theater.
“It was a circus and he was the ringmaster,” says Lee’s wife of 56 years of the decades when the apartment was filled with their three growing boys and Lee’s design staff often working on several projects at the same time, not to mention meeting and socializing with producers, directors and students.
At age 84, and with his mobility limited, Lee is retired from designing productions for the stage but still teaches a class at Yale. He is also the subject of a recently published, handsomely illustrated book, “Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design” (TCG, 336 pages, $75).
The book’s author Arnold Aronson spent countless hours over the same table where Lee is sitting on a bitterly cold winter afternoon over “pretty decent Chinese tea” to talk about his more than 300 designs for theater, opera and dance over the past 50 years, and about his more than 40 years as head of the design program at the Yale School of Drama.
Whether it’s creating an icy slice of a mountain in his Tony Award-winning design for Broadway’s “K2,” or his nitty gritty set designed for “A Moon for the Misbegotten” at Long Wharf Theater and Hartford Stage or his explosion of pop and political imagery in the original “Hair”, Lee’s imagined worlds haunt audiences long after the show is over.
Lee’s set designs have a beauty and boldness that can also stand alone in their artistry and have earned him a place in the American Theater Hall of Fame. Lee’s sketches and models have been exhibited at the New York Public Library, in Taiwan and Ningbo, China, and his native Shanghai and, most recently, last year at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery.
Lee’s demeanor is gentle and graceful as the landscape water colors that he painted as a boy growing up in Shanghai. Smiling, soft-spoken with a serene calm, this “Designer Yoda” radiates a zen-like authority. He also has a sly sense of humor.
“I had a hard time putting it down,” jokes Lee of Aronson’s hefty coffee table book.
Aronson says he was prompted to write his singular tome about Lee after writing an earlier book on America’s greatest theater designers, and finding that nine out of the 11sets in the collection were made up of Lee, his students, assistants and one other who had worked with him professionally.
“Even I was shocked when you put that statistic together,” says Lee.
“Ming has had the most profound impact on American design,” says Aronson. “There were a few peers such as his mentor Boris Aronson — no relation — and Jo Mielziner. But when Ming came along he brought together all of these influences and transformed [design] into something new.”
Aronson says Lee did two things his mentors did not, or at least to Lee’s extent. He worked across all performance genres “which meant he was having an influence in all of those areas as well as being influenced by those areas. And he taught — and at what is considered one the best theater schools in the country, certainly that’s where all the best designers were coming from. Training generation after generation of designers will continue his legacy indefinitely.”
Holistic Approach
It’s hard to place a definitive finger on Lee’s style, although he is often noted for his structural and sculptural approach — soaring verticals, collages and use of non-traditional materials such as pipework, raw wood and scaffolding.
His designs filled stages at New York’s Shakespeare Festival in Central Park and off-Broadway’s Public Theater, the New York City and Metropolitan Operas, the Joffrey Ballet and regional theaters across the country. Broadway was more of a challenge, often working in a series of shows that failed but even there his artistry was recognized. He was nominated for a Tony for a show that closed after just one night.
“But Ming continued to change,” says Aronson, “and the style that he was identified with in the 1960s, was no longer there in the ’70s, or ’80s and he continued to change even in the later years of his career.”
Lee resists using academic words like “scenography” to describe his work. “It sounds too scientific and doesn’t address the emotional value of ones work in theater.”
It’s not simply designing sets, says Lee, but creating a whole environment for the theater that evokes the essence of the work on stage.
That search for the right aesthetic for a production, Lee says, inevitably lies in the conflict between the real and the realistic.
“As one grows older you realize there is never such a thing as an abstract play,” he says. “The fact that it involves human beings tells you there must be something that’s real and therefore it is realistic.”
But it is not realistic in the conventional sense, he says, but representational of an essence, like a singular brush stroke in a Chinese landscape painting.
Another important aspect to Lee’s approach was his eagerness to collaborate.
“One of the things that Ming does that was unusual,” says Aronson, “was his holistic approach to the overall work. His greatest enjoyment was engaging with the director not just about what the stage should look like but what the play was about and who were the people in it.”
Advocating A Career Mix
One of the tenants of his teaching is to urge designers to have a more wide-ranging career.
He says too few designers are involved in a variety of performance “that has its own aesthetics and demands. I can now count on one hand American designers who did all these areas.”
“You have people who are successful on Broadway but you don’t see their work in modern dance or ballet or opera. Mention [legendary modern dance figure] Martha Graham and some people would say, ‘Who the hell is she?’
“When you really talk seriously about performing arts, you’re talking about someone who is performing on stage, whether it’s through singing or acting or words or through no words and only movement, it’s all still theater.”
That’s why in his first day of class at Yale he doesn’t pontificate about his philosophy. It’s about having the students talk about themselves. It’s about having them open up themselves to the class — and to the larger world.
Outside of class and the stage, Lee’s personal passions include artistic freedom and social justice and has not been shy in expressing his views when he felt the need. In the ’90s he was outspoken in defense of the arts during the attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts. He still calls support for the agency “pitiful.”
He says he was also torn on whether to accept the 2002 National Medal of Arts because it was presented by President George W. Bush, whose war policies Lee objected. (He accepted the award because he saw it as an honor from the country and not the man.)
And as far as the usage of computers and projections in modern set design, Lee says they are not a part of his hand-drawn methodology. He leaves technology-driven visions to others.
“Technology makes it look perfect and nothing comes out of perfection,” he said last year in a talk at the Yale exhibit of his work. “Efficiency is nothing to be proud of.”
Ask him how he would design a stage setting depicting the story of his life, one that centered on his apartment in its heyday of activity, Lee says he would begin like he would with any other project, “finding its real essence.” Then he paused and smiled.
“Let Betsy design it.”
