theatre

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Image features two white, stylized female figures and one black, stylized male figure on purple ground, with horizontally printed black and white sans-serif text. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Teetering Trio in a Pastel Void
In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. Today’s blog post was originally published on May 22nd, 2016. Alvin Lustig designed numerous book covers for New Directions Publishing over the course of his prolific career, including several for Tennessee Williams’s plays. Lustig’s modernist designs,...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Matthew Kennedy
Date
June 14, 2019
A Miniature Playhouse
Imaginative author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in his 1884 essay, A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, “If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock’s…”[1] The toy theatre was a beloved pastime in 19th-century England that appealed to the creativity and craftsmanship of children and adults. Benjamin Pollock inherited his...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Lily Gildor
Date
November 12, 2016
A View of “A View from the Bridge”
And this view, regardless of perspective, intends to invite the viewer into a daunting realm of judgmental voyeurism . . . Set designer David Gallo’s drawing for the 1998 revival of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge was used to make adaptations to the theatrical set when the production transferred from the Roundabout Theatre...
Read Time
4 minutes
Posted By
Matthew Kennedy
Date
June 10, 2016
Image features two white, stylized female figures and one black, stylized male figure on purple ground, with horizontally printed black and white sans-serif text. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Teetering Trio in a Pastel Void
Alvin Lustig designed numerous book covers for New Directions Publishing over the course of his prolific career, including several for Tennessee Williams’s plays. Lustig’s modernist designs, characterized by their dramatic simplicity, contrast with the voluptuous poetry and unapologetic melodrama of Williams’s writing. For this cover for A Streetcar Named Desire, Lustig choreographed a three-way dance...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Matthew Kennedy
Date
May 22, 2016
Large charcoal drawing of the stage for "King Lear" scene two. The stage itself is black and the backdrop is white and grey. At left, a tall, straight-backed chair. In center, extending from backdrop to front of stage, is a long, flat bed.
Wilson Lights the Lights
If anyone has come to know seminal avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson, they will have witnessed the autodidact hard at work sketching. Whether backstage at a major European opera house or cramped into an economy-class plane seat—flying over the Alps to simulate the intensity of a Wagner aria—he always garners silence when drawing. When at...
Read Time
5 minutes
Posted By
Adrian Madlener
Date
April 29, 2016
Shows a ballet in the Versailles gardens. Three of the actors are on fake whales in the canal.
A Whale of a Tale: Damsels in Distress at Versailles
In 1664, Versailles was briefly transformed into a mythical and enchanted fairytale land. From May 7th to 13th, the court of Louis XIV arranged a festival of Les Plaisirs de l’Ile Enchantée (Pleasures of an Enchanted Island) in honor of Anne of Austria, the mother of Louis XIV and the queen Maria Theresa, although the...
Read Time
3 minutes
Posted By
Cabelle Ahn
Date
February 25, 2015