The Library has acquired papers and theatrical designs documenting the life of Peggy Clark (1915-1996), one of the foremost lighting designers in the American theater.
Douglas Clark signs the gift agreement donating the Peggy Clark Collection to the Library, as his wife, Nancy, looks on. Library personnel in attendance included (from left) Jon Newsom, chief of the Music Division; Diane Kresh, acting director for Public Service Collections; Walter Zvonchenko; and Donald Panzara, chief of the Exchange and Gift Division at the time. - N. Alicia Byers
Clark's brother, Douglas, visited the Library with his wife, Nancy, to present the collection.
Material by Clark includes lighting plots, color and black-and-white renderings, finished elevations, costume design sketches and ground plans. Also in the collection are typescripts for plays, notebooks, clippings, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, posters, personal notebooks and color and black-and-white renderings by set designer Oliver Smith and rough elevations in pencil by Smith.
The Clark Collection represents the most recent additions to the Library's holdings in theatrical design and joins the body of stage and costume design in the Federal Theatre Project Archives, costume designs in the Lester Horton Collection, stage design in the Aaron Copland and Joshua Logan collections and costume designs by Leon Bakst for Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company.
Although most active as a lighting designer, Clark also created designs for costumes and stage sets. Her work was seen in some of the best known stage productions of the mid-20th century. She worked especially closely with the noted set designer Oliver Smith, creating the lighting for many of his shows and often putting his rough designs into final form to allow actual construction of the sets. Clark worked in all areas of theater: legitimate drama, musical comedy, dance and opera. Her technical work included making scale models, blueprints and "hanging plots" indicating how the scenery would be hung.
Clark's fascination with the theater and design began when she was very young. She decided early on to be an actress. At age 5, she created a marionette show. After seeing a performance with the puppets of the well known Tony Sarg, Clark asked one night for a cardboard box. The next morning, her parents woke to find that she had created a marionette theater, using the box as a stage and tying strings to the hands and feet of her dolls. Using Christmas tree decorations for lighting, she was ready to give a show.
Subsequently, Clark made scenic design her career choice. She earned her B.A. in dramatic arts at Smith College, and then went to the Yale School of Fine Arts for three years as a major in scenic design and lighting. At Yale, she designed sets and lighting for a production titled Divine Comedy.
Left, Peggy Clark designed this backdrop for Curtain Going Up, which opened Feb. 15, 1952 at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia; right, scene design by Clark from Dances from the Golden Era from the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre, 1953-54.
Clark passed the examination for entrance into the union for stage designers, United Scenic Artists, and later became the first woman to be elected to its board.
She first worked at a summer theater in the Adirondacks and at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, where she did lighting, painted sets and designed the set for the Paper Mill Playhouse premiere of Pearl S. Buck's Flight into China. Coming to New York in 1938 she prepared technical drawings for Here Come the Clowns and Missouri Legend. She was costume designer for The Girl From Wyoming, Uncle Harry, Counterattack and Dark of the Moon, among others.
Clark served as an assistant to a number of prominent designers, including John Koenig, Stewart Cheney, Donald Oenslager, Howard Bay, Nat Karson and Raoul Pene du Bois. As assistant, she might supervise the technical sides of the set creation, make models, draft the blueprints for the scene builder, find properties and supervise the installation and working of settings in the theater.
In this way, she started working for Oliver Smith as "technical supervisor" of his settings for On the Town, for which she also served as stage manager for six months. On the Town was a 1944 collaborative effort of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, George Abbott, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Oliver Smith.
Then, in 1946, she did technical work and lighting for Beggar's Holiday. Smith designed the sets for that production, and gave Clark the chance to design the lighting. A prominent drama critic of the time, George Jean Nathan, listed Clark's lighting for Beggar's Holiday as the best of the year in American Mercury in 1947.
Left, Clark designed this ballroom scene for the 1953-54 tour of the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre; right, Mountain Row, elevation by Clark for Brigadoon for the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre, 1953-54.
From this point on, Clark's career as a lighting specialist gained momentum. Continuing her activities in technical supervision, she also lighted Oliver Smith's settings for Brigadoon, High Button Shoes, Bonanza Bound, Along Fifth Avenue, Miss Liberty and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as well as the ballet, Fall River Legend, among other Smith shows.
In the meantime, Clark worked with others in designing and supervising lighting and, at times, the technical aspects of the sets. With Boris Aronson, she worked on Love Life by Alan Jay Lerner and Kurt Weill in 1948; with Sam Leve on All You Need Is One Good Break in 1950; and with Cecil Beaton on Cry of the Peacock, an adaptation of Jean Anouilh's Ardèle, ou la marguerite, in 1950. She supervised the lighting for John Piper's sets for Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia and for Robinson Jeffers's 1947 adaptation of Medea starring Judith Anderson and John Gielgud.
Clark actively supported the American effort during World War II. She served on the production staff of a USO production for military personnel called It's All Yours, featuring Hume Cronyn. She also created a set representing a steel town used in a 1942 Labor Day pageant staged in a stadium in Ohio to explain the function of steel in a nation at war. The production used episodes from American history and featured Florence Reed and a detachment of soldiers in battle uniform sent from Fort Meade. Her work with this pageant continued for three years.
Clark's versitility extended to costume design, as seen in these illustrations for a New York production of Uncle Harry, which opened May 20, 1942 at the Broadhurst Theatre.
Also during the war, she was the co-designer with Emeline Roche of the Stage Door Canteen, served as technical director for the American Theatre Wing's Lunch Time Follies shows given in factories devoted to the war effort and drew a series of blueprints for USO overseas camp shows. The Clark Collection includes documentation on all of these wartime activities. After the war, Clark helped reorganize "Stage for Action," which presented short shows on topical subjects for community and high school groups.
The collection complements a number of others already in, or in process of coming to, the Library. Among these are the Leonard Bernstein Archives, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Roger L. Stevens, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and Margaret Webster collections. Clark designed the lighting for the original production of Bernstein's Wonderful Town in 1953 and for a revival at New York's City Center in 1958. She created the lighting for the original production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song and for revivals of their Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Carousel and The King and I. She also worked on the 1952 revival of Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey and the 1954 revival of On Your Toes. She designed lighting for a revival of Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun and George and Ira Gershwin's Of Thee I Sing. In 1951 she designed lighting, costumes and sets for the New York production of The High Ground with a cast that included Margaret Webster.
Clark worked with a large number of very well-known theater practitioners in the course of her career. In discussing various attitudes toward lighting, she noted that George Abbott, one of the nation's most prominent directors, liked a great deal of light downstage, where he played all the comedy scenes. Agnes de Mille, who knew her choreographic preferences very well, wanted to silhouette her dancers on one occasion, and on another to have a dimensional effect. Jerome Robbins wanted plentiful light from out front to focus on the pantomime expressions and makeup that were important in his work.
Sometimes, things did not go the way they were planned. For example, when Clark met Judith Anderson, star of Medea, the actress said, "Look, I don't know a thing about lights. I just want to be seen." But, said Clark, "The funny thing was that on opening night out of town, she wasn't. The lighting equipment didn't arrive until 3 p.m. and we finished setting the lights at 8:15, with no time to check, naturally. During the performance, Miss Anderson usually left a spot just before the light got to it."
Clark talked and wrote extensively about her art, noting that "good lighting is unobtrusive. ... Lighting is visual music. ... It sets the mood, enables you to understand what is going on, yet never call attention to itself." Yet preparation for this quiet effect required a tremendous amount of labor. At times, hundreds of pieces of lighting equipment must be coordinated, with painstaking attention required to effect all the nuances of mood and action in the play, musical or dance. Actors' stage positions had to be understood and orchestrated under the vast lighting scheme; technicians had to be managed. Clark sometimes worked on more than one show at a time, which might be in "tryouts" in different cities prior to opening on Broadway.
"Designing lighting is like housekeeping," she said. "You have to arrange everything so you get dinner on time."
