Robert Edmond Jones
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
scenic, lighting
Lighting designer
The role of the lighting designer within theatre is to work with the director, choreographer, set designer, costume designer, and sound designer to create an overall 'look' for the show in response to the text, while keeping in mind issues of visibility, safety and cost...
, and costume designer
Costume Designer
A costume designer or costume mistress/master is a person whose responsibility is to design costumes for a film or stage production. He or she is considered an important part of the "production team", working alongside the director, scenic and lighting designers as well as the sound designer. The...
. He is credited with incorporating the new stagecraft into the American drama. His designs sought to integrate the scenic elements into the storytelling instead of having them stand separate and indifferent from the play’s action. His visual style, often referred to as simplified realism, combined bold vivid use of color and simple, yet dramatic, lighting.
Life
Born in Milton, New HampshireMilton, New Hampshire
Milton is a town in Strafford County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 4,598 at the 2010 census. A manufacturing, resort and residential town, Milton includes the village of Milton Mills...
, Jones attended Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
and graduated in 1910. Jones eventually moved to New York (1912) where, with friends made at Harvard, he began to do small design jobs. In 1913 Jones and several friends sailed to Europe to study the new stagecraft with Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Gordon Craig
Edward Henry Gordon Craig , sometimes known as Gordon Craig, was an English modernist theatre practitioner; he worked as an actor, director and scenic designer, as well as developing an influential body of theoretical writings...
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
Max Reinhardt
----Max Reinhardt was an Austrian theater and film director and actor.-Biography:...
’s Deutsches Theater
Deutsches Theater
The Deutsches Theater in Berlin is a well-known German theatre. It was built in 1850 as Friedrich-Wilhelm-Städtisches Theater, after Frederick William IV of Prussia. Located on Schumann Street , the Deutsches Theater consists of two adjoining stages that share a common, classical facade...
.
For a 1915 production of The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife directed by Harley Granville-Barker
Harley Granville-Barker
Harley Granville-Barker was an English actor-manager, director, producer, critic and playwright....
, 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
Vladimir Rosing
Vladimir Sergeyevich Rosing , aka Val Rosing, was a Russian-born operatic tenor and stage director who spent most of his professional career in England and the United States...
's American Opera Company
American Opera Company
The American Opera Company was the name of four different opera companies active in the United States. The first company was a short-lived opera company founded in New York City in February, 1886 that lasted only one season...
in 1927 and 1928 were praised by critics.
Jones also brought his expressionistic style to many productions put on by the Theatre Guild
Theatre Guild
The Theatre Guild is a theatrical society founded in New York City in 1918 by Lawrence Langner, Philip Moeller, Helen Westley and Theresa Helburn. Langner's wife, Armina Marshall, then served as a co-director. It evolved out of the work of the Washington Square Players.Its original purpose was to...
, with innovative designs for The Philadelphia Story
The Philadelphia Story (play)
The Philadelphia Story is a 1939 American comic play by Philip Barry. It tells the story of a socialite whose wedding plans are complicated by the simultaneous arrival of her ex-husband and an attractive journalist.-Production:...
(1937), Othello
Othello
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story "Un Capitano Moro" by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565...
(1943), and The Iceman Cometh
The Iceman Cometh
The Iceman Cometh is a play written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1939. First published in 1940 the play premiered on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on 9 October 1946, directed by Eddie Dowling where it ran for 136 performances to close on 15 March 1947.-Characters:* Night Hawk-...
(1946). Jones’s biggest commercial success was with The Green Pastures (1930), which, including its revival in 1951, played for a total of 1,642 performances. This revival would be Jones’s last production. Other Broadway credits include Holiday
Holiday (play)
Holiday is a 1928 play by Philip Barry. It was adapted for film twice. First in 1930, directed by Edward H. Griffith with Ann Harding, Mary Astor, Edward Everett Horton, Robert Ames and Hedda Hopper...
(1928), Mourning Becomes Electra
Mourning Becomes Electra
Mourning Becomes Electra is a play cycle written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. The play premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre on 26 October 1931 where it ran for 150 performances before closing in March 1932...
(1931), Ah, Wilderness!
Ah, Wilderness!
Ah, Wilderness! is a comedy by American playwright Eugene O'Neill that premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre on 2 October 1933.-Plot summary:...
(1933), Juno and the Paycock
Juno and the Paycock
Juno and the Paycock is a play by Sean O'Casey, and one of the most highly regarded and oft-performed plays in Ireland. It was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1924...
(1940), and Lute Song
Lute Song (musical)
Lute Song is a 1946 American musical with a book by Sidney Howard and Will Irwin, music by Raymond Scott, and lyrics by Bernard Hanighen. It is based on the 14th century Chinese play Pi-Pa-Ki by Kao-Tong-Kia and Mao-Tseo...
(1946). Jones was also the production designer for some early three-color Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...
films, such as La Cucaracha
La Cucaracha (1934 film)
La Cucaracha is a 1934 short musical film directed by Lloyd Corrigan. It was designed by Pioneer Pictures to display the new full-color Technicolor Process No. 4 , which had been used since 1932 mainly in Walt Disney cartoons. Jock Whitney and his cousin C. V. Whitney, the owners of Pioneer, were...
(1934) and Becky Sharp
Becky Sharp (film)
Becky Sharp is a 1935 film directed by Rouben Mamoulian and starring Miriam Hopkins. Other supporting cast were Frances Dee, Cedric Hardwicke, Billie Burke, Alison Skipworth, Nigel Bruce, and Alan Mowbray. It is based on the play of the same name by Langdon Mitchell, which in turn is based on...
(1935).
One of the early members of the Provincetown Players
Provincetown Players
The Provincetown Players was an amateur group of writers and artists who, at the early part of the 20th Century, wanted to see a change in American theatre and created a company committed to producing new plays by exclusively American playwrights...
, Jones worked closely with his friend Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
on many of his productions including Anna Christie
Anna Christie
Anna Christie is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. It made its Broadway debut at the Vanderbilt Theatre on November 2, 1921. O'Neill received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his work.-Plot summary:...
, The Great God Brown, and Desire Under the Elms
Desire Under the Elms
Desire Under the Elms is a play by Eugene O'Neill, published in 1924, and is now considered an American classic. Along with Mourning Becomes Electra, it represents one of O'Neill's attempts to place plot elements and themes of Greek tragedy in a rural New England setting. It is essentially a...
.
Jones published many articles on theatre design throughout his career. His books include Drawings for the Theatre (1925), The Dramatic Imagination (1941) and illustrated Kenneth Macgowan's
Kenneth Macgowan
Kenneth Macgowan was an American film producer. He won an Academy Award for Best Color Short Film for La Cucaracha , the first live-action short film made in the three-color Technicolor process....
, Continental Stagecraft (1922).
His book The Dramatic Imagination is considered the definitive work on modern stage design within the first half of the 20th. century.
He died in the home he was born in on Thanksgiving Day, 1954.
Ideas
In a time where theatrical set designs were extravagant and realistic, Jones counteracted the norm by creating simplistic or expressionistic sets and props. "He was an unashamed pleader for beauty and, far more important, an unsurpassed creator of it." Here follow some of his famous quotes from "The Dramatic Imagination""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."
"This medium [theater] is the talking picture."
"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."