Setting The Stage: Scenic Designs by D. Oenslager exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York

One of America�s most innovative scenic designers will be the subject of an exhibition on view at the Museum of the City of New York from 14 Feb through to 4 May 4 2008.

Setting the Stage: Scenic Designs by Donald Oenslager will feature 20 designs by Oenslager (1902-1975), whose career spanned some 50 years. Together with his contemporaries Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, and Jo Mielziner, Oenslager reformed American scenic design by bringing new emphases on symbolism and the interpretative use of lighting, which was inspired largely by European stage designers Edward Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia.

Designs for productions including the following will be on view:

• George and Ira Gershwin�s Girl Crazy (1930), which featured Ethel Merman�s rendition of �I Got Rhythm� and Ginger Rogers�s �Embraceable You�
• Red, Hot, and Blue! (1936), with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, and sets that moved from a New York City penthouse to Washington, D.C. landmarks
• My Sister Eileen (1940)
• You Can�t Take It With You (1936), by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937
• Clare Booth Luce�s Margin for Error (1939), directed by Otto Preminger.

After study at Harvard (with George Pierce Baker) and in Europe, Oenslager began his theatrical career as an actor, garnering his first Broadway credit in the 1924 production of Eugene O�Neill�s Desire Under the Elms. In the following year, he executed his first scenic designs, for Sooner or Later, a dance satire produced by The Neighborhood Playhouse, and became a founding member of the Yale University Drama School faculty. He won a Tony Award in 1959 for his scenic designs for A Majority of One.

Oenslager designed and taught in tandem until his retirement from Yale in 1970, creating designs for the settings, lighting, and costumes of more than 250 plays, musicals, operas, and ballets, and helping to educate and inspire generations of American scenic designers.