Akademik

(1901-1976)

   Born in Paris, but educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design, Jo Mielziner became the most important scene designer on Broadway after Robert Edmond Jones. He began his career acting and designing for the Jessie Bonstelle stock company in Detroit and for the Theatre Guild, where he gained recognition for his design of Ferenc Molnar's The Guardsman (1924). His remarkable output spanned every form of drama, from the classics to contemporary works, from musicals to tragedy. In his early years, Mielziner worked in both realistic and expressionist veins pioneered by others, but steadily moved toward a more uniquely poetic, painterly simplicity achieved, in part, through skeletal or fragmentary settings and sensitive lighting. He pioneered new lighting techniques in collaboration with Edward F. Kook.* Mielziner designed two Pulitzer Prize winners, Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928) and Elmer Rice's Street Scene (1929). Most of his major work came after 1930 and included such classic American plays and musicals as Of Thee I Sing (1931), Winterset* (1935), The Glass Menagerie* (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire* (1947), Death of a Salesman* (1949), South Pacific (1949), Guys and Dolls (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof* (1955), and Gypsy (1959).