Edited by Bobbi Owen, with introduction by Arnold Aronson.

Essays by Ann M. Archbold, Jade Bettin, Jody Blake, Whitney Blausen, John Bracewell, Gail Brassard, Annie O. Cleveland, M. Barrett Cleveland, Ben Coolik, Jeff Davis, Patricia Dennis, Richard E. Dunham, Linda Essig, Laura Hanson, Holly Monsos, Mike Monsos, Bobbi Owen, Sylvia Hillyard Pannell, Andrew Rich, Peggy Rosefeldt, Robert Lewis Smith, Mary Tarantino, Kristina Tollefson, Erik Viker, Arnold Wengrow, and Craig Wolf

$45.00
index, illustrations
272 pages
ISBN: 978-1-933348-17-9

Published by
USITT
in cooperation with
Broadway Press
March 2009

The twenty-five American designers—costume, lighting, scenery, sound, makeup—in this volume were all active between 1960 and 2010 when the majority of their careers occurred. They all spent most of their working lives in the theatre rather than in other venues and other art forms, and most of them dedicated themselves to working in the major theatre centers, in particular New York City, where USITT was founded in 1960.

Designers included are Ralph Alswang, Martin Aronstein, Lucinda Ballard, Howard Bay, Harold Burris-Meyer, Peggy Clark, Alvin Colt, Judy Dearing, Ben Edwards, Abe Feder, Arden Fingerhut, John Gleason, Gilbert Hemsley, Bernard Johnson, Richard Nelson, Ben Nye, Chris Parry, Raoul Pène Du Bois, Irene Sharaff, Tom Skelton, Oliver Smith, Rouben Ter-Arutunian, Miles White, Freddy Wittop, and Patricia Zipprodt.

Designers participate in the creation of art and entertainment productions with the same level of professionalism as performers and directors, but designers' names are less often remembered and their contributions can often recede into the collective memory. This book represents another effort by USITT to raise designers' public profile by establishing a record of their artistry. As Raoul Pene du Bois told Elliott Arnold during an interview for the New York World Telegraph in 1940: "No designer can afford to be modest. He has to fight hard for what he wants in a show. Once I planned to dedicate a book of my sketches 'to the producer through whose fingers slipped some of my best designs.'"