Firsts & Founders: Early Women in Drama at Yale
Women Offstage: Costumes & Production
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Virginia More Roediger | Jean Rosenthal | Anne Kleiner
Virginia More Roediger
Program for The Winter's Tale, 1931
Virginia More Roediger was primarily a costume designer, but she also acted in a number of productions during her time as a student. She executed the costumes for The Winter’s Tale (left and below) in 1931 based on designs by faculty member Frank Bevan. She wrote an analysis of an eighteenth-century farce, including set and costume design sketches, as her thesis.
In the summer of 1937, the Department of Drama sent Roediger to Paris with a Leica camera and letters of introduction to continue the work of collecting documentation of set and costume designs from libraries in Europe, begun by lighting designer and faculty member Stanley McCandless and his students in 1934.
Production photograph for The Winter's Tale, 1931
After leaving Yale, Roediger was a costume designer at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. She also published a book, Ceremonial Costumes of the Pueblo Indians: Their Evolution, Fabrication, and Significance in the Prayer Drama, in 1941, based on her fieldwork and sketches documenting religious performance.
Jean Rosenthal
Production photograph for Passée, 1933
Jean Rosenthal was a pioneer in the then emerging field of lighting design. She studied with Stanley McCandless, designed lighting for several plays including Passée in 1933 (above and below left), and was one of the women whose work was featured in A Demonstration of Stage Lighting (below right) at Yale that same year. In her 1972 book, The Magic of Light, she writes of her time at Yale, “I really could not have been better placed in history. I waltzed through an entire span of dramatic changes in a period of about three years.”
Program for Passée, 1933
Program for A Demonstration of Stage Lighting, 1933
After Yale, Rosenthal joined the Federal Theatre Project and the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles and John Houseman. She was on the Federal Theatre Project staff during the infamous first performance of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock on June 16, 1937, when the cast defiantly performed from their seats in a different theater after the Works Progress Administration canceled the production. Everyone involved was fired as a result. However, the Mercury Theatre resurrected the production, and it has been revived several times.
Carl Van Vechten, Jean Rosenthal, 1951. Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, YCAL MSS 1050
Rosenthal later became known particularly as a designer of lighting for dance, collaborating with Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, American Ballet Theater, and New York City Ballet. She developed ways of eliminating shadows onstage and creating evocative moods. She designed lighting for the original Broadway productions of West Side Story; Hello, Dolly!; Fiddler on the Roof; and Cabaret; as well as numerous productions at the Metropolitan Opera. She lit over four thousand productions during her career, and many of the techniques she invented are still in use today.
Anne Kleiner
Anne Kleiner, A Lighting Layout for High School Auditoriums and Stages: Basic Standards and Minimum Specifications, 1942
In 1942, Anne May Kleiner was the first woman at Yale to submit an M.F.A. thesis in Technical Design and Production, A Lighting Layout for High School Auditoriums and Stages: Basic Standards and Minimum Specifications (right). The technical drawing (fig. 3) visible in her thesis describes stage mounting pipes.
She studied under Stanley McCandless and notes that some of her illustrations are based on his influential book A Method of Lighting the Stage. Kleiner worked on lighting for several productions while a student in the Department of Drama and created a detailed and practical manual for school theaters.