64 
House df Garden 
The set for the second and third acts of “Aren’t IVe All?” shou's quite a veritable 
cottage interior, with its range of casement windows, chintz curtains and chintz 
covered chairs 
FOOTLIGHTS and FURNITURE 
Although the Drama Is Far Removed Fro??i Life, Decoration Has 
Given Stage Sets a Striking Realism 
MONTROSE J. MOSES 
S TAGE furniture should not be any more 
obtrusive than the furniture of a well- 
appointed home; in fact, not as much so. 
If the canons of good taste are followed in 
the decoration of rooms, nothing should 
shriek at you when you enter; there should 
be the quiet atmosphere of peace and 
beauty. So on the stage, when the curtain 
goes up, there should be nothing to captivate 
the attention and keep it away from the 
play. 
The days of the Old Curiosity Shop of 
Realism are over in the theater, just as 
completely over as the mid-Victorian idea 
of the decoration in the home. You may 
be assured that if there is any flagrant 
exhibition of bad taste on our stage today, 
it is demanded because of the bad taste of 
the characters in the play. For many years, 
there has been a Better Stage Home Move¬ 
ment, coincident with the suburban renais¬ 
sance and the increased profession of the 
interior decorator. It is bad producing to 
clutter the stage with all sorts of furniture. 
It is good producing to create an atmos¬ 
phere. Show me your house and I’ll tell you 
what sort of a person you are. Show me 
your scene, and I’ll be able to tell you 
something about the characters; Dr. Seelig’s 
library, in the third act of Mr. Augustus 
Thomas’ “As a Man Thinks”, shows the 
wealth, the sentiment and the racial bad 
taste of the man; in the opening scene of 
Three midlioned windows form the back 
of the set in the first act of “Lucky One ”, 
staged by Lee Simonson 
Mr. A. A. Milne’s “The Dover Road”, w'e 
know what sort of eccentric bachelor de¬ 
lightful Mr. Latimer is by the glassware, 
the bowl of flowers, the napery, and, more 
than anything else, by Milne’s statement 
that Dulac might have had a hand in the 
designing of the room. 
So that to the scenic artist I think there 
must be as much joy in fitting up a room 
for a play as there is for the decorator to 
furnish a house. There are problems to 
meet just as human; but also there are 
technical problems which show clearly how 
far removed from real life the stage is, and 
how grieviously wrong it is to attempt too 
slavishly to make it like life. Of course 
nearly everything on the stage these days 
is “practicable”. If there are doors, they 
are solid and made to open and shut; they 
Brugiiiere 
