| Recommend |
| Comment |
| Email this article |
| Print this article |
| Get news alerts |
| RSS Feeds |
 Share
|
Digg
Mixx
Linked In
Facebook
Twitter
Delicious
When illustrator Jim McMullen paints his signature posters for the plays at Lincoln Center Theater, he works hard to capture not just the dramatic aspects of a fine play, but also the psychological subtleties beyond the footlights.
A number of his posters are on display through September 8 at the newly-reopened Avram Gallery at Stony Brook Southampton, in a tribute to the man who has helped create live theater’s image over the past 22 years.
Mr. McMullen has a contract with the Lincoln Center Theater to produce at least three theater posters per year, but his signature watercolors, with their broad gestures and keen sense of mood, are often so in demand from directors that he sometimes produces the art for an entire season’s worth of performances.
“The first step for me is reading the script, taking a lot of notes, and thinking about it. If it’s a historical kind of play or relates to some kind of geographical place, I do research on what the physical environs look like,” Mr. McMullen, a Sag Harbor resident, said of his creative process.
“Then I talk to the director to get a sense of how he sees the play, which can be quite different than one would gather from simply reading it,” he said. “If it’s a well-known play, the director is going to have some particular take on it to rationalize doing it again.”
“Often it’s a very simple idea about gesture, the relationship of a character to a chair or a boat,” he said of the eventual image he chooses. “It’s best for me if there seems to be a real psychological reason to present the character in that way.”
Mr. McMullen then asks his friends to pose in physical arrangements or gesturing in a way that he hopes will capture the mood of the play. Then he sends a rough sketch off to theater management, and they, in turn, ask him to come in and photograph the actors in the scene that he’s envisioned.
In one of his favorite posters, for the theater’s 2002 revival of the 1932 George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber comedy, “Dinner at Eight,” the theater’s management had told Mr. McMullen “it’s about old money and new shenanigans.”
“I got a very strong image in my head of a very elegant old-money kind of lady shrinking back on the chiffonier in the entrance to her apartment and crude figures advancing on her,” he said. “I got my wife to play the elegant lady and got the crude people out of my head. It was an elaborate image, just a sketch, but before I knew it I had this quite resolved image.”
Such a strong certainty about how to proceed with a poster happens only a quarter of the time, he said.
“I’m not a prima donna, but sometimes I know in myself that I’m not going to do any better than this,” he said. “My work is done in the spirit of spontaneity.”
Another of Mr. McMullen’s favorite pieces is the poster he created for the 1998 production of Eugene O’Neill’s 1933 play, “Ah, Wilderness.”
“It’s a coming-of-age play about a young son. It’s sort of as close to a comedy as Eugene O’Neill ever wrote,” he said. “It’s about a young person who feels very strongly that he is an artist, and the way he separates himself from the family. You want to go to this other world. You can see that it is a very different world from your family’s world and you become an obnoxious person.”
“I did that. I was always playing Bartók really loud to annoy my mother. It was high level and esoteric and very important to me,” he said. “It’s about this kind of young artist who goes through this period of becoming an artist and at a certain point becomes a poseur,
disconnecting from the bourgeois values of the family and really being horrible.”
Mr. McMullen said that the character Richard, who pretends to write poetry that he has actually copied from a book in order to impress a girl he is smitten with, is one that he most identified with.
“I wanted to catch that moment when Richard is reading poetry and memorizing lines before she gets there, sitting there looking up into the sky in a very poetic way,” he said. “That’s an arbitrary decision because the play is about a lot of things. To represent this play I could have done a card game with a prostitute arriving. When I can read a play and it begins to provoke in me associations and memory, it really leads to much more powerful art.”
Mr. McMullen, who has taught life drawing, almost always uses human figures in his posters, though he says that in many modernist circles, a more symbolic poster, of, say a half-empty glass of whiskey or two old boots, might be seen as a more intellectual way to represent a play.
more
Add a comment