unconscious or attendant mind and of finding new realities within the
dream. Pocket watches don’t hang from trees or have liquid properties,
yet such an image may be, in some unpredictable way, exactly what inspires a poet or a scientist toward an important new idea or solution.
Over the past century, the practical arts have made widespread use
of surreal and expressionist methods. This issue’s Curio Cabinet, “Stage
Pictures: Jo Mielziner and the Art of Set Design,” opens with a detailed
note from Tennessee Williams regarding the set for his new play Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof, to open on Broadway in 1955. Williams and Mielziner
had previously worked together on A Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar
Named Desire. Mielziner’s minimalist approach emphasized one or two
key images within the play, which perfectly expressed Williams’s lyrical realism. Yet the playwright encouraged Mielziner to push the designs for Cat into the realm of the metaphysical, asking that Maggie
and Brick’s bedroom be “roofed by sky” to suggest the mystery of the
cosmos. Williams also provided the designer with detailed notes on the
huge console—the combination radio, phonograph, and liquor cabinet—
that dominates the room as an objective correlative for “all the comforts
and illusions behind which we hide,” with the overarching cosmos as a
powerful commentary on those illusions. Mielziner’s sketches from the
archive at the New York Public Library of Performing Arts demonstrate
his skillful interpretation of Williams’s requests. They also show an expressive talent that sustained a fifty-year career and helped transform set
design from craft to art.
Cat Powell’s powerful story “Manifold Northeast Life and Trust” is
about an isolated middle-aged widower working for a once thriving insurance company now in such decline that its multistory office building
is scarcely occupied. In his isolation, he notices fantastical changes in
his workplace. A pond appears in one of the offices, fish populate it, and
then a forest starts to grow. He does less and less of his regular work
and more and more tending of the forest and dismantling the offices to
make room for it. Later, ghostly shades of dead former colleagues start
to appear and populate the building, going about the business of work
and interacting with each other. The narrator seems to have made the
transition from the necessary labor of supporting self and family in the
real world to tending a larger mind.
Jason Brown’s striking “Sarah Campbell’s Story” takes form as a family history written down by Sarah Campbell’s granddaughter from her
grandmother’s oral account. The contrast between the dry and straight-
