Cleon Throckmorton

Throckmorton circa 1918

Born in Absecon, just outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, Throckmorton's parents Ernest Upton Throckmorton and Roberta Cowing Throckmorton had moved to Washington, D.C. by 1912 where Ernest ran a cigar store.[7] His mother was an artist employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.[8] Throckmorton's early years were spent in Atlantic City and Washington, D.C.[8] He purportedly was deeply influenced by the gothic atmosphere of the American South which he drew upon in later years when he designed sets for All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) and Porgy (1928).[7]

As a young man, Throckmorton studied engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1917–18 and George Washington University from 1918–19.[9] As a student, he worked as a lab assistant at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.[10] He developed an interest in painting, and studied painting with portraitist Charles Webster Hawthorne and Alexis Many.[11] According to Throckmorton, his career began as a bet made with other artists in Washington, D.C. The artists claimed he could not succeed both in engineering and painting.[2] Within a year, Throckmorton won the bet by graduating with an engineering degree and had an exposition of his paintings at the Biennial Exposition of Contemporary Artists.[2] Attempting to reconcile his passion for painting with his love of engineering, he gradually became aware of "the perfect marriage of the two professions—set designing."[2]

Cleon Throckmorton, his first wife Katherine "Kat" Mullen, and friends at the Krazy Kat in 1921.

After obtaining an engineering degree and following an exhibition of his paintings, Throckmorton began advertising himself as a specialist "in difficult tasks for the theater that require the combination of the artist and the engineer."[2] Soon after, he became a frequent collaborator and associate with the African-American drama department at Howard University, a federally chartered historically black research university in Washington, D.C. He taught classes, produced plays, and designed sets at Howard University circa 1920–22.[2]

While associated with Howard University, Throckmorton operated the Krazy Kat Klub, a raucous nightclub and speakeasy situated at No. 3 Green Court near Washington, D.C.'s Thomas Circle.[12] As a pre-Raphaelite impressionist, Throckmorton believed that artists should pursue their vocation day and night by surrounding themselves with appropriate settings that inspired creativity, and the venue fulfilled that purpose.[13] Due to its courtyard and tree-house, the establishment became as an idyllic haunt for artists, bohemians, flappers, and other free-wheeling "young moderns" during the Jazz Age.[14] A frequent club habitué was Katherine "Kat" Mullen, a model and sketch artist known for her radio performances as a singer and ukulele player with the Crandall Saturday Nighters.[15] Throckmorton and Mullen were married during this period.[15]

While operating the Krazy Kat Klub speakeasy in Washington, D.C., Throckmorton became acquainted with theater producer George Cram Cook, a key figure in the experimental theater collective known as the Provincetown Players located in Provincetown, Massachusetts.[9] Cook had been impressed by Throckmorton's avant-garde work on Ridgely Torrence's Simon the Cyrenian at Howard University,[2] and he offered Throckmorton the opportunity to design the sets for the upcoming first production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920).[9] Throckmorton completed the sketches and sets in only three days, and the play opened to rave reviews on November 1, 1920.[2]

Throckmorton's lighting and set design for The Emperor Jones (1920) won him national acclaim and catapulted him into the cultural elite.

Due to the ecstatic critical reception of Throckmorton's set work for The Emperor Jones, Throckmorton went on to work on stage design or set design for over six hundred productions during the next decade.[7] His many works included The Hairy Ape (1922), In Abraham's Bosom (1926; Pulitzer Prize, 1927), Porgy (1928), the American premiere of The Threepenny Opera (1933), Sidney Howard's Alien Corn (1933), the 1935 American premiere of Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding (retitled as The Bitter Oleanders), and a 1942 production of Nathan the Wise.[16] During this heyday of Throckmorton's career, it was said that the only person whose name appeared on more playbills than Throckmorton's was the fire commissioner.[5] Many notable artists and stage designers worked with Throckmorton at the Provincetown Players, including Mordecai Gorelik,[17] Alexander Calder,[18] and Robert Edmond Jones.

By 1928, following his divorce from his first wife Katherine Mullen and his second marriage to screen actress Juliet Brenon,[19] Throckmorton had relocated to Hoboken, New Jersey, where he and his intimate friend, writer Christopher Morley, co-founded the Hoboken Theatrical Company.[20] They produced at the Old Rialto Theatre a series of successful revivals of old-time melodramas from the gaslight era,[9] "complete with peanuts—hisses for the villain and cheers for the heroes."[8]

The efforts of Throckmorton and Morley led to a brief cultural flowering in the city.[8] They concurrently produced an assortment of experimental crafts including an illustrated map of Hoboken,[21] Hoboken passports,[22] and a book, "Born in a Beer Garden, or She Troupes to Conquer" (1930), written with then-unknown poet Ogden Nash. Throckmorton and Morley later produced plays at the Millpond Playhouse in Roslyn, New York, including a well-received production of Morley's "The Trojan Horse".[9]

Throckmorton's set design for Catfish Row as it appeared in Porgy (1928). Seven years later, this iconic set design was re-used for George Gershwin's musical adaptation Porgy and Bess (1935).

While residing in a studio at West Third Street in New York City during the early 1930s,[9] Throckmorton produced a series of drawings which soon decorated the "Volare" restaurant in Greenwich Village in New York City, where they have been hanging since 1933.[23] In 1934, Throckmorton's four concept drawings for the scene designs in The Emperor Jones were included in the 1934 International Exhibition of Theatre Art at the Museum of Modern Art.[24] During this period, Throckmorton also became known as an architect and designer of theaters, working on the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, the Cape Playhouse at Dennis on Cape Cod, and many others.[2] In 1935, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Theatre Arts to study classic European theaters.[25]

After his artistic zenith during the Jazz Age, Throckmorton's theatrical work steadily declined in the 1940s, and he was forced to move on to other ventures. He became an event planner, created murals for restaurants and nightclubs, and designed private homes. He also did pioneering television work designing simulations of historical events, battles, and other events that could not be filmed.[5] He became the first art director for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) during the early years of television.[2]

As his career declined, Throckmorton divided his time between his Greenwich Village apartment and a residence in the Bahamas.[8] In his final years, Throckmorton lived with his second wife Juliet Brenon in semi-retirement at 33 South North Carolina Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey.[7] He died at 68 years old on October 23, 1965.[9] Nearly forty years after his death, he was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2002.[6]