Flowering Peach, The

Abstract

Sketch of Mordecai Gorelik's original set for Odets' The Flowering Peach, a retelling of the biblical story of Noah. He has designed a homey ark, the kind of boat a simple peasant farmer might have imagined. Mordecai Gorelik served his theatrical apprenticeship under Robert Edmond Jones, Norman Bel Geddes, and Sergei Soudeikine. He launched his professional career in the ground-breaking 1925 production of John Howard Lawson's The Professional, for which he designed both the sets and costumes. A founding member and designer for the Group Theatre in the 1930s, Gorelik was drawn to dramas of social conflict and he championed the kid of theater propounded by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator. Speaking about his own technique, Gorelik once said 'Some stage designers begin with a sketch, other with a ground plan or a preliminary model,. It may be notorious by now that I start with a metaphor.' He asserts that a setting need not be closely coordinated with other components of a production -- a belief that sounded very much like reading from the dogma of Brecht and Piscator. He likes to use discordant elements: projections on screens, film sequences, and fragmentary settings