Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,169
By This is the grave of Peggy Clark.
Born in 1915 in Baltimore, Margaret Clark grew up well off. Her father was a prominent anatomy professor. The family moved to Philadelphia when he got a job at the University of Pennsylvania. Clark went to Smith and really wanted to go into the theater. In fact, she claimed that was the case since she was 5 years old, when she saw a marionette show. She graduated in 1935, but did not have much success as an actress. She said it was because she was so tall. Could be, the long prejudice in society about women being taller than men is real. So she went on to Yale for a master’s degree in Drama and Design, which she finished in 1938. She spent her summers doing stage design for smaller productions in the Adirondacks and New Jersey, getting key experience for her future.
Clark then went to Broadway. There, she became one of the first real pioneers of contemporary lighting design, which had long been something of an afterthought in the theater, something you just hired the electricians to take care of. She got the job on some key productions and soon had a supporter. The New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson routinely praised her work in his reviews. That got attention, since in that small, insular world of Broadway, a stagehand getting attention was unusual. So Clark became the grand dame of lighting design for Broadway production for decades. Over her career, she was the lead lighting designer for over 60 big Broadway productions, including “Bye Bye Birdie,” “Brigadoon,” “Paint Your Wagon,” and “Wonderful Town.” Many of her productions were in tandem with the set designer Oliver Smith.
Clark was also a good union member. She was president of United States Scenic Artists, Local 829, the first woman to hold that post. In the late 60s, she taught some at Smith and then back at Yale. She was also president of the French Bull Dog Club of America.
Clark had a series of strokes in her 70s and that finally killed her in 1996. She was 80 years old. This is a short post, but hey, lighting is important and worthy of discussion.
Peggy Clark is buried in Woods Hole Village Cemetery, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I had never heard of her before, but if you are going to have a chatty grave like this, you might get my attention.
If you would like this series to visit some of the people Clark worked with over her long career, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The set designer Boris Aronson is in Nyack, New York and Oliver Smith is in Elmira, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.