Cleon Throckmorton

Cleon Francis "Throck" Throckmorton (born October 8, 1897, Absecon, New Jersey, died Atlantic City, New Jersey, October 23, 1965) was an American painter and theatrical designer, producer, and architect.

Early life

Born in Absecon, just outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, by 1912 Throckmorton's parents Ernest and Roberta Throckmorton had moved to Washington, D.C. where Ernest ran a cigar store. Throckmorton attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology 1917-8 and George Washington University 1918-9 before starting a career as a painter. He studied painting with Charles Webster Hawthorne and Alexis Many.

Throckmorton ran the "Bohemian" Krazy Kat Klub in Washington, a speakeasy and meeting place for artists, from 1919 into the early 1920s.

Theater work
Throckmorton's set design for "Catfish Row" in "Porgy", 1928

In Provincetown Throckmorton became involved with the experimental theater group the Provincetown Players. He designed and produced the sets for the first production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920) and a number of other works by the Players. Throckmorton went on to work on stage design or set design for over a hundred productions, including 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.[1] In his heyday in the 1920s and early 1930s, it was said that the only person whose name appeared on more playbills than Throckmorton's was the fire commissioner.[2]

Many notable artists and stage designers worked with or for Throckmorton at the Provincetown Players, including Mordecai Gorelik,[3] Alexander Calder,[4] Robert Edmond Jones, and others.

From 1920-2 Throckmorton was associated with the drama department at Howard University, teaching and helping produce plays.

Art by Throckmorton was included in the 1934 International Exhibition of Theatre Art at the Museum of Modern Art.[5]

In 1928 Throckmorton and his friend writer Christopher Morley began to produce a series of revivals of old melodramas at theaters in Hoboken. They produced an assortment of works in association with it, including an illustrated map of Hoboken,[6] Hoboken passports,[7] and a book, "Born in a Beer Garden, or She Troupes to Conquer" (1930; written with an as-yet-unknown Ogden Nash). Later Throckmorton and Morley produced plays at the Millpond Playhouse in Roslyn, New York, including a well-received production of Morley's "The Trojan Horse".[8]

Throckmorton also became known as an architect and designer of theaters, working on the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village, the Westport Country Playhouse, and others. In 1935 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Theatre Arts to study classic European theaters.

Throckmorton was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2002.[9]

Later work

Throckmorton's theatrical work declined in the 1940s and he was forced to move on. He became an event planner, did 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.[10]

Artwork

Drawings by Throckmorton decorate the "Volare" restaurant in Greenwich Village in New York City, where they have been hanging since 1933.[11]

Family

Throckmorton married silent movie actress Juliet Brenon (1895-1979) on May 13, 1927. The Brenons were a musical and theatrical family; her father Algernon had been a music critic, her uncle Herbert Brenon was a silent film director, and her sister Aileen (1894-1967) was a music critic and theatrical/film publicist whose husband was writer and art critic Thomas Craven.[12]

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References
  1. https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/cleon-throckmorton/ Guggenheim Fellows biography of Throckmorton
  2. An American Theatre: The Story of Westport Country Playhouse, 1931-2005, Richard Somerset-Ward, Joanne Woodward, and Paul Newman, Yale University Press, 2005, p. 35
  3. Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik: Scene Design and the American Theatre, Anne Fletcher, SIU Press, 2009, p. 27-9
  4. Calder: The Conquest of Time : the Early Years, 1898-1940, Jed Perl, Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, p. 174-178
  5. https://www.moma.org/artists/65776 Throckmorton's entry on MoMA website
  6. https://hoboken.pastperfectonline.com/archive/A14E8431-FFCD-4D6D-86FA-401778173210 Morley and Throckmorton's map of Hoboken
  7. https://hoboken.pastperfectonline.com/archive/EC2806A5-5D51-4AB0-9FAF-115931825540 Hoboken passport
  8. New York Times obituary, October 25, 1965, as reprinted in the Congressional Record, Volume 112, part 24, p. A531
  9. http://americantheatrecritics.org/theatre-hall-of-fame/ Archived 2010-05-17 at the Wayback Machine Theater Hall of Fame page on American Theatre Critics Association website
  10. An American Theatre: The Story of Westport Country Playhouse, 1931-2005, Richard Somerset-Ward, Joanne Woodward, and Paul Newman, Yale University Press, 2005, p. 35
  11. https://www.grade-a-fancy-magazine.com/2015/07/a-quick-one-at-krazy-kat-klub_8.html "A Quick One at the Krazy Kat Klub", July 9, 2015, Grade A Fancy Magazine
  12. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyhs/ms3045_brenon/bioghist.html guide to Aileen St. John Brenon papers, New York Public Library
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