Cleon Throckmorton

Born in Absecon, just outside Atlantic City, New Jersey, by 1912 Throckmorton's parents Ernest Upton Throckmorton and Roberta Cowing Throckmorton had moved to Washington, D.C. where Ernest ran a cigar store. Throckmorton attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology from 1917-18 and George Washington University from 1918-19 before starting a career as a painter. He studied painting with Charles Webster Hawthorne and Alexis Many.[5][1]

Throckmorton's lighting and set design for The Emperor Jones (1920) garnered him national acclaim

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.[6] 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.[7]

Many notable artists and stage designers worked with or for Throckmorton at the Provincetown Players, including Mordecai Gorelik,[8] Alexander Calder,[9] Robert Edmond Jones, and others.

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

Throckmorton's set design for Porgy (1928)

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,[10] Hoboken passports,[11] 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".[1]

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.[12][13]

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.[6]

Throckmorton was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2002.[4]

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.[7]

Drawings by Throckmorton still decorate the "Volare" restaurant in Greenwich Village in New York City, where they have been hanging since 1933.[14]

Katherine Mullen was Throckmorton's first wife and model

Throckmorton's first wife was Katherine "Kat" Mullen.[2] A model and sketch artist, Mullen was a frequent habitué of Throckmorton's speakeasy known as "The Kat" in Washington, D.C., and was also known for her radio performances as a singer and ukulele player with the Crandall Saturday Nighters.[2][3] Throckmorton likely divorced Mullen when he permanently relocated from Washington, D.C. to New York City.

On March 13, 1927, Throckmorton married his second wife silent movie actress Juliet Brenon (1895-1979). 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.[15]

During the 1920s and 1930s, Throckmorton's Greenwich Village apartment that he shared with Juliet Brenon would become an after-hours salon for thespians, artists, and intellectuals such as Noël Coward, Norman Bel Geddes, Eugene O'Neill and E.E. Cummings.[1][16] Their politically leftward salon notably raised funds for the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War.[1]

• Krazy Kat Klub