‘A loT of The Technology of The TheATer comes from sAIlIng shIps.’
— eugene lee
aboard, sailing, rowing and whipping up magic tricks with their parents at his father’s cottage called Hi-Lee near Lake Ripley, Wisconsin. “Jerry Todd, my Herreshoff 12½, was named after a character in my grandfather’s books,” Lee says. “Named after my father, actually.”
There was always lots of hustle and bustle around Lake Ripley, which is where Ole Evinrude tested out his great invention, the outboard motor.
“We always had a lot of extra boats,” Lee says. “Lots of kayaks, canoes and homemade boats. All kinds of things like that. You could just pop down to the lake and get anything you wanted for excitement.”
Summer also gave the boys time to read books by globe-trotting sailors Eric and Susan Hiscock. They sent Lee’s imagination soaring beyond the lake, to the challenges of bluewater voyaging.
“I was always interested in Vertues because the Hiscocks sailed Wanderer III, a 30-foot Vertue, around the world many times,” he recalls. “I read about all their travels.”
Years passed, the boys grew, and while Tom got a commission to West Point, Eugene was drawn to sketchpads, isometric drawings and the “really fantastic theater” at his high school. “We went in opposite directions,” he says, adding, “Tom has boats, too. He’s as crazy, and possibly more crazy, than me. His boats are all plastic. I know. Heresy, right?”
Lee’s restless aspirations saw him through a peripatetic educational path. It included stints at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the Art Institute of Chicago. He received BFA degrees from Carnegie Tech and the Art Institute Of Chicago. He went to the Yale School of Drama, where he received his Master of Fine Arts. He downplays his top-flight professional credits and awards (he was admitted to the Theater Hall of Fame in 2006), which are too numerous to list. For him, life’s pretty much as it’s always been.
“I’m just doing now what I was doing in high school, to be honest,” Lee says. “It hasn’t changed. A lot of the technology of the theater comes from sailing ships. The systems that were used in the theater to fly things involved counterweights and blocks and falls. All that’s right out of how the mechanics of theater used to be done.
“Set designers like me, we know a little bit about a lot of things,” he adds. “We know a little bit about engineering, but we’re not engineers. We do things architects might do, but we’re not architects. It’s a funny profession.”
On the second floor of his carriage house is another sanctuary of collectibles. Bikes, bistro chairs and pendant lamps are suspended from the ceiling. Surrounded by wooden rolltop desks, filing cabinets, a draftsman’s table and stacks of shallow drawers, Lee’s in his element.
“So this is more like what I do,” he says, spreading out drafting paper that contains the storyboard from “Wicked.” “It’s like cartoons. You can make it look like anything. Here’s Glinda, arriving in a bubble machine.”
Suddenly, his attention flutters away from Broadway to a canister of pencils, sharpened graphite tips up. He pulls one out. He holds up a foam board model of a house he’s building in the woods of northern Maine, so he can be located near a pencil-factory project he says he’s planning with a friend. A pencil factory? He and a buddy found a consultant in high-end pencils along the lines of the celebrated Blackwing writing instrument. Lee figured he would need to find a place to stay, and so hired an architect for the house, which will be passive solar.
“I’m told by the consultant that maybe we’ll be making pencils by the end of the year,” Lee says. “Who knows? None of this makes any sense.” Yet once you get to know even just a little about Lee, it does. “I’m going back to my youth in Maine,” he says. “There’s a nice little pond there, like a little lake. The boats I have won’t fit into this scheme. I need something smaller, more appropriate for the location.” And maybe, no fixed location at all. “I’d live on a boat in a second,” he says. “I’d live on a boat right now.”