COVER STORY : A Man With Nothing to Hide : Premier designer Ming Cho Lee’s minimal sets let you see everything, in the school of Bertolt Brecht or Chinese opera, for that matter. ‘The Woman Warrior’ presented a unique challenge: connecting with his own past.

A wall of pale panels washed in cobalt blue light stretches from side to side of the Doolittle stage, almost beyond the bounds of vision. In front of the brilliant expanse, black-clad Chinese villagers play out a life-and-death melodrama in a wide- open space.

At another moment, the panels become a desert of bright white. They also rise and fall--as the onstage world switches from 19th-Century China to the mythical domain of the warrior Fa Mu Lan to the workaday milieu of 1950s California. Or they part, revealing the ornate spectacle of Chinese opera, complete with acrobats and towering ghosts in flowing gowns.

This constantly transforming landscape of grand-scale space and saturated hue is the backdrop for “The Woman Warrior,” Deborah Rogin’s adaptation of two of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novels about the coming of age of a Chinese American girl. The complex, sometimes subtle, sometimes jarring set, which more often than not defines the action onstage, is the work of Ming Cho Lee, paterfamilias of U.S. stage design.

For the Tony-winning Lee, versatility and innovation are trademarks. But “The Woman Warrior” represents a special moment in this master’s career: It is the first time the Shanghai-born designer has looked to his own past for inspiration.

“I never had any project before this that had anything to do with China,” says Lee, 64, sitting in the cluttered apartment that serves as his studio on New York’s Upper East Side. “Maxine’s book totally wiped me out. Because I was not born here, her experience was very different from what I knew. At the same time, I understand it because I am Chinese. It was a very important opening of my eyes.”

What those eyes saw, and what now appears onstage, were shards of childhood memories washed in whitest whites and sometimes vivid colors. “When I was 5 and my grandfather died, I remember going to see off my relatives,” Lee recalls. “For a Chinese funeral, everyone wears white.”

Now is a time of looking back and forward, not only for Lee but also for his fans. His 30-year-old design for Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” for instance, recently turned up onstage at Orange County’s Opera Pacific. And Lee is also designing South Coast Repertory’s upcoming production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” which opens in June.

A more comprehensive view of Lee’s art is on display through May in “Sets by Ming Cho Lee,” a retrospective at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center--the same library that housed his first retrospective, 26 years ago.

The exhibition--with more than 40 set models plus sketches and renderings--ranges from his 1960s monumental abstracts for the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park to the more recent efforts of what he calls his “white period.” The show covers Lee’s extensive work in theater, dance and opera, both here and abroad.

Yet as prolific and revered as Lee has always been, his greatest legacy may be his teaching. Dubbed “the dean of American set designers” by the New York Times, Lee is now in his 26th year at the Yale School of Drama--for 20 he has been co-chair of the design department--and he numbers among his proteges many of the most prominent names in American design, including John Lee Beatty, Heidi Landesman, Michael Yeargan, Adrianne Lobel, Marjorie Bradley Kellogg and Douglas Schmidt.

Lee has, in fact, long regarded the two sides of his career as being essential to one another as yin to yang. “Teaching forces a teacher to always go through a process of self-evaluation,” he says. “I always remember what I owe to other people who were my mentors.”

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Three massive stone panels--at once sculptural and architectural, like angular fragments of a castle’s walls--hang from a towering scaffolding at the back of a stage. The center panel has a massive door in the middle, a waiting exit, perhaps, from a forestage dominated by cold, slate-like disks.

This is a model of Lee’s 1964 Central Park set for “Electra,” a majestic and chilling design that, according to Arnold Aronson’s “American Set Design,” “marked a turning point in American stage design.”

Nearby in the Performing Arts Library gallery stands a model of Lee’s set for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1985 “Khovanchschina,” in which a monumental photographic image of dark Russian turrets dwarfs a bleak wall that winds from one side of the stage to the other.

Lee’s 1984 set for Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s “Dog Lady” at New York’s INTAR, a theater devoted to Latino work, is a study in L.A. whimsy with palms in the foreground and a looming freeway in the background. A winding forced-perspective pathway, flanked on both sides by rickety bungalows in pastel blues, pinks and gold, leads to a never-never nowhere, like Dorothy’s path to Oz, gone So Cal style.

These and the many other designs in the retrospective display a striking range, which makes it tough to define a trademark Lee style. His sets vary from abstract to symbolist to quasi-representational, yet they do share an essentialist, almost minimalist approach.

Lee strives to provide only what is required--or, perhaps more accurately, somewhat less--by the play, opera or dance. It is the performers who must complete the picture, as the influential designer Robert Edmond Jones used to say--and as Lee is wont to repeat to his students.

Lee does not, however, do windows or kitchen sinks. Frequently credited as one of the first to push the boundaries of American stage design beyond conventional realism, Lee has long shunned linoleum.

“You don’t think of going to Ming to do a set that needs running water and frying bacon,” says Mark Taper Forum artistic director Gordon Davidson, for whom Lee has designed several shows. “You don’t talk with him about ‘I need three exits and four entrances.’

“You do talk about an essential visual metaphor for a piece, (based on) images that arise from the text,” Davidson continues. “He isn’t interested in decoration. He is a theatrical sculptor.”

Which made Lee the perfect choice for a daunting project such as “The Woman Warrior,” when the Taper first commissioned an adaptation in 1983.

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Based on Hong Kingston’s 1976 book of the same name and the 1980 “China Men,” “The Woman Warrior” tells the story of a girl growing up in the 1950s in Stockton, Calif., where her immigrant parents run a dry cleaners. The girl’s mother, who was a doctor in rural China, is fond of weaving tales, and these stories materialize onstage.

A neutral palette on a grand scale--which The Times’ Laurie Winer described as “ingeniously simple and sleek”--Lee’s set consists of a backdrop of huge white panels with a giant scrim rising above. The space in front of the panels is bare, providing a wide-open area for dancing and kaleidoscopic storytelling.

Lee actually designed for the play twice, over the course of a decade. (Both designs are on view in the retrospective.)

The play was announced for the Taper’s 1984-85 season, and again for the 1986-87 season, but it was pulled both times because the script wasn’t ready.

The Taper venture was shelved indefinitely. Then, in 1991, producer Martin Rosen brought Rogin’s new adaptation to Berkeley Rep artistic director Sharon Ott to direct. A co-production with Davidson and Boston’s Huntington Theatre Company--where the play was staged last fall after premiering in Berkeley last spring--was arranged.

Lee was the only carry-over from the original creative team. He was joined for this version by costume designer Susan Hilferty and lighting designer Peter Maradudin, both of whom had been his students. “The three of us (designers) actually had a great deal of input,” Lee says.

With “The Woman Warrior,” as with nearly every show that he designs, Lee first sought to find an essential image or metaphor, based on the content of the play, that would both propel and focus his design.

He arrived at that image almost at the outset, and it survived through to the final version now onstage. “I felt,” he says, “that the past should emerge from the back.”

How to make that imagistic understanding concrete was, of course, another matter. At the same time, Lee also had to cope with the script’s logistical demands--including the various temporal planes on which it operates.

It was a process of trial and error. “I made a suggestion that perhaps the whole stage could be little boxes,” Lee says. “People were coming to the U.S. with crates, so maybe the whole stage could be crates, painted red, with people coming through them. That didn’t really work very well.”

As the script went through rewrites, Lee honed his vision by storyboarding the plot. “I thought it was time to settle down and really do some designing,” he says. “That was when I made the storyboard and started really analyzing who are the people.”

The task was to make separate yet distinct universes, while allowing for fluid movement between them. “You have real people, who are the immediate family in Stockton, and you have the stereotypical whites in California,” Lee says. “Then you have the family in China, the villagers and relatives who are stereotypical Chinese, and then you have the mythical figure of Fa Mu Lan and the evil baron.”

“He saw so clearly the three levels that the play operated on: the realistic Stockton laundry, the family in China and the mythical scenes,” Davidson says. “What was terrific was evolving a production organic to the evolution of the play.”

Ultimately, Lee’s solution was to hide everything in plain sight. “My approach was Brechtian,” he says, referring to the anti-realistic principles codified by the German playwright-theoretician Bertolt Brecht. “I didn’t really want to hide anything. Theater magic happens when you know exactly what happens.”

He also turned to Chinese opera for inspiration. “In Chinese opera, there are no sets,” Lee says. “A table can be used many different ways. If they say it’s a mountain, it’s a mountain, and there are no questions asked.”

T he story of “The Woman War rior” is, in a way, emblematic of the immigrant experience. But it is emphatically not the immigrant experience that Lee has known.

“I personally never had the experience that belonged to Maxine, because I was not born here,” Lee says. “I came from a Westernized family, whereas Maxine’s family actually came from a village near Canton.”

Born in 1930 into an urban, upper-middle-class Chinese family, Lee was 6 when his parents divorced. Lee’s father, who died last July, was a 1919 Yale graduate who was in the international insurance business.

Like his father, Lee’s stepfather was a member of Yale’s class of 1919, and his mother’s brother was a 1918 graduate. The young designer grew up in an environment where English was often spoken.

At the time of his parents’ divorce, Lee was sent to live with his father, which was not unusual at the time. “I had weekend visits with my mother, and those were the great moments of my life,” he recalls. “I really didn’t get along with my father.”

It is largely from his mother that Lee derives his love of the arts. An amateur actress, she would often take her son to the theater, movies and opera--not to mention the occasional trip to the dog races.

Those early experiences left their mark on Lee, and their traces show not only in his design for “The Woman Warrior” but also in the many productions he has created for the Metropolitan and other opera companies. “I was taken to see Chinese operas, but my mother and uncle happened to love Italian operas,” he says. “I enjoy (Chinese opera), but nowhere as much as I enjoy Italian opera.”

Lee’s mother, who died six years ago, was a free spirit for her day. “She was, strangely enough, a liberated woman,” Lee says. “I have a feeling she had a great many friends who were in the Communist Party. My mother disliked social injustice and had a jaundiced view of wealth. That’s why I’m still a quasi-socialist.”

Lee’s mother arranged for her son to apprentice to a Chinese landscape painter for two years. Then it came time for college. “Even if the communists did not take over China, I probably would have come to the U.S. to study,” he says.

At that point in 1949, Lee’s mother and stepfather were living in New York. “My father did not want me to come to the East Coast because he felt that it was not healthy for me to be so close to my mother,” he says. “He also felt that there are too many family friends on the East Coast, that I would get completely sucked in by the Chinese community.”

Lee was sent instead to L.A.’s Occidental College, where he studied speech and drama with Omar Paxson and others. It was at the small liberal arts college that Lee was first introduced to acting, directing and stage design.

F rom the start, Lee found the U.S. full of opportunities. As with most Chinese immigrants during the ‘40s and ‘50s, he was far better off than those who had come over earlier.

“The experience of struggling, I have none of it,” Lee says. “We had an arrogant viewpoint toward the Chinese who were already here, because they were all from the villages. The best thing they could do is work in the laundry.

“There was never any question that I would become either a professional or a businessman or whatever,” Lee continues. “There was never any (thought) that I would open a laundry or a restaurant.”

Lee completed a year of graduate study in design at UCLA before moving to New York in 1954. There he was taken under the wing of the doyen of the previous generation, designer Jo Mielziner, for whom he worked as an assistant from 1954 to 1958.

Also in 1958, Lee married his wife, Betsy, a photographer and frequent collaborator, with whom he assembled the Performing Arts Library retrospective. They have three children, all in their 30s.

During those early New York years, Lee also assisted such notable scenic designers as Boris Aronson and Rouben Ter-Arutunian.

Soon he began to get Off Broadway and then Broadway assignments. Around this time, Lee also began to work with the Martha Graham Dance Company, designing the choreographer’s 1962 “A Look at Lightning” and other works.

Lee’s true breakthrough, however, came when he first signed on as resident designer for the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1962, a post he would hold for 11 years. Lee’s tall, spare, abstract designs for the festival’s Delacorte Theater in Central Park, in particular, caused a stir.

Lee also began to teach in the late 1960s. He was on the faculty at New York University for a brief while before going to the Yale School of Drama.

The teaching has remained important throughout his career, fulfilling both his need to pass on knowledge and remain current. “Ming is absolutely driven by his responsibility as a teacher,” says Davidson.

He has never put teaching second to designing. “No matter where he is--even at the most crucial moment when he’s working on a production--he’s on a plane, making that Saturday morning class,” Davidson says. “Something deep inside him is disturbed if he misses a class. It can drive you crazy when you need him, but he’s on a plane like a yo-yo.”

And Lee’s methods have never been strictly top-down, either. “Rather than producing little Ming cookie cutters, he manages not to burden them with his style,” Davidson says.

One of Lee’s key contributions as a mentor is the annual Lincoln Center gathering known as the National Stage Design Portfolio Review, a major new-talent showcase more popularly called “Ming’s Clambake.”

Launched in the 1970s by the League of Professional Theaters training program, the yearly showcase was curtailed for lack of funding in the mid-1980s.

Lee came to the rescue. At first, he invited students from other schools to come to Yale to show their wares. Then, when the National Endowment for the Arts gave Lee its $25,000 Distinguished Theater Artist award, he committed money to reviving the Portfolio Review, which is now partly backed by the Lincoln Center Library that houses the event.

The Portfolio Review, which is closed to the public, allows young designers a chance to show their wares and schmooze with some of the best in the biz. This past year, for instance, Lee was joined by such luminary colleagues as John Lee Beatty, John Conklin, Tony Walton, Adrianne Lobel, Santo Loquasto, Dunya Ramicova and others.

The Review is, of course, only the most obvious aspect of a mentor-apprentice system the likes of which few trades enjoy. “It’s almost medieval, like a guild,” Lee says. “There’s a community, a continuity of bringing people into the profession that I find rewarding.”

T hose who study with Lee are learning from an artist widely regarded as among the best ever.

The Times’ Martin Bernheimer, for one, has frequently cited Lee’s sets. Recalling Frank Corsaro’s staging of “Faust,” he said “an inspired designer . . . played the drama amid a vibrant, lusty, brightly stylized evocation of the Medieval Germany dictated by Goethe and Gounod.”

Lee’s dance settings also get high marks. The Times’ Lewis Segal said of his design for the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s “The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet,” “Lee’s highly mobile, High Renaissance towers, arches, balcony, bridge, facades, frescoes, tapestries and chandeliers provide the most inventive and purposeful movement in the entire ballet. . . . Lee permits nearly limitless cinematic fluidity in the staging.”

Still, it is probably theater design--including his extensive work on this country’s key regional stages--for which Lee is best known. “In many ways, he’s a quintessential Shakespearean designer,” Davidson says. “He understands the thing that was the Elizabethan stage--with its relationship between the main level and a second level--and he translates it into contemporary visual form.”

Former Times theater critic Dan Sullivan called Lee’s 1985 set for the Taper’s staging of Marsha Norman’s “Traveler in the Dark’ (the model for which is in the Lincoln Center show) “so true that it takes your breath away.” In a 20-year look at the Taper’s stagings, Sullivan singled out the same show for its “dazzling spread of autumn leaves.”

Lee has also had his share of national recognition. In addition to his noted design for Michael Cristofer’s “The Shadow Box,” at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Lee is frequently remembered for the five-story ice mountain he created for Patrick Meyers’ “K2,” which premiered at Washington’s Arena Stage and went on to win a Tony Award in 1983.

I t was not surprising, then--giv en their past work together and Lee’s widespread acclaim--that Davidson turned to Lee to visualize Hong Kingston’s complicated work.

Back in 1983, when the Taper first commissioned an adaptation, multiculturalism had not yet really hit the American theater. Plays concerned with the lives of non-Anglo Americans were still unusual.

Lee, for one, was wary. “I had never done any project that had anything to do with China,” he says. “At the beginning, I felt strange that the reason they asked me to do it was because I am Chinese.”

Yet that was why Davidson thought Lee was right for the job. “He was born to do it,” he says. “It’s his sense of space and style and the fact that he’s Chinese.”

In hindsight, Lee agrees that there is such a thing as a cultural leg up. “Even though I have forgotten most of what is Chinese, I can tell what is fake and what is genuine, what is in essence Chinese and what is gift store Chinese,” he says.

Perhaps more importantly, Lee’s designs are eventful without ever upstaging the drama they serve.

You see that in Lee’s early Delacorte settings just as much as in his long and low-slung 1993 design for Terrence McNally’s “A Perfect Ganesh” at the Manhattan Theater Club, or in his stark black and white 1994 “Othello” at the Stratford Festival in Ontario.

The Lincoln Center retrospective also offers a glimpse of Lee’s wry sense of humor--as tiny white placards accompanying the models note his fondness for one work (“always liked this little design”) or his dissatisfaction with another (“not used . . . too much ditz”).

And most poignantly, there is the ongoing self-criticism by the artist who has fostered a generation of successors.

He asks in the catalogue essay, “Is there life after a retrospective? Have I now finally arrived?”*

* “The Woman Warrior,” Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 p.m.; Thursday and April 13 and 20, 2 p.m. Ends April 23. $15-$47.50 (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. * “Sets by Ming Cho Lee,” Vincent Astor Gallery, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York. Monday and Thursday, noon-8 p.m.; Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, noon-6 p.m.; closed Sunday. Ends May 26. No admission charge. (212) 870-1630.