Mordecai Gorelik

Mordecai (Max) Gorelik (1899 - 1990) was an American theatrical designer, producer and director.

Born August 25, 1899, in Shchedrin near Minsk, Russia, Mordecai (Max) Gorelik immigrated with his family to the United States in 1905 to escape the pogroms that killed most of his family. After graduating from the Pratt Institute of Fine Arts in Brooklyn in 1920, he worked for a time with Robert Edmond Jones, the pioneer American set designer who became his mentor.

Gorelik rendered in a wide variety of media and styles working with the most famous designers of the 1920s and 1930s – Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Norman Bel Geddes, Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner, Oliver Messel, Aleksandr Golovin, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, and Cleon Throckmorton. He worked for the most prestigious companies --the Provincetown Players, the Theatre Guild on Broadway, the Group Theatre New York, and the Actors Laboratory Theater in Hollywood. In keeping with his love of experimental theatre, he was involved with the most avant-garde companies of the day --the New Playwrights Theatre, the Theatre Collective, the Theatre of Action, and the Theatre Union.

His first encounter with Bertolt Brecht in 1935 deeply influenced both his theories and designs. He became an advocate for the Epic Theater style developed by Brecht and director Erwin Piscator, and he pioneered the deliberate employment of metaphor in design. A decade later, he served as a designer and director for the Biarritz American University in France where he began teaching a seminar known as "The Scenic Imagination." It won national recognition as an original, inspiring, and incisive approach to the purely creative side of stage production in script, direction, acting, and design. This study was in unique contrast to the vocational method known as stagecraft, taught everywhere else. Four years later he also acted as an Expert Consultant in Theater for the American Military Government in Germany. His command of French and German languages enabled him to network with amateur and professional theatres around the globe.

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