Artist Murray Laufer created bold and innovative scenery for Canadian productions

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Theatre is an ephemeral art form, but that didn’t stop Murray Laufer from being an exacting perfectionist. Despite the fleeting nature of most theatrical productions and the risk that his efforts might be lost on unsophisticated audiences, the pioneering Canadian stage designer took endless pains to get things exactly right.

Phillip Silver was a young resident designer at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre in the 1970s when he got to watch the master at work. Mr. Laufer had been brought in by Citadel artistic director John Neville to design an epic staging of Bertolt Brecht’s anti-fascist satire Schweik in the Second World War. By then, Mr. Laufer was one of the country’s top designers, known for the inventive scenery he’d conceived at the Canadian Opera Company and, as he had demonstrated at Toronto’s new St. Lawrence Centre, an especially adept interpreter of Brecht.

Mr. Silver facilitated Mr. Laufer’s ambitious vision for Schweik, helping shepherd it through the Citadel’s scene and props shops. “It pushed the theatre staff into areas they had not gone before, including large-scale puppets, very broad scenic effects,” Mr. Silver recalled. “He was very definite in what he wanted. He was very picky about every little detail, which in retrospect was kind of surprising. When the whole thing was so massive you kind of wondered why a detail might matter.”

It did matter to Mr. Laufer, though, and his vindication was the resulting production. It was, in Mr. Silver’s recollection, “amazing. I can’t say it was a big hit with the Edmonton, Alberta, subscription audiences of the 1970s,” he admitted with a laugh, “but those of us who worked with him were really impressed with what he did, not only in terms of vision and scale, but also the political consciousness that he brought to the subject. He knew how everything he put onstage was going to resonate.”

Mr. Laufer, who died on June 17 in Toronto at the age of 91, would later leave theatre’s collaborative processes for the solitary pursuit of a studio artist. Drawing and painting were his true loves, and he was just as exacting with them. “He threw out so much of his work,” his younger daughter Vanessa Laufer said. “He had a very high standard for what he thought should be kept and shown.”

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Naomi Laufer, his older daughter, remembered meeting an artist who knew Mr. Laufer from Toronto’s Open Studio printmaking collective and confessed to rescuing one of her father’s rejected plates from the garbage bin to use in his own work. “Something my dad thought was junk, this artist thought was fabulous,” she said.

If Mr. Laufer was tough on himself, that demanding nature didn’t extend to his family, friends and colleagues. “He was generous with his knowledge and really supportive,” said Shawn Kerwin, one of the many prominent Canadian stage designers who saw Mr. Laufer as a role model. She remembers him as a warm-hearted man who took his art seriously but approached life with a sense of fun. “He had a twinkle in his eye,” she said.

Murray Bernard Laufer was born on Oct. 26, 1929, in Toronto to Arnold and Pauline (née Cohen) Laufer, a Jewish couple of Polish and Lithuanian heritage. Arnold was a tailor and furrier, Pauline was an artist in her spare time, and both encouraged their only son in his boyhood passion for drawing. As a kid, he spent almost every day at the Toronto Public Library’s Boys and Girls House, a children’s library on St. George Street close to the family home, where he pored over books of great art. After graduating from Harbord Collegiate, he attended the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) on a full scholarship. There, he met his future wife and artistic partner, Marie Day.

When the two graduated in 1952, they headed abroad, Ms. Day to take a job with London’s Mermaid Theatre, Mr. Laufer to hitchhike across Europe, soaking up the Old Masters in the museums and visiting the Paris studio of avant-garde icon Man Ray. He also joined a couple of his art school buddies, Robert Hackborn and future Canadian art titan Michael Snow, who were playing jazz gigs at the first Club Med resorts.

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Back in Toronto, Mr. Laufer and Ms. Day were married and he got a job painting sets for CBC Television, soon moving up to the role of production designer. He began designing for the stage as well, just as Canada’s professional theatre was starting to grow. He had no interest in it at the time, Ms. Day said, but that’s where she was working and he wanted to be closer to her.

He created sets for Toronto’s seminal Crest Theatre and teamed with Ms. Day, as costume designer, on a series of productions for the Canadian Opera Company, beginning with Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges in 1959. “Already Murray had such a fertile imagination,” Ms. Day recalled. “The sculptural quality in his work was unique.” His painter’s eye, meanwhile, led him to employ projections and visual effects long before they became a commonplace on Canadian stages.

Between the operas, the couple also had a hand in making Canada’s longest-running homegrown musical, Anne of Green Gables. Created to launch the Charlottetown Festival in 1965, it was a notorious seat-of-the-pants affair. “It was cobbled together before the writers were even totally finished writing it,” Ms. Day said. Nonetheless, it was a smash success. Reviewing it in The Globe and Mail, theatre critic Herbert Whittaker praised “Murray Laufer’s light-hearted scenery and Marie Day’s nostalgic costuming” as among its winning elements.

Mr. Laufer and Ms. Day had more time to devote to their next landmark production, Harry Somers’s historical opera Louis Riel. To design the show, which the COC premiered in 1967 to mark Canada’s centennial, the couple did assiduous research. They studied the Riel artifacts at Winnipeg’s St. Boniface Museum, read his letters and even made sure they used Hudson’s Bay blankets appropriate to the era. “It was very authentic,” Ms. Day said.

In the early 1970s, with the opening of the St. Lawrence Centre, Mr. Laufer found his biggest challenges and triumphs. The centre’s original main theatre was a cold, cavernous monument to Brutalist architecture, with a dizzyingly raked auditorium and sight line problems.

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Yet working alongside Leon Major, artistic director of the centre’s tenant company Toronto Arts Productions, Mr. Laufer conjured some of his most potent stage magic. Mr. Major and Mr. Laufer were at their best mounting epic plays with political themes, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet gulag drama Article 58 (originally titled The Love-Girl and the Innocent) and Brecht’s Galileo, for which Mr. Laufer famously designed a huge bronze disc with a bas-relief sculpture suggesting Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment that floated above the stage.

In 1975, Mr. Laufer became the first Canadian set designer invited to represent Canada at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space – the Venice Biennale of theatre design – where he won an award for excellence. He returned as Canada’s commissioner general for the 1979 exhibition, heading a delegation that included protégée Astrid Janson and Ms. Kerwin.

Ms. Kerwin admired the smooth way he dealt with the bureaucracy and corruption of Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. When their Prague hotel insisted there was no reservation for Ms. Kerwin, Mr. Laufer discreetly tucked a $20 U.S. bill into her passport and handed it to the authorities. “He was so low-key about it,” she recalled. “I was so thankful that he was there to do that.”

By the 1980s, Mr. Laufer had shifted his focus to painting. Lighting designer Sholem Dolgoy, who worked with him at the COC, felt he wasn’t happy in the theatre: “As a fine artist, I feel he was frustrated by the relentless compromises of producing shows.”

Mr. Laufer kept a studio at Toronto’s 401 Richmond artist hive, where he created work that was as bold and robust as his stage designs, but highly personal in nature. It ranged from portraits of his mother, Pauline, to striking studies of animal carcasses inspired by his childhood visits to a neighbourhood butcher shop. Much of his art drew on his past as well as his classic influences, notably Rembrandt and the Russian-Jewish expressionist Chaim Soutine.

“He clearly was expressing something that was deep inside him,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, former director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, which gave Mr. Laufer his first comprehensive exhibition in 2006.

“He was an artist of the human condition,” added Mr. Teitelbaum, now head of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and a family friend. “His work was about continuity and regeneration and cycles of life.”

A second exhibition followed in 2018 at the Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives (PAMA) in Brampton, Ont. Along with Mr. Laufer’s high-relief paintings, it included drawings and – a nod to his theatrical past – raku masks. PAMA’s Sharona Adamowicz-Clements, who curated the show, found Mr. Laufer’s art “deeply poetic but also full of humour.” She noted his self-deprecating self-portraits of what he called “a handsome Jewish man.”

It’s the kind of humour Mr. Laufer’s daughters remember. Naomi said he used to take them trick-or-treating on Halloween in a William Tell costume with an arrow-pierced apple stuck to his head. Even in his frail last days, he was a wiseacre. When a hip fracture landed him in hospital, where he would eventually succumb to pneumonia, he joked with the medical staff during his surgery.

During his life, Mr. Laufer was hailed for his contributions to Canadian theatre. In 1981, he was the first recipient of Ontario’s Pauline McGibbon Award for theatre artists and in 1996 received the Silver Ticket Award from the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts. He was made an honorary fellow of OCAD University – where he also taught – in 1977 and received an honorary doctorate from Montreal’s Concordia University in 1980. As well, he was the first stage designer to be elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Mr. Laufer leaves his wife, Ms. Day; daughters, Naomi and Vanessa Laufer; granddaughter, Saskia; and son-in-law, Cyrus Sundar Singh.