Robert Cothran, who taught scene design at UT from 1972 to 1998, is an internationally recognized master of scene design. His career spanned more than 55 years and included scene designs for more than two hundred productions from east coast to west coast and from Puerto Rico to Canada. He worked with notable directors Michael Kidd (Room Service, Eisenhower Theatre, Kennedy Center, 1983), Joshua Logan (Rip Van Winkle, Clarence Brown Theatre; and Opera House, Kennedy Center, 1984), and many others. He designed the original set for Ralph Allen’s Sugar Babies when it opened at the Clarence Brown Theatre as The New Majestic Follies. Upon graduation from high school in Birmingham, Alabama, Cothran entered Vanderbilt to study physics, but then discovered after a year that he was not interested in the formality of higher education but was fascinated by the Vanderbilt Theatre. He then tried UT, spending a year on campus doing some acting and design work as Dr. Paul Soper was initiating UT’s first theatre facility, the Carousel Theatre, with a summer season.
From UT, Cothran went to Nashville to work as a tech person and designer. A two-year stint in the army followed and provided a very helpful career boost—when the army discovered his designing ability, he was placed in its commercial art department. Army duty became a course in extensive commercial design involving lettering, illustration, and reproduction techniques. Following discharge from the army, he went to Yale to study set design. After tests and interviews, he was admitted to Yale’s three-year master of fine arts program as a special student. Since he had not earned the bachelor’s degree, he was not eligible to receive the master’s degree. After two years, he left Yale to take a post in Puerto Rico. He worked in Richmond, Virginia, for a year and then for two seasons with the Pittsburgh Playhouse, after which he created a highly successful exhibit company.
Dr. Ralph Allen, head of the University of Pittsburgh’s Theatre Department, was looking for a set designer, and Cothran was asked to design the last show of the season, which led to more and more set design work and going with Allen to the University of Victoria (Canada). When Allen moved to UT, so did Cothran. He became head set designer and taught in UT’s Theatre Department and accepted commissions for designing sets for productions outside UT.