He was the artist behind the scenes

Hiroshi Iwasaki, 59, of Mount Airy, a lecturer in theater design at Bryn Mawr College who created sets and costumes for numerous area productions, died of cancer Tuesday, Nov. 23, at Keystone House in Wyndmoor.

In 2003, Mr. Iwasaki's work was featured in a Haverford College exhibit titled "A Dream Play." "In this display," Inquirer art critic Victoria Donohoe wrote, "details from Iwasaki's stockpile of eye-catching scenery and costumes take on larger-than-life proportions. . . . Iwasaki appears to find his way with feeling rather than by sticking to a chart, and he attends to the basic business of the stage with pure sensual devotion and creative pleasure."

Besides admiring Mr. Iwasaki's sets, Donohoe enthused about the "never forgotten" pink gown with train he created for an actress in Gertrude Stein's Pink Melon Joy "to wear as she swept down the Philadelphia Art Alliance's grand staircase."

Mr. Iwasaki produced sets and costumes for regional theaters and dance companies in several states, for Philadelphia's Live Arts Festival, and for theaters at many colleges and universities.

His final work was the set for Interact Theatre's production of Lidless. The play will open Jan. 21, his 60th birthday, in the Adrienne Theatre on Sansom Street. The space was the site of Mr. Iwasaki's first set for an area company in 1987, the Wilma Theater's production of Eugene Ionesco's Macbett.

That year, Mr. Iwasaki moved to Philadelphia from Boston. Since then, Mark Lord, director of the theater program at Bryn Mawr College, had collaborated with Mr. Iwasaki on more than 50 productions in area theaters.

"Hiroshi was very quiet and very gentle," Lord said, but he could also be very persuasive.

In 1990, Lord asked Mr. Iwasaki to design costumes for the production of Stein's Listen to Me that Lord was directing. "I wanted the 15 characters to all wear white," Lord said. "Hiroshi agreed but came back with sketches for white costumes for only two of the characters and convinced me to go with his idea. We would talk things out. There was give and take."

Mr. Iwasaki found the best way to use "found" space for productions, Lord said. With limited budgets he created sets for plays staged in the Frankford Arsenal, Eastern State Penitentiary, cramped basements, and 12 rooms and the garden of the Art Alliance.

Since 1992, Mr. Iwasaki had been senior lecturer and design-technical director of the theater program at Bryn Mawr. Over the years he had various medical problems but would will himself to get out of bed to teach his class and made models for beautiful sets from his hospital room. He could be gritty and determined and funny and sweet at the same time, Lord said.

In 2000, Mr. Iwasaki's set for the Villanova University production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame was nominated for a Barrymore Award for Excellence in Theater. In a review of the play, Inquirer theater critic Douglas J. Keating wrote: "The absurdist setting . . . is a bunkerlike cellar that is apparently the last bastion of human habitation. . . . The old folks live in garbage cans, and though they occasionally poke their heads and shoulders above the rims of their domiciles, they don't have a great deal to say."

In 2008, Mr. Iwasaki created the scenery for the annual Barrymore Awards gala. He often designed scenery for special events, including a show at the Franklin Institute and the gala opening of the Philadelphia International Film Festival in 2005. He also designed exhibits for the Rhododendron Society at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

A native of Japan, Mr. Iwasaki earned a bachelor's degree in French literature at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, and studied French literature for two years at the University of Lyon in France.

After moving to the United States in 1975, he managed a Japanese restaurant in Boston; studied watercolor, drawing, and sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and renovated a residential building he had purchased in the South End. When he realized he could combine his artistic talent and construction abilities, said his life partner, John Howe, he enrolled in the scene-design program at Boston University, earning a master's degree in fine arts in 1986.

Mr. Iwasaki and Howe, who were together for 26 years, met on an Amtrak train traveling from Boston: "He got off in New York City, and I got off in Philadelphia." They enjoyed travel abroad and saw plays in New York City every week until last month.

Mr. Iwasaki is survived by his partner.

Services are private.

Memorial donations may be made to the Kimmel Cancer Center Development Office, 233 S. 10th St., Suite 908, Philadelphia 19107.