Theater fans, I hear you. Sometimes, even for the most dedicated among you, your passion for the theater abates a little. Why must they sing? Why must they talk so loud and ask me to listen to them? So this weekend, indulge the side of you that longs for a nice, long shushing and head for the Morgan Library, where the curators have set out a banquet of set designs, all culled from the collection of late, great American designer Donald Oenslager. (Why didn’t his wife give this collection to Yale, where he was a founding member of the Drama School faculty? Tough cheese, Bulldogs!) The “Creating the Modern Stage: Designs for Theater and Opera” exhibit is in only one gallery, so you’ll be in and out in an hour and a half—but in that time, you’ll give yourself a pretty decent course in the history of the last hundred years of set design. Now that’s what I call efficiency in education…

The holdings are incredible: Originals by Edward Gordon Craig, Alexandra Exter (pictured) and Robert Edmond Jones are the showstoppers, and a Jo Mielziner design for the 1935 production of Winterset belongs alongside the Hoppers at MoMA. The exhibit follows roughly national lines—first we see Teutonic biggies, then we get the Russians spanning from Realism to Suprematism, and we wind up with a multicultural mishmash of designers who worked on American productions, from the Ziegfeld Follies to Porgy and Bess. The Morgan also offers listening stations, where you can hear bits from the operas and musicals themselves. (Fall hard for the Oskar Kokoschka/Paul Hindemith work Murderer, Hope of Women and giggle your way through the dese-and-dose ode to the Brooklyn Bridge in Kelly, the famously awful Broadway flop.)

And if you haven’t dropped by since the Renzo Piano addition opened, the Morgan Library itself feels more than ever like a marvelous stage set, with J.P. Morgan’s blood-red sitting room pulsing in the middle of a chilly, elegant glass enclosure. After you’ve goggled at the Goncharova and the Bel Geddes and the Ming Cho Lee, be sure to spend some time in the old robber baron’s industrialist’s lair. After all, for a while there, America was his show, and he stage-managed us all.