The term “prodigy” rarely applies to set designers, but Mr. Conklin’s instincts were on full display in his youth. Growing up in Hartford, Conn., he attended symphonies and operas with his family, and by the age of 10 he was building his own models, based on photographs he found perusing the magazine Opera News.
“I was drawn to opera,” he said in a 2019 interview with Opera America, a New York-based industry organization, “because it was music and because it had the power of music, but it also had the power of theater; and the power of painting; and the power of architecture; and the power of dance. So it seemed like the ideal thing to do.”
Colleagues said his flashes of inspiration could come from anywhere, at a moment’s notice. The director Daniel Fish recalled Mr. Conklin’s work on a 2007 Bard College production of “Oklahoma!,” the basis for Mr. Fish’s critically acclaimed runs at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, on London’s West End and on Broadway, where it won two Tonys in 2019.
In an early meeting about the production, “John reached into one of the drawers in his studio and pulled some sparkly fringe, a miniature version of the stuff you see hanging over used-car lots, and asked, ‘What if we hung this over the space?,” Mr. Fish said in an email. “That ‘what if’ was key to John’s creative process.”
For the later iterations of the show’s production design, Mr. Conklin passed the baton to Lee Jellinek, a former student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where Mr. Conklin taught design and dramaturgy for more than four decades. The fringe, however, remained.
“It set the tone for the show,” Mr. Fish said.
