Take it from someone who’s spent the better part of three afternoons interviewing them: as a group, the twelve costume designers who have been nominated for this year’s Ovation Awards are almost unreasonably pleasant and thoughtful. And busy. Despite being reached in their cars, work rooms, or heading into or out of rehearsals, every designer spoke with joy and engagement about costumes’ unique ability to render life on stage. As triple nominee A. Jeffrey Schoenberg put it, “You’re taking someone by the hand and leading them into a world that they may not be at all familiar with, and how thoroughly you create that world very much affects the storytelling.”
Project Wonderland
Though split across two categories – representing work in both Intimate and large theaters – the nominees frequently touched on the same topics: the ambitious scale of Los Angeles theatre production, or how many theaters classified as “large” are still small enough to keep the designers on their detail-oriented toes. Lynn Jeffries, recognized this year with an Ovation Honor for Puppet Design, cropped up in several conversations, as did both the Ahmanson and the Dorothy Chandler for being exemplars of large houses where top-flight work is an expected matter of course. That only one of the fourteen nominated costume designs was for a production in a LORT theater, (Christopher Oram’s design for Parade at the Taper), speaks vividly to the strength not just of Los Angeles theatre but to its wardrobe artisans as well.
Elaborate production concepts were the norm for the 2009-2010 nominees. Vicki Conrad built, rented and distressed her way through designs for 85 different costumes for Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at The Actors Coop. The double casting that is the norm at Antaeus Theatre Company meant that for Cousin Bette, Schoenberg constructed costumes not just for more than thirty characters–many played by furiously quick-changing actors–but for two completely different casts of quick-changing actors portraying more than thirty characters. Black Coffee, designed by Joyce Ferrer for Theater 40, was on the smaller end of this year’s costume production scale, despite clocking in at a healthy thirteen distinct characters.
The Gogol Project
The Gogol Project, mounted by Rogue Artists Ensemble at the Bootleg Theater, gave company member Kerry Hennessy the chance to design a whole community from top to bottom. “The concept [adapted from three short stories by Nikolai Gogol] is about this town and its citizens, so we got to envision an entire town, zeroing in one at a time on each member of the village, and have the show be a winging journey through that town.”
Snezana Petrovic, who designed both costumes and sets for Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands, produced by Overtone Industries in a vacant 20,000 square foot automobile showroom in Culver City, was charged with creating 24 distinct worlds. “The director had this modernist idea that I’m not allowed to have any references. It had to be my own creative voice in each land, but each land had to be different: what their traditions are, how people look, the colors and textures.” As if a production with 24 different scenographies were not overwhelming in itself, Petrovic and director O-Lan Jones developed the show over seven years. Laughing, she admits, “We’d have a child in second grade by this time.”
Big Dreams/Small Budgets
The designers working in intimate spaces were most concerned with stretching their intimate budgets without compromising story and character nuance. Teresa Shea, part of the elaborate team behind Robert Prior’s puppet-filled, perspective-bending Project Wonderland, said, “It’s about finding interesting and creative ways around not being able to afford the first thing out of the director’s mouth. Saying, okay, I get that you want this particular thing, but what are you trying to put across with it – so that I can give you something else that puts that across.”
Hennessy, a founding member of Rogue since its early days at UC Irvine, revels in the opportunity to do more with less, saying, “I enjoy shocking and surprising people with what we can do with what we have. I think people go to small theater expecting it to be an acting showcase, and I think there’s something to be said for keeping design alive, and not just at the Ahmanson or Chandler, where people might expect it.”
Awake and Sing
Julie Keen, nominated for her design for Awake and Sing! at A Noise Within, notes that while the classics-focused theatre is technically in the large category, the collaboration experience of the design team in its relatively intimate space buoys the resulting work: “You’re closer knit, you have to be, because you can’t avoid each other. Our work is interacting with each other in such close proximity, it’s impossible not to collaborate. It’s not like the actor can move ten paces over and be in a different background color. We’re all right there together.”
Designers who had the opportunity to work in unquestionably larger spaces still had their own host of challenges. Shigeru Yaji, who brought Culture Clash’s vision of Aristophanes’ Peace alive as an over-the-top combination of Marx Brothers costumes, contemporary work clothes and classical Greek silhouettes, struggled with the non-traditional theatrical infrastructure of the ultra-classical Getty Villa. “That space was never really a theater, it’s an open space. So it’s not really easy to prep things or run the show–-not just for costumes, but for lighting and scenery, too. Where are we going to put these things and how are they going to appear?”
Ann Closs-Farley, who revamped the iconic Saturday morning TV costumes of The Pee-Wee Herman Show for its pre-Broadway run at the Nokia Theater, struggled to make her work pop against a set that was equally as colorful as Ms. Yvonne’s skirts or Cowboy Curtis’ purple spotted chaps. The ultra-wide stage presentation at The Colony, normally an opportunity to present costumes in fabulous profiles, forced Schoenberg to keep the Cavalier-period wigs for Celadine in check, giving the impression of volume without obscuring the actors’ faces from one side of the house or another.
Frosty the Snow Manilow
Still, the advantages and restraints of each format can inform each other, as Sharon McGunigle attest from both her day job in the costume shop at the LA Opera and her regular design work with The Troubadour Theater Company including Frosty the Snow Manilow. “I love working with world class designers and bringing their designs to life for opera. Working at that level is always inspirational. With Troubadour shows, I love flying by the seat of your pants– making it work onstage without the same structure you need in a larger company with a lot of different levels and people participating. Each one feeds the other for me. The cross-pollination works both ways. Working with The Troubadours has helped me solve technical issues at the opera, too.”
It Takes A Village
Between budget realities and their own imaginations, many designers had to get creative to achieve their visions, calling in friends or making new ones to multiply their hands. Petrovic, who estimates 90% of her materials were recycled or donated, recruited an army of her own undergrad studio art students and volunteers from the community to assemble Songs and Dances’ multiple worlds, creating workshop lessons around the construction needs of the show. Closs-Farley spent most of last August bedazzling forty-thousand rhinestones onto a suit by hand joined by a rotating cast of five friends to help pass the time.
Tommy
Erika C. Miller, resident designer as well as development director for The Chance Theater, was able to fall back on the mothers of the two young leads in The Who’s Tommy. “The two moms actually volunteered to be dressers,” for their sons, but ended up “helping backstage with many other quick changes, which helped the design itself tremendously.” When the Orange County Performing Arts Center tapped The Chance’s production to be re-mounted at OC PAC in February 2011, many of Miller’s vendors unexpectedly offered to let her hold onto the pieces as long-term rentals, preventing crucial pieces from going missing for the later dates.
The mixed joys of serendipity aside, Miller or any of the nominees could well have agreed with Teresa Shea’s playful jab at the notion of being held back by insufficient resources: “People say, ‘oh, its better for not having had the money.’ I’d love not to have that problem. I would love the challenge of having too much money to spend on a show. I’d love to find out what that challenge is like!”
Yaji, who problem-solved how to run Peace without much in the way of dressing rooms or a backstage at all, concurs. “Even in the big picture, you still have to deal with all those individual issues,” from quick change workflow to accessory breakdowns for each character, “which takes an endless amount of time and energy.”
The Pee-Wee Herman Show
Like all good theatre people, the nominees spoke with the frisson of true passion despite their challenges, especially in describing that moment when all the hard work comes together. “On opening night, everything becomes real,” said Vicki Conrad, remembering her work on the ensemble of Big River. “I’m sure there are little nuances that no one else in the world will ever see that just make me happy. A lot of times in theater, when [the costumes] are the biggest thing, the show really depends on them for time and period, feel and ambience. The costumes can really make a difference in how you experience the piece.”
Or as Closs-Farley put it, speaking of Pee-Wee but perhaps expressing on behalf of the entire group, “That’s the nature of a show–a bunch of people having a really good time, coming together, in its own world.”
Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Rebecca Kinskey has been a stage manager, production manager and producer for theatre, film, tv and web. Currently working towards an M.A. in Arts Journalism at USC Annenberg, she loves writing about how creativity makes its way from idea to execution, and all the steps in between.
