PlayMakers Page to Stage

"New clothes, new smells, new lights, new sounds"by Katie Paxton

2012-01-26T10:54:00.000-05:00

Katie Paxton

by actor Katie Paxton

Katie plays four characters in The Making of a King, including Doll Tearsheet and Lady Mortimer.

“Inhabit your costume with utter familiarity, and make it work for you; after all, your character chose it in order to convey an image to the world.”--Maria Aitken.

New clothes, new smells, new lights, new sounds. New floors, new shoes, new hair. The first day of technical rehearsals harkens back to my childhood: reaching into my dress-up trunk and seamlessly stepping into the characters I’ve created in my mind.

For me, a huge part of my process is my character’s clothing. My favorite part of tech is seeing the dressing room and feeling the fabrics of my costumes. What we wear is so indicative of who we are, whether we like it or not, and it is no different for the people in the Henry plays. Before we even started rehearsals, costume renderings were available to actors so that we could hit the ground running on character work. Costumes help the audience to identify individual characters while recognizing a common world the characters live in through the artistic vision of the Costume Designer (for this production, the lovely Jennifer Caprio).

During technical rehearsals, we are stitching together each individual artists’ work on and off the stage. The lighting designer, sound designer, costume designer, directors and actors each add a unique piece of cloth to the tapestry of our production.

The idea of putting it all together can seem impossible (Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?)--but I was astonished by how our plays effortlessly slipped into the Paul Green Theatre like a pair of old gloves in my childhood trunk.

We teched through and ran each show in four days, which means room left to play, tweak details and explore before previews...who woulda thunk?! That has to be a record. If not, it’s certainly a testament to our phenomenal team of artists on this epic project, working day and night to tell the story of The Making of a King.

The Making of a King: Henry IV and Henry V runs January 28 to March 4. Click here for more information and tickets.

"A Tech Survival Guide" by Nathaniel P. Claridad

2012-01-26T10:12:00.000-05:00

Nathaniel P. Claridad

by actor Nathaniel P. Claridad

Nathaniel plays Corporal Nym in The Making of a King: Henry IV and Henry V.

In my years of being an actor in DC, New York City, and now happily at PlayMakers Repertory Company, I have never been a part of a project of such epic proportions. I have also never been part of a project that was in tech for NINE DAYS.

Usually, tech (which is when the creative team for any given show adds costumes, lights, sets, and props, and plods through the show making sure us actors look dashing and brilliant) lasts about two to three days, and goes straight into previews. But when you're doing essentially three plays (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 being condensed into one play, and then Henry V), you're going to need more time.

So, since I've spent so much alone time with the character I'll be playing in both shows, Corporal Nym, ...here is a quick guide for surviving tech through the eyes of the dagger-happy tavern dweller, Corporal Nym:

Corporal Nym's Tech Survival Guide

Buy a smart phone. Being in a theatre from 12pm to 12am can cause copious amounts of cabin fever. I find solace in Words with Friends.
Find a daily ritual to keep your creative juices flowing: the out-of-town actors treated the cast to Krispy Kreme...and the donuts came with a little hat...Nym's daily ritual? Taking pictures of the cast in said hat. There is nothing funnier than seeing a "hair-brained Hotspur" wearing a Krispy Kreme hat.
Nym is not fond of war, so he has a bit of time to relax. During long breaks, WATCH THE SHOW COME TOGETHER! The creative staff for this epic is mind-bogglingly talented, and since I won't be able to watch the show during the run, this is my one chance to see what the audience will be "oooo-ing" and "aaah-ing" at. I don't want to give anything away, but when watching the show, the word "magical" comes to mind.
John Patrick, the vocal coach, has a favorite saying: "Stay curious." And this is a great time to stay curious about the many actors in the show. When you're in a dark theatre for 12 hours, there is no choice but to get to know the people you are sharing the stage with. Ask questions, and get to know your castmates, more often than not, the answers and their stories will surprise and amaze you.
Nym is lucky enough to have a best friend: Bardolph (played by John Allore). If you don't have a best friend in the show, find one...he or she will keep you sane and keep things fun.
And last, but not least, after many hours spent in a tavern on stage...go to a real tavern on Franklin Street after tech. Two 12 hour days will make anyone desire "small beer".

See you all from the stage!

The Making of a King: Henry IV and Henry V runs January 28 to March 4. Click here for more information and tickets.

"Before we’ve even moved into the theatre" by Cody Nickell

2012-01-24T09:32:00.000-05:00

Cody Nickell

by actor Cody Nickell

Cody Nickell plays Hotspur in Henry IV and Fluellen in Henry V.

     I write this blog post as the cast of The Making Of A King: Henry IV and Henry V gets ready to have its last rehearsal in the rehearsal space before moving into the theatre to start tech rehearsals. So far, it has been a fast and furious process, unlike anything I have ever been a part of. The scope of the story that Joe Haj and Mike Donahue have set out to tell is breath taking and I have had an absolute blast watching my fellow cast mates and all the people involved wrestle this monster text down to the ground and build it back up into an exciting, moving, funny and surprising ride.

     The chance to see these plays done in conjunction with each other is such a rarity and to get to be a part of their creation here at PlayMakers means so much to me. I saw my first production of a Shakespeare play right here at PlayMakers almost twenty years ago as a high school student in Chapel Hill (Twelfth Night). I was absolutely amazed by the production and everyone involved (some of whom I am getting to work with on this show), and it went a long way in inspiring me to pursue theatre and acting as a career. To get to come back home and explore the amazing words of Shakespeare on this stage with this group of people is thrilling to me.

     So in these plays, I am playing Hotspur in Henry IV and Fluellen in Henry V, and I have to say I couldn’t be happier about it. Hotspur is an incredibly fun and complex character to play and one that I have always wanted to tackle. I get a pretty great sword fight. Grown boys playing with swords. Always fun. And it is one of my wife’s favorite characters in Shakespeare, and it certainly never hurts to impress your wife.

     Some of the other highlights of this rehearsal process so far have been working with a composer in the room (an incredible Marc Lewis, creating an entire soundscape by himself), jumping from working with one director to the other, watching this incredible company of actors delve deeper and deeper into their characters, and when I’m not acting, I am having so much fun being an audience member (the tavern scenes in Henry IV are especially fun to watch with Mike Winters as Falstaff and Shawn Fagan as Hal leading their wacky band of brothers in all sorts of shenanigans). The chance to see the characters develop over the course of these plays is amazing, especially the journey that Shawn is creating with Hal and Henry. It is a special thing to behold.

     And all this has happened before we’ve even moved into the theatre. These next few weeks should be crazy and busy and exhausting but full of amazing new discoveries along the way to opening night.

"Moving Day" by Joseph Haj

2012-01-20T12:14:00.000-05:00

Joseph Haj

by director Joseph Haj

Today is the day we move from the rehearsal room to the theatre to begin tech for Henry IV and Henry V. We’re there for a long time. We tech from 1-11 today (Friday), and from noon to midnight on Saturday and Sunday, and then we have a day off on Monday before we go back in on Tuesday for another week of tech before previews.

The PlayMakers team is incredible. The admin staff goes to great lengths to protect my time when I’m in rehearsals, and that means additional work for them to shoulder. The shops are working around the clock to get the scenery, costumes, lights, props and everything ready to go. Our two stage managers, among the best in the business, are ready to guide us through tech. Co-director Mike Donahue and I think we are exactly where we need to be in the process.

And the twenty-four member acting company? Incredible. Generous, collaborative, smart, wildly talented, and on the cusp of something very special with these plays.

Many years ago, I was an actor in Genet’s The Screens at the Guthrie theatre in Minneapolis, and the lighting designer was Jennifer Tipton. I never knew that lights could be such a huge part of the storytelling. Jennifer is one of the most admired and in-demand lighting designers in the world, and it has been a long-held dream of mine to work with her on a project. I’m thrilled that it turned out to be this epic journey of The Making of a King.

Wish us luck! We’re on our way!

The Making of a King: Henry IV and Henry V begins performances on January 28. Click here to learn more and to buy tickets.

"A lotta touch of Harry in the night"

2012-01-19T22:42:00.002-05:00

by "a secret source within the rehearsal hall"

What's it like being an actor in The Henrys? A little like being on the march to Agincourt. Hurry-up-and-wait... Stay focused for hours on end... give your captain your full respect and attention.

Tonight we finished up our work in the rehearsal hall with our first full run throughs of both plays, Henry IVand Henry V. It's a very satisfying sort of tired. Tomorrow we move into tech in the theatre (and so begins a weekend of 10 out of 12s).

What I have learned in the past 5 weeks:

If you give the rehearsal your full focus, even when you're not on stage, that care and attention will all come back to you.
It is just as hard to listen and react on stage as it is to have all the lines and be in the spotlight.
Referring to 2 above: you can learn a lot by shutting your mouth and observing Ray Dooley.
Bring your imagination to the role / the scene, but listen to Joe and Michael; they will give you gold.
Everyone is a soft touch for Tug, the PRC dog.
Playmakers is the most supportive arts organization I have had the pleasure to work with; actors, designers, admin staff... everyone counts.

What should the audience watch for in The Henrys? Something struck me about three weeks into rehearsal. In one particular rehearsal I was living with Falstaff and Hal. These characters only exist as theatrical creations, and after years of reading them / reading about them, there they were, in the flesh. It was a magical moment; one that can only be experienced when you have really good actors doing the work. I can't wait for audiences to reach this same point of realization, as I am sure they will with all elements of The Henrys.

I come from Eastcheap

Altering Armor for The Making of a King

2012-01-18T14:25:00.000-05:00

by Rachel Pollock, Crafts Artisan

On deck at work, we are currently well into production on a pair of repertory shows, Shakespeare's Henry IV and V. The designs for this show are one of those non-era-eras that I like to describe as "postmodern collage"—a mixture of modern and historical styles all blended together to create intriguing looks not tied to any specific time, leather jerkins with jeans and workboots and that type of thing.
I like working on shows done in that way for contemporary audiences because it allows for all the super cool craft stuff that Shakespeare histories pretty much need (like armor!), but it also makes those things accessible to the modern eye in an empathetic way that true period pieces from about the 17th century back don't. It is very hard, in the 21st century visual milieu, to look like an indomitable, ruthless soldier in, say, pumpkin hose and tights.

Our designer, Jen Caprio, is renting and purchasing the armor because there is just SO much of it needed. If we were doing one of these plays, I could have built some, but both in repertory with the bulk of the rehearsal period happening over our winter vacation, that meant too little time and not enough staff to plan the making of any of the big pieces. Instead, one of the biggest responsibilities I have is to make the armor we've rented fit the actors we've cast, without altering it in any permanent way, yet maintain the standard of quality that I expect.
One of the things I stress in my classes is that there is the best way to do something, and everything else is a concession you ought to choose to make. In a classroom context, I teach what I believe to be the best way of doing things, since it is easier to make informed concessions required by things like a lack of time/money/labor than it is to break bad habits of shoddy workmanship. It is exciting to see all these pieces of armor from all different sources and makers, and look at the choices they have made in construction (some of which are helpful and others leave me scratching my head). Today I am going to write about how we reversibly altered a piece of leather armor for our productions in such a way as to maintain its level of quality inside and out.

Woven leather jerkin from OSF Costume Rentals Shoulder seam detail. I see some grommets I need to replace. Note elements like the integrated D-ring for clipping a gorget to. What's going on with this side-seam's double lacing? ...it's hiding a quick-change closure in there! This is the piece in question. It's made from strips of leather woven together and riveted at all the crossovers. The edges are bound with a rollover leather strip binding, and the two halves lace together at the shoulders and sides. It has also been aged and toned with paint and dye effects. We have rented it from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's costume rental division.
Among regional theatres, the OSF is a powerhouse when it comes to quality armor production. Their pieces are made to withstand not only their own productions' run, but built to last for many shows and rentals thereafter. They make it policy to cut no corners, and their work is categorically levels of awesome: is it great, or is it spectacular? The artisans turning out their pieces know their work can't just be crap that looks decent enough from the front row and can cling on for a two-week run, and it's a pleasure to work on their stuff. OSF costumes are made with longevity and quality at the forefront, because they become assets in the rental side of the company.

So, if it's so great and all, what could we possibly need to do to this thing? Well, the design concept does not include any skirtlike hangdowns. We need to use it, but lose the long tabs along the bottom. Obviously, we're not going to make that happen with scissors and rivets.

For the fittings, to insure that it would work for one of our actors, I had my assistant Whitney use masking tape with a light-tack adhesive to just tape the tabs up inside. The light-tack adhesive would keep them out of the designer's sightlines for the fitting, without damaging or removing any of that great paint treatment. Tape was fine at this point, because why go to the trouble of a more professional finish if it wasn't going to fit any of our actors? So, tape-tape-tape, and off it goes to be fit.

A couple days later, it comes back. Yay, we love it on somebody, so we're using it! Now's the time to figure out something better than tape, because any tape that will hold up to over a month worth of repertory shows with fight choreography is going to damage the piece, which is not only Not Okay in my own personal book, it's Way Not Okay in our rental contract.

Inside of the front with the tabs folded up in the desired style. What will I do? I can't and wouldn't ever cut those tabs off or duct-tape them up. If it were ours, I might consider popping some of the rivets and replacing them with Chicago screws (like a rivet, but with a threaded shaft so they're removable) so I could hold the tabs up that way, but I’m not popping whole rows of rivets on a piece that's not ours.

I took a measure of the area blocked out in black in the image above, for both front and back. I use clips and clamps when I need to hold pieces of leatherwork together, not anything puncturing like pins or tacks. I cut a rectangle for each from a section of black vinyl, doubled back an inch on each end for the lacing sections, then had Whitney punch holes to correspond with the holes in the sides of the garment itself. Above the vinyl insert is clipped to mark the holes for punching. Each vinyl insert is labeled to note whether it's front or back, since they're different sizes, just in case wardrobe needs to remove them at any point.

Crafts assistant Whitney Vaughan shows how she's tacking up the tabs. See those strips at the base of each tab at the back, to reinforce the rivets? Those are only riveted on, not glued also, which meant that Whitney was able to use a heavy carpet thread and slide a needle between them, and whipstitch the tabs to the vinyl insert without ever puncturing any of the leather. Here, the blue lines show a vague diagram of how that stitching runs, for a visual:

Next, she laced the inserts into the armor, thus:

We put Velcro on the insert since it would cover the strip on the armor itself, to maintain the quick-change closure option. Ta-da! Lookout, Hotspur! Prince Hal is ready for you! So, there's one of many armory projects that are moving through my shop these days. I've got another couple in-progress, so once those move onto the Done Rack, I’ll give you the skinny on them as well.

"Virginia Woolf" Photos Are Here!

2011-12-06T15:27:00.001-05:00

Once again we've brought in photographer Jon Gardiner to get some production photos at the final dress rehearsal of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - and these shots are pretty spectacular! Check them out below to get a sneak peek of this sizzling production.

Ray Dooley as George, Katie Paxton as Honey,
Julie Fishell as Martha and Brett Bolton as Nick

Katie Paxton and Brett Bolton

Brett Bolton and Ray Dooley

Julie Fishell and Brett Bolton

Ray Dooley and Julie Fishell

Photos by Jon Gardiner.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is now playing through December 18th.

The Costumes of "Virginia Woolf"

2011-12-02T10:36:00.000-05:00

When working on a period show, the costume shop often has to rely on finding vintage pieces or making similar garments themselves. But luckily for this production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the styles of the 1960s are making a comeback (probably due to the popularity of AMC's Mad Men).

"The fashions on the television screen have trickled into the mass market and it's now possible to go to the mall and buy slim tailored suits, skinny ties, and even hats and not have to rely completely on vintage pieces to obtain an authentic look," says costume designer Jade Bettin. "This is a very fortunate coincidence when one is trying to create costumes for a show like Virginia Woolf that is set in 1962."

But the design process still took some research. "Of course my immersion in the silhouette of the late 1950s and early 1960s went beyond Mad Men," Bettin says. "After my initial design meeting with [director] Wendy Goldberg and the other members of the design team, I collected a large amount of images that solidified my understanding of the details of the period."


1962 Brooks Brothers fashion illustration from Bettin's research

Bettin also had to work with - and at times against - the vibrant set design, which she previewed not long after that first design meeting. "I opened the email and saw - was that a bright patent red floor and ceiling?" she said, adding, "I think my initial thought was, well, I guess I'm not using green."

Though the set offered certain restrictions, it also provided inspiration. "My journey to find the colors that work for each character and with this set has been a very interesting one," says Bettin, who chose saturated colors for the character Martha.

"In reading the play and focusing in on the character of Martha, I always got the sense that she didn't quite fit - that she was not content playing the role of 1950s housewife," she said. "So that saturation hints at her discontent and also ties her to the color of the floor and ceiling and one of the other most interesting pieces of the set for me - the abstract painting that is commented on in the dialogue."


Untitled 15-P by Edward Dugmore, a 1959 abstract painting that inspired Bettin's design (source: www.abstract-art.com)

"The abstract paintings of this period are canvases filled with bold splashes of color that speak to raw emotion," Bettin says. "Sounds like Martha to me."

The Set Design of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

2011-11-28T12:07:00.000-05:00

For Alexander Dodge, set designer for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the design process began with understanding the play's psychological and emotional tone.

"The atmosphere of the play is incredibly hot much of the time and frequently unbearably so," he said. "However, its volatility is absorbing and even bewitching."

From there, Dodge and director Wendy C. Goldberg approached the task of creating a feeling of confinement for the PlayMakers thrust environment. "We wanted a space that felt oppressive and constricting without necessarily being completely literal and naturalistic," he said. "Though the play requires certain trappings of a period living room and the course of the evening happens in real time, the overall space could be metaphorical as well."


Rendering of Dodge's design

To accomplish this, they settled on a "metaphorical playing space" with more realistic, period-specific furniture pieces "to ground the reality." The use of books ties in with the characters' connections to academia. The glossy red floor and ceiling create the feeling of confinement desired by appearing to crush the wall of books.

An image that inspired Dodge's design

Dodge said, "One of Martha's first lines is 'what a dump' channeling Bette Davis. Presumably as George and Martha mess up one area of this big rambling colonial they move on to a cleaner area until the entire house is in the state we find it."

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opens November 30th.

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and the Pulitzer Prize

2011-11-17T07:28:00.000-05:00

Entertaining? Definitely. Shocking? At times. Wholesome?

...maybe not.

There's a lot that can be said about Edward Albee's 1962 Broadway debut Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, winner of the 1963 Tony Award and initial winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. But when it came time to award the Pulitzer, the committee actually decided to override its original decision. Albee's play did not, they decided, portray a "wholesome" view of American life. Its sexual themes and language were not deemed "uplifting."

Edward Albee (source: www.achievement.org)

So what beat out Virginia Woolf?

Actually, nothing. The Committee didn't award a drama prize at all that year, despite critical acclaim. The decision grew even more controversial when half of the Committee's members resigned to show their support for Albee.

For more information, check out Edward Albee's biography.

And if you think you can handle the scandal, then get ready for PlayMakers' production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opening on November 30th.

Get on the Bus! - Don’t forget your luggage.

2011-11-10T15:05:00.002-05:00

1961: The Freedom Riders have gathered from across America. They are about to travel to the segregated and violent southern states to fight racial prejudice. What might they bring with them on such a trip? A change of clothes? A few belongings for the road? In the first few days of rehearsal for Mike Wiley’s Parchman Hour, the story of the Riders and their struggle, the prop shop got a note asking for “about 12 suitcases”. We did a little research on clasp and lock types from the 1940’s through the early 60’s. Luckily Playmakers’ has an extensive stock of mid-century suitcases, so we rolled our stairs over to the loft and pulled down about 15 of the most interesting ones we could find.

Suitcases with their original handles.

We cleaned them up and put them in rehearsal. During rehearsal, we realized that the wiggle in the suitcase handles was hazardous. The actors had to perform a choreographed routine with the suitcases and the unwieldy pieces of luggage were suddenly death bludgeons. So we took back the ones we liked. Over the next few days our wonderful prop Work Study students removed the original handles with saws and cutters and other destructive tools.

Melinda Bendixen removing and original handle.

We chose plain metal drawer pulls as replacement handles because of their strength and durability. However they are ugly.

Yuman Wang attaching a new handle.

At this point we let the work studies loose on them with the instructions to “Make them work, make them look like they go with the suitcase.” Taking the original handles as starting points, they painted some, covered a couple in colored gaffer’s tape or fabric, and even wrapped one in ribbon.

Suitcases with new and hold handles

We bolted the new handles on, reinforcing the older, flimsier suitcases, and voila! Dance worthy suitcase handles. No wiggling or whacking our actors. They can now use suitcases in a way they were never intended to be used! Ah, the magic of theater.

End of story! Of course not! So much of the action takes place front and center in this show (without the usual scene changes or off stage costume changes) word came down from rehearsal that a change of costume should be pre-dressed in the suitcases. We went back and “prettied up” the insides of the suitcases. We cleaned them out, let them air out, deodorized a couple, fixed some lining, and once again- Voila! Completed prop. Now we just check them every few days to make sure they’re structurally sound and that everything is holding up.

The Parchman Hour runs through Sunday, November 13.

The Best of Both Worlds: Undergrads in "The Parchman Hour"

2011-11-07T11:19:00.000-05:00

Many of the artists at PlayMakers have ties to UNC-Chapel Hill, but it's not often that a production features undergrad actors in the cast. However, open casting calls for The Parchman Hour brought undergraduates Jessica Sorgi and Allen Tedder to the PlayMakers stage - a fact the students are pretty excited about.

Jessica Sorgi

"I don’t know of any other schools where undergrads have the opportunity to work in a professional environment," says Jessica. "Being able to work on a professional production, while still having the security of an educational environment, is the best of both worlds."

Allen Tedder

Allen, who has been with the cast for both tours, admits that it can be difficult to balance school and work. "There were some challenges, especially on the tours and working at PlayMakers," he says. "I have had late nights and liters of coffee to try and keep my grades up. And missing spring break for the tour earlier in the year was well worth it, but it was still like not having a break."

Still, both undergraduates agree that the experience has taught them a lot. "I know now that I want to be an actor for the rest of my life - this run has confirmed that," says Allen. "I have also learned that in the world, there are countless unsung heroes (I've met them) that do not even seek the glory they rightly earn... just the satisfaction of being able to sleep at night, knowing that they did what they could for the genuine good of the whole."

Jessica, who said she was grateful for the opportunity to share the story of the Freedom Riders, added, "I hope that audiences not only learn more about the civil rights movement, but are also inspired to take action for what they believe in. I hope that they recognize how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go in the pursuit of freedom and equality."

The Parchman Hour runs until November 13th.

Photos of "The Parchman Hour'!

2011-11-03T10:11:00.000-04:00

Every dress rehearsal (the night before our first public performance), we bring our favorite photographer Jon Gardiner into the theater to shoot production and press photos. He always gets great pictures that show off the excitement of the production. Check out some of his shots of The Parchman Hour below!

Dee Dee Batteast with the Ensemble

The Ensemble

Kashif Powell as Stokely Carmichael (foreground) and Doug Bynum as John Lewis, with the Ensemble

David Aron Damane as Pee Wee with the band and Ensemble

The Ensemble

Photos by Jon Gardiner.

The Parchman Hour is running until November 13th.

Costuming the Freedom Riders, part 2

2011-11-02T12:05:00.000-04:00

by Rachel Pollock, Costume Designer

A few posts ago, I made an update about the show opening tonight for which I have designed costumes, a world premiere of a new script by playwright and director Mike Wiley. The play, The Parchman Hour, takes place partly in Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm prison.

My prior post talked about how I came up with the costume design for the inmate characters doing hard time, whom we know from copious research images wore ragged, faded, black-and-white striped convict uniforms:

Design collage for the uniforms.

We needed to get fabric to make the uniforms in a very specific stripe dimension and fiber/weave, which we were able to do thanks to the wonderful services of Durham fabric printer Spoonflower. Thanks to modern technology, I can show you some video that the theatre produced as part of the press releases and supplementary media for this show, which is relevant to the project!

Twelve-minute Behind the Scenes video:

There's a great section in the middle of the Behind the Scenes video, an interview with me and crafts artisan and second-year graduate student Adrienne Corral talking about some more of the processes we did on the Spoonflower fabric before the cut-and-sew portion of construction. The section starts around 6:25. It not only talks about the design concept behind the fabric production, but gives you a glimpse into our dye facility, as Adrienne walks the viewer through the laundry and dye processes she did to start with.
Then, lead draper and third-year graduate student Kaitlin Fara drafted patterns for the shirts and trousers, and supervised their construction with the help of two first hands (Claire Fleming and Leah Pelz) and a factory sewing cell of stitchers.

Once the five uniforms were complete, they went back to Adrienne for aging, distressing, and dirtying-up. She used a variety of dye mixtures, textile paints, and screenprinting inks to age the garments, applied with a combination of manual techniques (aka "finger painting"--smearing and scrunching the fabric with colorant smeared onto her gloved hands) and Preval sprayers. After application, she heat-set the effects using both our industrial heat press and a steam chamber, depending on the garment. (Bulky sections with buttons and several thicknesses couldn't go into the heat-press, which is kind of like an enormous straightening iron for hair, so they went into the steamer.)

Adrienne applies some finishing touches of filth to one of the shirts.

Grimed-up trousers on our dyeroom steel table awaiting heat-setting.

Two-minute trailer:

David Aron Damane wears one of the uniforms in the fight at 0:45.
Close-up pan on the band in them at 0:52.

Stage shot of David Aron Damane wearing one of the uniforms.
Also pictured: J. Alphonse Nicholson and the ensemble.

Note how the stage lights minimize all that grime treatment!

There was one other craft project that involved digital design and printing as well, and that was our reproductions of the logo pins that the Freedom Riders from the Coalition of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee wore on their lapels, to show their solidarity and support, much the same way such logo pins are worn now for political support of fans of a band or whatever. Adrienne took photos of some of the original pins that I provided her as research, and cleaned them up digitally so that they could be uploaded and produced by the company Wacky Buttons, who turned around our small quantity orders (15 of each design) in a matter of a couple days. Here are the masters Adrienne made:

This actually is a great illustration of how digital technologies and online media are changing the way designers can and must think about their shows. The camera operators who shot our trailer video got press shots at such close range that a design element which seems at first thought like an aesthetic conceit (making sure we had the lapel button designs that CORE and SNCC members wore on the rides) becomes differently visually relevant.
Before YouTube trailers for shows, maybe no one but the actors would have gotten a really good look at the pins. Maybe folks on the front row might have barely been able to see the SNCC clasped-hands image. The buttons might just go unnoticed by the majority of the audience so their actual design might not have been very important, but I watched the trailer on full-screen and man, you can really see a couple of them!

The pan shot of the band gets closer to these uniforms than any audience member ever would, so in both of these cases, it was not enough for me to approach the design of this show regarding its appearance at the middle distance, or from the back row, or the front row. There has long been a cliche about costumes and sets, and corners that get cut or illusions that get created: "Will they see it from the front row?" Working for a company that embraces new media, digital technologies, and social platforms for audience engagement is effectively breaking the fourth wall even further down. Something to consider!

Anyhow, that's the dirt (ha!) on the prison uniforms for this world premiere production, opening tonight! It's been an incredible journey. So far, i've sat previews in which people got up and danced, shouted standing ovations, and surviving Freedom Riders got up onstage at the finale. I cannot wait to see what Opening Night holds, and I bet the run is going to bring even more incredible, exciting surprises and energy. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is a game-changing, attitude-changing, life-changing play that will make you want to change your world for the better.

"The Expression of Experience" by John Patrick

2011-10-31T10:12:00.001-04:00

John Patrick is a vocal coach who has worked in film, theatre, and television. He served as the vocal coach for A Number with PlayMakers before working on The Parchman Hour.

The voice carries on it the expression of an experience. Each voice is different just like each person’s perspective is different. The human need for individualized expression is beautifully juxtaposed against the power found in solidarity in The Parchman Hour.

As vocal coach, my job is to support and guide the actors to vocal choices and discoveries that further reveal and communicate the present experiences of the given characters and story, all under the guidance of our esteemed director Mike Wiley. Oh, and to make sure the audience can understand what the actors are saying, lest the artistic choices be for naught.

The unique challenge of working on The Parchman Hour was the sheer amount of characters the audience has to be able to discern from one another. Each with a unique sound and dialect and sometimes one actor may play multiple characters. We live in exciting times with abundant resources for research in this capacity. Audio and video recordings of some of the voices of the actual Freedom Riders exist online. We also have a plethora of recordings of natives from all over the country so we can find dialects that sound indicative of very specific areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and New England where the vast majority of characters hail from. The actors heavily drew on these resources for inspiration in creating living and breathing vehicles for the voices of some historical and fictional characters.

But to simply do an impression of someone historic would not take into account the heart and soul that can only come when an actor identifies personally with the traits and perspective of a character. This marrying of external postures with internal life is a nuanced and exciting journey. We play and make mistakes until a choice is made that resonates deeply with the actor, the ensemble, and ultimately the audience. Then we know we have something powerful to share. Embracing diversity was one of the many tenants of the Civil Rights era so in finding the voice and body of these brave characters we must honor the diverse actors that inhabit them. The actor’s voice must be heard through the dialect and vocal rhythms of the character to celebrate the connection between the two.

The actors do ALL this work. It is my honor to guide and point towards possibilities that the actors already have inside themselves. They may need help shedding light on the sometimes dark and messy catacombs of the creative process, but in the end, the actors make the choice to breathe and dangerously reveal their unique expression of a moment filtered through the perspective of the character they inhabit for a time. How exciting! I am in awe of what actors do and I cannot wait to hear the voices of the Freedom Riders live on in a new generation in The Parchman Hour.

Behind-the-Scenes Video of "The Parchman Hour"

2011-10-28T11:37:00.000-04:00

Check out our behind-the-scenes video for The Parchman Hour, featuring playwright-director Mike Wiley with members of the design and production team and the cast!

The Parchman Hour is now playing through November 13. Learn more here.

"A Music Director's Perspective" by Rozlyn Sorrell

2011-10-26T12:04:00.003-04:00

Singer/actress Rozlyn Sorrell is a New York native who has performed in music, film, television and theatre in Los Angeles and currently operates Vocal Precision Studio in Raleigh. Rozlyn serves as the music director for The Parchman Hour.

As an educator, I feel this piece is very timely and relevant in the world in which we live today. The economic challenges we face as a nation have affected our educational school system and the way funds are spent. Our world of political correctness jeopardizes historical curriculum and the way texts are written. Their content is watered down and falsified with generalities preventing knowledge in its truest form. As creative arts programs struggle to stay alive, it is so very important that productions such as The Parchman Hour continue to be produced. Future generations will come to know and respect the poignant pen of Mike Wiley, as he is able to communicate the hard realities of a difficult and ugly past in a moving, provocative, honest and entertaining way.

What value, quality and dimension can I add to The Parchman Hour as music director? Ay, there’s the rub. It is my job to support Mike’s vision with musical nuances that accentuate the underlying theme and purpose of the project. It is my job to ensure it is achieved by pulling the qualities he seeks from each artistic cast member. Fortunately, the talented and hard-working cast of this production makes this task less daunting.

The music in this piece helps to soften the heavy blow of harsh dialogue and physical action, but does not eradicate it. It punctuates and emphasizes contradictions of political rhetoric, but does not shove it down your throat. Some music is pounded into the core of your being, while some subtler music just makes you think. You will cry one moment and, before you know it, find yourself clapping your hands, stomping your feet and even singing along. The power of a well-written work is the ability to cause one to experience a roller coaster of emotional confusion. Mike Wiley succeeds – yet again – in accomplishing this feat. It is with great joy that I am able to come along for the ride.

"A Remarkable Journey" by Kashif Powell

2011-10-24T14:20:00.000-04:00

Kashif Powell is a Triangle-based actor, and a Ph.D. student in Performance Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, making his PlayMakers debut as Stokely Carmichael in The Parchman Hour.

It has been such a privilege to work on The Parchman Hour. This project has taken me on a remarkable journey, teaching me profound lessons in courage and sacrifice along the way. One such lesson came this past May when I, along with other members of the cast and the director, Mike Wiley, attended the 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Rides in Jackson, Mississippi.

As waves of Freedom Riders and their families began to flow in, the 15,000-seat auditorium felt like a teapot attempting to contain an ocean. The space ignited with hundreds of stories nearly fifty years old and histories that dated back much further. It still astonishes me that I was able to hear those stories first-hand; I sat next to Jesse Harris who vividly discussed the brutality he experienced while in Parchman and spoke with Joan Trumpauer Mulholland who rode from New Orleans to Jackson with my character, Stokely Carmichael.

The journeys of the Freedom Riders and the legacy of the Freedom Rides filled that space, and in doing so made its way into the hearts and souls of every person present. Now, this production and all those involved are charged with the responsibility of telling the stories of the Freedom Riders and bearing their legacy.

I believe that this play does just that. Like a wave at its summit, it is poised to wash over the audience and pull them right into the thick of the Freedom Rides. So bring your life jackets, because it’s gonna to a fun ride! And when it’s over, hopefully you will leave understanding what I came to understand in May - “freedom does not drop from the sky.” Instead it must be ardently fought for, and, once obtained, lived to its fullest extent. I sincerely thank the many Freedom Riders for not only changing the course of my history, but the path of my future as well. Enjoy the show!

Designing the world of "The Parchman Hour"

2011-10-21T10:03:00.003-04:00

When audiences enter the theater to see The Parchman Hour, their eyes will probably go straight to the life-sized bus onstage.

"The bus became the real tag for me as so much of this story and the story of the civil rights movement involves buses," says set designer McKay Coble, citing the story of Rosa Parks, the strategy of the Freedom Riders and the bus-burning incident at Anniston as examples. But there's more to the set than the bus.

The scale model of McKay Coble's set design

Coble also says she incorporated T.V. sets into the design to highlight the discrepancy between the "lighthearted and a little sexy" vsion of "a bright new world" broadcast on television and the grim problems actually occurring in the '60s.
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"We are using a clip of a Greyhound commercial (and it is one of many travel logs) that show a journey that was supposed to be representative of the trips folks took on buses in 1961," Coble says. "I think the photos of the Greyhounds we see used for the Freedom rides - particularly the one at Anniston - tell a very different story."

As many television sets were still in black and white in 1961, Coble set the majority of the play in the color scheme. "The play starts out in color and we lose it once we get to the prison," she says, citing the achromatic prison uniforms seen in Parchman and the mug shots of the Freedom Riders as examples of the black and white design elements.

Coble says that the return of color at the end reminds audiences "that the movement was forward - still with a way to go, though." The use of color was also inspired by the artwork of Charlotta Janssen, whose work Coble discovering when researching the world of the play.

portrait of Rosa Parks by Charlotta Janssen

"She has created remarkable collage and painted portraits based on the mug shots of the Riders that have become so iconographic," Coble says. "It is rich and deep and passionate- makes complete sense to me."

Parchman in Context, Part 2

2011-10-19T10:16:00.008-04:00

by Ashley Lucas, Dramaturg

Ashley Lucas is production dramaturg for The Parchman Hour by Mike Wiley. The text of this post contains the dramaturgical notes she wrote for the program of the play. This is Part 2 of a two-part essay -- click here to start with Part 1!

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The bus rides themselves provided sufficient evidence of the Freedom Riders’ bravery and the depth of their belief in the Civil Rights Movement. However, the Riders further proved their resiliency and their devotion to human rights by maintaining their strength, humor, and commitment to one another during the weeks they spent inside Parchman. Few people have the will to sing about freedom while they are held captive, to engage in hunger strikes when they have already lost much of their physical strength, to hold fast to their ideals when almost no one can see them do it. They faced Parchman and still believed in the dignity of all people. The Parchman Hour does much to capture the sheer force of will of the Freedom Riders, and it raises up their songs and stubborn optimism in the face of terrible violence and irrevocable injustice. They, like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ghandi, and Cesar Chavez, imagined the freedom and equality they did not have and sought to create it with little more than their bodies and voices.

Though the Freedom Riders had a significant hand in the many great triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, neither they nor the many others who fought for freedom in the 1960s managed to eradicate racism, inequality, or the brutality of incarceration. In 2008 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report about the “horrific conditions” at Parchman Farm. HIV-positive prisoners began writing to the ACLU in 1998, explaining that:

they were living in squalor, categorically segregated from the rest of the prison population, and barred from all prison educational and vocational programs and jobs. They told us that they were dying like flies because prison doctors refused to give them the “cocktail” (the triple-drug combination therapy that since 1997 had begun to change HIV from an inevitably fatal disease to a treatable chronic illness). (Winter and Hanlon, “Parchman Farm Blues,” ACLU Website)

The ACLU investigation found that of the one hundred twenty men being held in segregation, eighty percent were black and most were convicted of nonviolent offenses. Their report describes these men as being “warehoused in a virtual leper colony and left to die.” ACLU lawyers spent nearly ten years in litigation before they felt that officials at Parchman were finally taking steps to change these conditions in 2007. Life on the Farm doesn’t change much.

The courage of the Freedom Riders—and indeed Mike Wiley’s play—ought to push us out of our seats and into our own forms of protest. We cannot merely marvel at what those in the Civil Rights Movement did for us; we must root out the injustices which surround us today, both those that are readily apparent and those which are deliberately hidden from us. The United States incarcerates 2.3 million people today (one in every one hundred of its citizens) (US Bureau of Justice Website). Our schools are now more segregated than they were in 1954 when the Brown decision was handed down (www.projectcensored.org). In 2010, 17.2 million households in the U.S. did not have enough food to feed their families—a higher rate of hunger than we have seen in this country’s history (www.worldhunger.org). If we admire the Freedom Riders, then we must seek to become them in new ways and in unexpected places. We cannot be content to ignore the persistent legacies of racial inequality, but we must be creative—like the Freedom Riders—and imagine the bus before we can get on it.

So who were the Freedom Riders?

2011-10-17T13:28:00.000-04:00

PlayMakers Repertory's upcoming show, The Parchman Hour: Songs and Stories of the '61 Freedom Riders, focuses on the story of a brave and determined group of men and women who had a significant impact on the Civil Rights Movement. Here's some inspirational historical context to get you ready to see the show.

It started with the Nashville Student Group. Upon successfully desegregating lunch counters and movie theaters in their city, the band of college students decided to challenge the Jim Crow laws throughout the South by traveling the country on public buses.

A group of Freedom Riders ready to depart. Source: www.forusa.org

On May 5th, 1961, the group of students, black and white, sat together on their first bus and ignored "white" and "colored" designations at their stops. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in public facilities three years earlier, these acts were still considered criminal in the Deep South and the Freedom Riders became the victims of beatings by angry mobs along their route.

On Mother's Day, 1961, a mob in Anniston, Alabama, slashed their bus's tires and threw a firebomb inside. When the Riders tried to escape, they encountered the mob waiting outside the bus weilding lead pipes and baseball bats. Though an undercover agent intervened to precent imminent lynchings, the group was beaten a second time that day when they arrived in Birmingham. Soon afterward members from to CORE (the Committee of Racial Equality), SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and the SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference)joined the Freedom Rides.

The bombing of a Freedom Riders bus. Source: www.birminghamarchives.org

Police soon arrested 350 participants, filling Mississippi jails. Many of the Freedom Riders were transferred to the maximum-security prison at Parchman Farm near Jackson, Mississippi and endured humiliating and torturous conditions.

Upon their release the Riders continued their efforts, inspiring other movements to spring up to challenge segregation laws. Five months after the first ride, the Interstate Commerce Commission enacted a tougher law banning segregation in public facilities.

For more information, check out the Freedom Riders Foundation's website.

We Have a Bus!

2011-10-14T10:02:00.002-04:00

by Laura Pates, Shop Lead on The Parchman Hour

Laura Pates is a first-year Technical Production MFA student who tracked down and transported a real 1960s bus into the Paul Green Theater to become part of the set for The Parchman Hour.

Laura Pates and production manager Michael Rolleri pose by the bus (before it was chopped up).

The interior of the bus

The bus is one of the main elements of Mckay's set design and references many incidents in the Civil Rights Movement. I was given the task of finding a 1950s-60s era city bus within our available budget and driving distance. I started by contacting every junk yard, scrap yard, wrecking company and bus company within a 2 hours radius of Chapel Hill. Through research and the help of some people I spoke to, I was put into contact with a man in Warsaw, NC who knew everybody and everything there is to know about buses in the country. He gave me the name of a man in Fayetteville who had exactly what we needed (among roughly 90 other buses he has behind his house). I then contacted him and arranged a time for us to drive to Fayetteville, find our bus, and arrange a deal.

The next step was the most interesting and definitely the most fun. Our entire crew took 3 trucks with 2 trailers and every tool we could think of to cut a 40' long bus literally in half. We sectioned it into about 7 pieces as we had to carry the pieces through woods and a maze of buses, out to our trucks. We brought the pieces back to the theatre and have begun reassembling the bus in our scene shop. It has been a long process and we ran into many obstacles, but the end product makes it more than worth the effort.

Disassembling the bus

Come check out the bus in our production of The Parchman Hour, running October 26 - November 13!

Parchman in Context, Part 1

2011-10-12T10:53:00.002-04:00

by Ashley Lucas, Dramaturg

Ashley Lucas is production dramaturg for The Parchman Hour by Mike Wiley. The text of this post contains the dramaturgical notes she wrote for the program of the play. This is Part 1 of a two-part essay -- check back next week for Part 2!

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Throughout the American South, Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality, as well it should be.
-David M. Oshinsky

Since its establishment in 1901, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, has had a reputation for being one of the bloodiest and most dangerous prisons in the United States. A former plantation owned by a family named Parchman, the prison’s legacy of farm labor and a mostly black prisoner population remain in place to this day. Historically, most prisoners at Parchman have worked in the fields, tending the cotton by hand for ten hours a day, six days a week. Though prisoners now grow vegetables rather than cotton, they still work the same fields that their enslaved ancestors once plowed. In 2010, the incarcerated workers at Parchman spent 732,326 hours in agricultural labor (Mississippi Department of Corrections Website). Some things don’t change much over time, especially in prison, especially in the South.

Parchman’s notoriety as a place of terror long predates the arrival of the Freedom Riders in 1961. After the end of the Civil War, much of the South—and Mississippi in particular—persisted without much infrastructure of any kind. Devastated by the economic and human cost of the war, Mississippians of all racial backgrounds now faced not only the confusion of Reconstruction but also the new legal status of the 400,000 blacks in the state. White legislators quickly drafted the first Jim Crow laws, and Parchman—the only maximum security men’s facility in Mississippi to this day—became the destination for a great many black men (and some women) who were put to work both on the farm and outside of it as part of the convict lease system. Most of the major cities in the South were rebuilt during Reconstruction on the backs of prisoners working on chain gangs (a practice which continues today in Arizona). Both in terms of their monetary worth and their health and safety, blacks had been more valuable as slaves than they were as prisoners. A slave, like any other piece of livestock, needed to be kept in good working condition if a slave owner wanted to maximize his or her productivity. A prisoner, however, ceased to be an asset and could be worked to death without any fiscal loss to the state. The practice of laboring prisoners literally to death was so common that, “Not a single leased convict ever lived long enough to serve a sentence of ten years or more” (Oshinsky, p. 46).

Even those not placed on the chain gangs risked death each day at Parchman. The field laborers at Parchman are still patrolled by guards on horseback carrying rifles. Guards punished prisoners with such severe beatings that many died from the lashes of a leather whip known as Black Annie. Prison administrators and guards also employed the biggest and toughest prisoners to strong arm their peers into submission, even offering guns to some of them to shoot anyone who tried to escape while working in the fields. The severity of the conditions at Parchman prompted a lawsuit in 1972 in which the Honorable William C. Keady declared the prison “an affront ‘to modern standards of decency.’” He ruled for an immediate end to many disciplinary practices at Parchman, including,

beating, shooting, administering milk of magnesia, or stripping inmates of their clothes, turning fans on inmates while they are naked and wet, depriving inmates of mattresses, hygienic materials and/or adequate food, handcuffing or otherwise binding inmates to fences, bars, or other fixtures, using a cattle prod to keep inmates standing or moving, or forcing inmates to stand, sit or lie on crates, stumps or otherwise maintain awkward positions for prolonged periods. (Gates v. Collier)

Death and pain—and the fear of those things—remain part of the atmosphere of most prisons, but the vast seclusion of the 18,000 acres of this former plantation, regional efforts to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War, and the inherent racism of the U.S. criminal justice system enabled a culture of perpetual violence to rule Parchman even more strongly than many other prisons in this country.

Mike Wiley’s new play, The Parchman Hour, gives audiences a glimpse of this prison in 1961 when a group of black and white civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders served thirty-nine days on the infamous farm after being arrested in Jackson, Mississippi. On May 4, 1961, the first Freedom Ride set out from Washington, DC, carrying thirteen men and women on Trailways and Greyhound buses. These travelers meant to assert the basic right for whites and blacks to sit with one another on a bus, anywhere in the United States. Their peaceable action met with intense hostility from segregationists. By the time the Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi, they had already faced many beatings and murderous mobs. Under such circumstances, one might be tempted to assume that they were likely to be safer in prison than on these ill-fated buses, but the protestors knew Parchman’s reputation well and had every reason to fear for their lives when they were brought to the legendary farm. Their ride for freedom ended in incarceration.

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This is Part 1 of a two-part essay by Ashley Lucas. Check back next week for Part 2!

Costuming the Freedom Riders, part 1

2011-10-10T10:22:00.000-04:00

by Rachel Pollock, Costume Designer

I'm currently designing costumes for a very exciting project, the professional world premiere of The Parchman Hour, a new play written and directed by Mike Wiley.

The play chronicles the stories and songs of the Freedom Riders, a group composed mostly of college students who, during the summer of 1961, challenged segregation in the southern US by riding Greyhound and Trailways buses into the Deep South and refusing to observe segregated waiting rooms, restrooms, terminal lunch counter seating, and bus seating.

They met with violent resistance--one bus was firebombed and several of the Riders were beaten so badly they had to be hospitalized. They were not deterred, however, and more busloads of them kept coming--eventually over 300 people in all. Ultimately the state of Mississippi began incarcerating them in the notorious Parchman Farm Penitentiary, where they endured cruel abuse but kept their spirits up with songs and a nightly "vaudeville show," in which they would trade off reciting poetry, delivering speeches and sermons, telling jokes, calling out their contributions to everyone down the row on their cellblock.

In our production, there are several performers (one actor and four musicians) who are costumed as long-term Parchman inmates--men who are not part of the Freedom Riders group, but who instead are part of the Parchman gen-pop, hardened criminals and chain-gang workers who toil in Parchman's fields day in and day out. The uniforms worn by those prisoner characters are the subject of this post.

In researching what the uniforms looked like, I was specifically looking for photographs of prisoners making music, since the majority of our performers costumed in this way will be prominently featured onstage providing the music for the show.

I initially found some photos of prison bands, inmates who toured providing music for public events. These images weren't ultimately useful for my research though, beyond novelty. For one thing, all the images i found of prison bands of the era depicted only white prisoners (no surprise, given the segregation and prejudice of the time), and the majority of men serving long sentences in Parchman were black men.

And, our characters haven't been "polished up for the public." They aren't wearing stage-wear uniforms of clean, new fabric. Our guys are inmates playing music for themselves and those with whom they are incarcerated. They need to look like they just came in from the work detail and have sat down to unwind.

These men found time to play music despite incarceration. Our band represents these men.

This photo from the early 20th century shows a Parchman work detail returning. Note the variation in sun-fading of the stripes from one man's trousers to another.

This photo depicts Parchman prisoners in 1948 out on detail as music scholar Alan Lomax records their work songs.

Design collage for Pee Wee and the Band. These images became the basis for our conception of what our inmates' uniforms would look like.

I looked into what might be available in terms of pre-made prison-striped garments, but options consist of mostly flimsy cartoonish Halloween costumes, or actual modern-day black-and-white striped prison uniforms, which are now mostly made from ultra-durable polyester fabrics. (Not all modern prisoners have the television-cliche orange jumpsuits.) If you've ever tried to break down or "fade" polyester, you know what an uphill and ultimately losing battle that would mean for the crafts artisan on this show! And, you can't put bright white stripes onstage without adversely affecting the lighting, but you also can't easily tech down a white polyester to a creamier or greyer shade of pale.

I knew that if i wanted to wind up with a group of uniforms that might believably be worn by men serving hard time at Parchman Farm in 1961, we had to explore other options which would afford us more control over our final costumes.

Thankfully, it is entirely feasible in this day and age to simply design your own fabric to whatever specifications you need, and have it digitally printed in your exact yardage requirement. So, this is where the internationally-known, local, print-on-demand fabric production company Spoonflower comes in!

I created a file in Photoshop of a 2" stripe, already aged and faded to a certain degree, and uploaded it to their site. First, we ordered fat quarters in two of their fabrics--cotton twill and linen/cotton canvas--to test the print, the scale of the stripe, and to compare the hand of the fabric. We also did laundry tests on these sample pieces to see how the hand would change as the costumes were worn and laundered.

This image shows the cotton twill sample on the left, and the linen/cotton canvas sample on the right. We decided to use the cotton twill, since as the most sturdy weave it would be the most long-wearing for uniforms, and I loved how it reacted to the laundry processing-- slight changes in hand and ink retention.

The samples were washed with soda ash on a high-agitation cycle to help break them in, so they wouldn't look so freshly printed. An unwashed sample is on the right.

We did a set of dye tests at this point, to see what kinds of grime, staining, and yellowing we could incorporate as well. Above are several swatch tests of different washes of dye recipes.
Our shop manager, Adam Dill, contacted the folks at Spoonflower to let them know what we were going to be doing with their fabric and establish a line of communication in case there were any issues or concerns that arose on either end. They were really helpful, and completely on-board about our production timeline and the unusual nature of this project. Then, we ordered 31 yards of the final stripe design in cotton twill.

To give you an idea of the timing and planning of this at this stage of the game, we placed our fabric order two weeks before we wanted to have it in-house. Spoonflower's website lists a turnaround time of 6-7 days from order to shipping, with two more days required for larger quantities like our order. We wanted to make sure there was some wiggle-room. This means that as the designer, Mike and i began talking about these costumes and I started my research literally months ago, back in May and June, and the whole process of ordering the samples and doing the laundry tests happened back in August.

We knew, too, that once the fabric arrived, that there needed to be a week built into the schedule for the stuff to get double-processed (laundry loads, then dye washes). So, the planning for using a digital print has to be really on-point with all areas of production and design--you can't decide to do this on a whim!

Since I am serving as the costume designer on this show, I am not working in my usual capacity as Crafts Artisan. Rather, when i design for the mainstage at Playmakers, it affords one of our graduate students the opportunity to serve as production crafts artisan on a show. That student handles all the responsibilities which would usually be mine--processing dye requests, aging costumes, rubberizing shoes, making or altering or refurbishing hats, etc. I serve in a mentorship capacity, answering questions about specific processes or pointing them toward particular equipment or media or making sure we have extra hands to get the work done if needed, but the day-to-day running of the crafts sub-departmment during Playmakers work hours is left to them. They determine their workflow and ask for undergraduate or overhire help as they see fit, and ensure the crafts get done on time and up to par, as i would. I suppose if we did not have a graduate student who expressed interest in crafts, we might overhire a production crafts artisan, but so far it has been something our grads do pursue with enthusiasm.

The first batch, post-dye-treatment! It looks old and dirty and sweaty, and it's not even a garment yet! Success!

Production Crafts Artisan Adrienne Corral began processing the fabric in batches of six yards each through our 60-gal dye vat. It takes about two hours for her to do one length of the fabric, and is physically demanding work. Imagine suiting up in neoprene scuba gear, rowing a dinghy for fifteen minutes, and then carrying two flour sacks through a sauna. That's kind of what dyeing cotton twill yardage in a 60-gal vat is like, once you've got the neoprene apron and gauntlets and splashproof goggles on, and the bath's up to a boil!

For reference, here's another shot with the original freshly-printed unwashed sample swatch on the right, compared to our ready-to-cut pre-faded gross old prison uniform stripe! Great job, Adrienne!
In the next installment, we'll look at how this fabric yardage turns into costumes, and what else happens to them before they make their appearance onstage in Mike Wiley's incredible new play!

"The Parchman Hour": An introduction by Mike Wiley

2011-10-06T22:18:00.001-04:00

by Mike Wiley, playwright and director of The Parchman Hour

"We few, we happy few. We band of brothers. For he who sheds his blood with me today shall be my brother..."

Words so elequently written by William Shakespeare for the theatre and so bravely echoed by the Freedom Riders for the "beloved community" and "the redeemed America". Men and women, white and black from across America. Students mostly. Heroes, all. In the fall of 2010 at the dawn of the 50th anniversary of those bloody Freedom Rides, students from UNC, Duke, Chapel Hill High School, and NC State once again took up the mantle of those heroic happy few. Tirelessly researching and rehearsing what would become a workshop production and tour of The Parchman Hour. A tour which carried students that had never been out of the Carolinas into the Mississippi Delta, Parchman Prison and beyond.

Young adult actors who were merely seeking the glow of the footlights for themselves became bright channel markers for their generation.

Our time in Mississippi was the culmination of hard work and preparation; yes, but it was more so the culmination of transformation.

A cast of what was once a shy group of babes, who knew very little about the Freedom Rides, arose from wobbly to strong legs with arms outstretched grasping for truths. Truths they'd never been told. Truths they never knew to ask.

Theatre that is vital, that is necessary digs for the truth. Theatre that is healing. Theatre that reconciles. Theatre that is intravenous screams for the truth. And that truth can transform. Transform a person, an audience, as well as communities. The student production had been given a gift. A gift to share their talents, their experience, their knowledge, and most importantly their hope. I saw in my student troupe, everything a director, teacher, or parent could ask for and that was simply and wonderfully a new generation of possibility.

Mike Wiley

"PlayMakers as Matchmaker" by Matthew Greer

2011-10-03T16:57:00.001-04:00

By Matthew Greer, who plays Dr. Givings in In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)

Romance between actors playing opposite one another is nothing new—it’s a cliché without which a myriad of gossip shows and tabloid publications would likely starve. Acting is the only profession I can think of that demands co-workers (who are often complete strangers) to believably create the illusion of intensely intimate relationships. To do so, actors use the script—its language and its imaginary circumstances. But without the commitment of the actors’ other tools - their imaginations, intellects, instincts, emotions, and bodies - no audience member would perceive the characters’ connection as anything but false. Since these tools are the same tools with which all humans relate to one another in the course of “real life,” actors run the risk of having the boundaries between “real” and “imaginary” blur.

I have been a professional actor for over twenty years, and I’ve seen many a “show-mance” ignite during rehearsals. Most cool quickly once the shoot wraps or the show closes, and the “imaginary” forces give way to “real” ones. Sometimes, however, real connections are made, between people, not characters, and these can last a lifetime.

When I first came to work at PlayMakers, fifteen years ago, I was cast as the romantic lead, Posthumus Leonatus, in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Posthumus is no Romeo. He defies the king and marries the princess, Imogen, just before the play starts. Basically he kisses her, he hits her, and between that, he has no stage time with her - he just rages about her and tries to have her killed. Not really “show-mance” material.

I remember distinctly watching the actress playing Imogen, Christina Rouner, enter the room at Graham Hall (where we rehearsed before the current Center for Dramatic Art was built around the Paul Green Theater) on the first day of rehearsal. A strikingly beautiful six-foot-tall blonde, she easily captured my eye. But what I remember most was the thrill of her reading of the part. She had such facility with the language, talent, technique, humor, and emotional availability. I spent the ten-minute break after the read-through feverishly wondering how I was going to step up and match her performance.

Stage time together or no, we had to believably create a couple who had known each other since childhood, been raised in the same court, and loved each other enough to risk the considerable wrath of the king. We met outside of rehearsal time to imagine their life before the start of the play. As actors also draw heavily on their own life experiences to create aspects of their characters, Christina and I wound up sharing more and more deeply personal stories, and began to discover a great many common interests. On the third day of rehearsal, we began to get the first scene up on its feet, and we had to kiss for the first time. It was, let’s say, much easier than anticipated. We enjoyed more and more time together, and I came to feel I had found a kindred spirit. My parents remind me that I described myself at that time as “completely smitten” by Christina. But would our friendship grow beyond the end of the show, or was it all just another “show-mance?”

I am pleased to report that last Thursday, September 29, marked Christina’s and my tenth wedding anniversary. The fact that we celebrated it during the run of In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) here, at PlayMakers, where it all began, is a storybook touch to a real-life romance.

Matthew lives in New York City with his wife, Christina, an actress, and their two children, Miranda, 8, and Spencer, 5.

Making hats for "In the Next Room", part 3

2011-09-30T09:44:00.001-04:00

by Rachel Pollock, Crafts Artisan

Today, the trimming of the final two hats from In the Next Room!

Recall from prior posts on this topic that the hat trim is intended to be a physical representation of the metamorphosis of the character of Mrs. Daldry over the course of the play, and that the first two hats progressed in decoration from a reserved veiled hat to a more adventurous hat with a single upright "wing."

But what about the third and fourth hats?

Hat #3 features a rainbow ombre-dyed length of embroidered silk, sprays of coq feathers, taffeta ribbon bows, and velvet roses.

Front oblique view.

Rear oblique view.

Hat #3 worn onstage! Wow, how flamboyant and fabulous it looks! Katie Paxton as Mrs. Daldry, Matt Garner as Leo Irving, Kelsey Didion as Mrs. Givings. (Photo by Jon Gardiner.)

In the fourth hat, the theme of metamorphosis becomes encoded in a fairly literal symbol: the butterfly. Designer Anne Kennedy wanted to expand the adornment of the hats from the fairly traditional realm of fabrics, ribbons, flowers, birds and bows, to encompass what would appear to be actual butterflies (which are really made from painted and dyed feathers)! What fun!

We purchased the butterflies from a floral supplier, but they were too bright (top row). You can see how we sprayed down the brightness with a mist of black paint (bottom row).

Millinery assistant Leah Pelz then assembled some of them into these ornamental sprays.

Whoa. Now that's Hat #4.

In addition to the butterflies, some of the adornments include 9" wide satin ribbon, taffeta ribbons, faux grasses, feathered sprays, faux rosehips, and a red raffia thistle.

Oblique view.

Rear view.

This image shows the hats ready to go into the dressing rooms. I always pin these detailed hat care documents onto each head for the wardrobe crew, so they know how the hats are to be worn and stored safely.

Unfortunately, I don't yet have a stage shot of the fourth hat, but i'm sure you can tell from the other three onstage, how fun it looked!

Making hats for "In the Next Room", part 2

2011-09-28T13:28:00.000-04:00

by Rachel Pollock, Crafts Artisan

I initially thought this was a two-part post but I've realized that I'm going to need to split this into three, I think. At the end of the prior post on the topic, all four multiples had been blocked into the desired shape, using a terra cotta flowerpot as a crown block and a brim block I made a couple years ago for The Importance of Being Earnest.

The next step for all the hats was to wire and bind the brim edges and line them.

For some felt styles (say, a fedora), you might choose not to wire the brim edge, but I chose to on these for a couple of reasons. First, the wire and binding will go a long way in helping to maintain the upward curl of the brim in places, since it offers a strong reinforcement to the shape which was initially created in the blocking and sizing process.

Second, these hats are taken off and put back on multiple times an evening, by both the actress herself and her dressers. They need to be as sturdy as possible to withstand that much handling (consider that in "real life," you might wear this hat once a week, tops, if it were your favorite hat, whereas this hat is being worn every night of the week and twice on matinee days).

And third, the designer wanted them finished with this super-cute pinked-edge burgundy suede binding from Mokuba, so we had a perfect means to hide the wiring built into the look itself.

I also tend to line my hats for stage before trimming them out. For a streetwear/fashion hat, you would wait til after trimming to line it to hide the interior stitches securing the trim, but because hats for stage go through SO much aesthetic change in the tech process (on these we have changed the trim on three of the styles twice now, and we aren't even through previews yet), I line before trimming. On felt hats like this one, the lining serves as a stabilizer, too, so that the felt of the hat doesn't bear all the stress of the stitches attaching the trim, so that's a nice secondary benefit to this decision.

My primary assistants at this point were first year graduate Leah Pelz and PRC's staff Costume Technician, Adam Lukas Land, though on at least one occasion I had five undergraduates all at some stage of some craft process working in my room as well. It was fun, all of us working on hats in various stages of completion a taste of what it must have been like to work in the production room of a 19th century milliner's studio when these types of hats were originally made.

Here's a shot of the hats with their brims wired and bound.

Each hat is lined in a crossweave taffeta, with the label set into the crown. These have not only the actress/role name in them, but also the hat number.
The next step was to begin trimming them out, and since the hat trim was intended to be a physical representation of the metamorphosis of the character of Mrs. Daldry over the course of the play, this involved a lot of discussion with costume designer Anne Kennedy about how that was to manifest in the decor.

The first time Mrs. Daldry is introduced to the audience, she and her husband have arrived for an appointment with Dr. Givings, who treats patients for "hysteria," which in Mrs. Daldry's case seems to denote what we would call depression today. She doesn't leave the house or open the curtains in her room, and she shuns light by wearing a veil on her hat. We also learn that she isn't happy with her marriage, and that their childlessness is causing both the Daldrys grief.

First hat, with rust net veil edged in narrow brown ribbon shot with a single iridescent strand. The veil attaches to the hat with a brown embossed-stripe velvet ribbon bow.

The hat itself is trimmed in a ruched band of crossweave silk taffeta with a topstitched plaid pattern.

Katie Paxton as Mrs. Daldry
Jeffrey Blair Cornell as Mr. Daldry(Photo by Jon Gardiner.)

For the second hat, Mrs. Daldry is returning to the doctor's for further "treatment" of her hysteria. She has begun to play the piano again, something her depression (or "hysteria") had previously prevented her from doing. She is far from happy, but she is taking her first steps toward a better frame of mind.

In millinery terms, the idea is that she's taken her hat to the local milliner and asked that it be made over to a bit more daring and (for 1880) modern style. Ladies magazines of the time were showing styles that featured a lot of verticality in trims--towering loops of ribbon and feather sprays, and even bird wings (some mock, some real). The veil has been abandoned, as she no longer needs a physical barrier between herself and the world in order to cope with leaving her house, and she has begun to rediscover an appreciation for sunlight and gardens.

The decor of Hat #2 features a confection of ribbons as a hatband and ornaments, scattered silk flowers and leaves, and an actual antique millinery "wing" (not a taxidermized actual bird's wing, but a piece of decoration made from dyed feathers to resemble one).

Front view
The trim on the crown of this hat is where ribbon candy gets its name!

Side front

Profile view

Side back

Katie Paxton as Mrs. Daldry(Photo by Jon Gardiner.)

I'll stop there, and follow up in a third post on the third and fourth hats, which evolve even further into the realm of elaborate and symbolic trimmings!

Photos from In the Next Room!

2011-09-21T14:56:00.004-04:00

We had our final dress rehearsal for In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) last night, and our production photographer Jon Gardiner was in the house to shoot our publicity photos. They look fantastic! The show is a lot of fun with brilliant actors, elaborate period costumes and a beautiful set, so we have a great album of outstanding photos to share with you.

(Click any image to see a full size version.)

Julie Fishell, Matthew Greer and Katie Paxton (lying down)

Matthew Greer, Katie Paxton, Jeffrey Blair Cornell and Julie Fishell

Kelsey Didion, Katie Paxton and Matthew Greer

Katie Paxton and Kelsey Didion

Dee Dee Batteast and Kelsey Didion

Katie Paxton, Matthew Greer and Kelsey Didion

Photos by Jon Gardiner.

These are just a selection of pics from the full album. Click here to see the rest on our website.

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) runs from September 21 to October 9, 2011. Click here for more details.

Making Hats for "In the Next Room"

2011-09-20T10:03:00.004-04:00

by Rachel Pollock, Crafts Artisan

We're working on a really fun set of hats for the next show at work, Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room (or the vibrator play). The script is set in the 1880s, which means some great bustle costumes and of course hats!

The action of the play takes place over a couple of months, and the character for whom I've got the most craftwork is Mrs. Daldry, who undergoes a process of self-discovery. Our costume designer, Anne Kennedy, came up with a great way of expressing this through Mrs. Daldry's hat. Riffing off the idea that women would have a favorite hat retrimmed in whatever the new fashion was, Mrs. Daldry is to appear in each scene with the same basic hat style, but trimmed ever more frivolously and exuberantly. Fun!

We initially discussed whether this would be a single hat with interchangeable decor "appliances" that the wardrobe crew would change out between scenes, but I decided instead to do four identical hats trimmed differently, to instead create the illusion of the same hat being retrimmed.

Not the right period, but a great illustration of how the basic hat shape itself is only part of the final look!
Same face, same dress, same hat base, but such different personalities!

There were several reasons for this decision, most of which had to do with making the wardrobe crew's job easier. PlayMakers is a professional regional theatre, but we reside on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as such everyone on the theatre's staff is essentially doing double duty as artists and as teachers in practicum--UNC's students in the department of dramatic art have the invaluable opportunity to work alongside us to produce PlayMakers' shows, and among those opportunities is in a wardrobe crew capacity. Our Wardrobe Supervisor, Whitney Vaughan, leads a team of undergraduates who (for class credit) learn the ins and outs of backstage costume support for the run of each show.

I figured, our crew is already going to be learning SO much new information and unusual costume rigging (like how to help actresses put on corsetry and bustle cages and wigs and hats), that to keep the hats as straightforward as possible would only be a help. It is much easier to keep track of four separate hats backstage in the dark than to keep track of four batches of fiddly hat trim that snap or hook on and off of a piece. It's easy to accidentally drop or crush a feather spray attached to a pouf of fabric, but a hat is a more tangible item less easily damaged or lost. And, if the basic hat style was one we could block in felt, making multiples is actually (for me) less work, all told, than retrimming the same single hat four ways and then troubleshooting how to stabilize each "edition" into single quickly-removable units.

Ms. Kennedy sent us a large research packet of historical images showing hat styles she liked for the character of Mrs. Daldry. Then, I looked into options of block shapes for brim and crown styles, among blocks we own or could makeshift.

Research example of the "flowerpot" hat crown shape Ms. Kennedy wanted.
No joke, they don't call that shape a flowerpot for nothing!

$3 terra cotta flowerpot of the proper scale, getting sealed with polyurethane.

First i blocked an old hat crown onto it, to look at with our desired brim block.
(Read about how I made this brim block from esparterie here.)

First stab at blocking the first crown on the flowerpot...

It worked! Look what a cute conic-section crown it produced!

My assistant, first year grad Leah Pelz, blocked the remaining three hats.
Here they are in various stages of processing.

I'll stop there for now, because we're about to start tech on the show, but a second post is yet to come to show you the four different means of trimming these hats out!

Vivienne Benesch on "In the Next Room"

2011-09-16T10:45:00.000-04:00

Its title is titillating. Its subject matter, unusual. So what exactly is going on with In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), the Playmakers' first mainstage production of the season?

"It's a combination of sex farce and a Chekhov play with a little bit of Ibsen," says director Vivienne Benesch. "But from a female voice."

Vivienne Benesch

Ms. Benesch, an actress and director who also serves as the artistic director of the Chautauqua Theater Company in New York, calls the show "one of the funniest and most moving contemporary plays which deals with contemporary issues, many of which continue to go unspoken today." She explains that though the show is set in the 1880s, she hopes that audiences will "laugh and recognize themselves in both the humor and the struggles of the characters."

"It's about human connection," she says of the show's theme. "It doesn't matter how much electricity you have in technological form if you don't have that connection in human form."

In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) runs from September 21 to October 9, 2011. Click here for more details.

The Design of "A Number"

2011-09-09T10:19:00.002-04:00

What was the inspiration for the haunting set design for A Number, the first PRC² production of the season? Costume and set designer Jan Chambers reveals that her design process began upon discovering the backstory actor Ray Dooley created for his character.

After learning that Dooley decided that his character's emotional problems arose from a traumatic experience in Vietnam, Chambers happened to encounter a painting that she said spoke to her of the character's "haunted stated of mind."

"The resemblance to Ray is uncanny, and the painting emotionally cemented his character for both of us," Chambers said. "The play, of course, takes place some 35-40 years after that moment, but his past and present state of mind definitely played a part in the design of the space - a small, confined, claustropobic world where something massive is slowly closing in."

Josh Barrett and Ray Dooley in A Number by Caryl Churchill.
(Photo by Andrea Akin.)

Chambers incorporated that tension into the space. She said of her design, "Skewing the angles of the room and pulling the space into the audience's lap further helped create a visceral environment that played as a counterpoint to the measured and suppressed dialogue of denial and avoidance."

A Number is now playing through Sunday, September 11. Click here for more details.

Some (fun) historical context for "In the Next Room"

2011-09-05T09:43:00.001-04:00

Here's a little historical background on the vibrator, to get you in the mood for our upcoming production of In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)...

1913 ad for White Cross vibrator

A vibrator for every home!

As electricity became an in-home convenience, the vibrator became the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified and available for retail sale, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster.*

That's the category they were placed in: domestic appliance.

They had many suggested uses, none sexual. The White Cross Electric Vibrator (photo above) was marketed as a tool to cure "Acne, Alopecia, Asthma, Bladder, Bust Development, Change of Life, Cold, Colic, Constipation, Cramps, Deafness, Diabetes, Gout, Obesity" and more.

Can you imagine opening the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalog and seeing a full-page ad for a vibrator?

It clearly illustrates the different context for use in the early 1900's, as you can learn more about in our upcoming production of In the Next Room (or the vibrator play)!

* Want to learn more? Check out The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel Maines for the full story.

50th Anniversary Festivities in Jackson, MS

2011-05-23T09:43:00.000-04:00

The Freedom Riders are returning to Jackson, MS. This week, people from all over the country will descend upon Jackson to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Rides of 1961. Playwright/Director/Actor Mike Wiley will bring their story to PlayMakers this Fall in the professional World Premiere of The Parchman Hour: Songs and Stories of the '61 Freedom Riders.

Tar and Feathers and BIG RIVER!

2011-04-13T12:08:00.003-04:00

A new "behind the scenes" video! See Costume Designer Bill Black and Crafts Artisan Rachel Pollock give an inside look at the famous "tar and feathering" scene in Big River.

Video by Braxton Hood.

Big River runs April 6 - 24, 2011. Explore the show here.

Behind the Scenes of BIG RIVER

2011-03-31T11:56:00.001-04:00

Check out this exclusive behind-the-scenes look at
Big River, our first musical in over a decade!

Big River runs April 6 - 24, 2011. Learn more here.

The Sound of BIG RIVER

2011-03-28T11:44:00.000-04:00

Curious about how a Sound Designer approaches a musical? Watch the video below to see our resident sound designer Ryan Gastelum give some insight into the challenges of working on PlayMakers' first musical in over a decade, and what it's like to work with The Red Clay Ramblers!

Click here to learn more about our upcoming production of
Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Announcing our 2011/2012 Season!

2011-03-18T17:12:00.002-04:00

We're thrilled to announce our terrific 2011/2012 season! Watch the video below to see Producing Artistic Director Joseph Haj give an overview of each of next year's plays.

Mainstage Season:

In The Next Room
(or the vibrator play)
by Sarah Ruhl
September 21 - October 9, 2011

The Parchman Hour
written and directed by Mike Wiley
October 26 - November 13, 2011

TBA
November 30 - December 18, 2011
An exciting production to be announced soon. Are you on our email list? That's the very best way to stay up to date on production announcements, special events, and discounts. Click Here to sign up!

The Making of a King
Henry IV & Henry V
by William Shakespeare
in rotating repertory
January 28 - March 4, 2012

Noises Off
by Michael Frayn
April 4 - 22, 2012

PRC² Season

A Number
by Caryl Churchill
September 7 - 11, 2011

TBA
January 11 - 15, 2012

Penelope
written and performed by Ellen McLaughlin
music composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider
April 25 - 29, 2012

Glimpses of BIG RIVER costumes

2011-03-10T10:12:00.008-05:00

by Rachel Pollock

Our final show of the season, Hauptman and Miller's musical Big River, is in full swing in the costume shop at PlayMakers, and though I don't have any completed projects to talk about yet, I do have some glimpses behind-the-scenes of things we're working on...

Shoes await rubberizing in the crafts facility.

Freshly-begrimed raffia for the Royal Nonesuch dries in the dye shop.

The Duke's shirt being dyed the perfect shade of yellow in our vat.

Tar-and-feather samples for The Duke.

Jo Harper's hat on the electric hat stretcher.

Tom Sawyer's spiral straw braid hat is almost complete!

Get out the vote!

2011-02-23T16:11:00.001-05:00

Please forgive us as we indulge in shameless self-promotion for a moment...

It's time for the Independent Weekly's "Best of the Triangle" Awards! There are two categories in particular that we'd like to direct you towards: "Best Live Theater Venue" and "Best Live Theater Company." We're both!

The Triangle has some great theater so we understand it could be a tricky decision, but we hope you'll vote for PlayMakers! To help you decide, why don't you take a little look back at our 2010/11 MainStage season with us...

As You Like It
by William Shakespeare

"Bubbling with wit, heart and sass"
- Classical Voice of North Carolina

Fences
by August Wilson

"Poignant spectacle not to be missed"
- The Daily Tar Heel

Shipwrecked!
An Entertainment
by David Margulies

"In short, it's magic!"
- Triangle Arts & Entertainment

Angels in America
by Tony Kushner

"A play everyone should see... brilliant and riveting"
- The News & Observer

Not bad, right?

Ready to vote? Click here to head over to IndyWeek.com to cast your vote now!

Photos by Jon Gardiner.

Chairs in Heaven

2011-02-17T10:02:00.000-05:00

Where do angels sit? Set designer Narelle Sissons was responsible for answering that question for Angels in America, and what she came up with is pretty cool.

Narelle's research for this piece began with the idea of a winged chair...

...which became more specific with a detailed look for the wings...

...then the final piece was crafted by our (incredibly talented) props artisans...

...and it looks great!

Here is another of the chairs on stage during one of the final scenes of the play. Where are they, you ask? I guess you'll just have to come see Part 2 to find out!

ANGELS IN AMERICA Video Trailer!

2011-02-07T13:35:00.000-05:00

So what do you think? Does it make you want to come see the show?

Sketching out a costume design

2011-02-03T10:17:00.002-05:00

With Angels in America in previews this week, now's a great time to take a closer look at the extensive preparation put into this epic two-part production. Let's start with the costumes!

Check out these early research boards that Costume Designer Jan Chambers created for the character of Belize, played by actor Avery Glymph. Each frame includes a selection of images pulled to give an idea of style and color, plus a hand sketch that brings it all together.

You can explore all of Jan Chambers' research images and sketches for Angels in America on her Flickr page here. And, now that performances have started, you can see it all put together on stage!

The AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed at PlayMakers!

2011-01-27T09:37:00.002-05:00

Four 12’ x 12’ panels of The AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed in the PlayMakers lobby throughout the run of Angels in America, including 2 early pieces in memory of Roy Cohn.

Established in 1987, The NAMES Project Foundation – the international caretaker of The Quilt -- works to preserve, care for and use The AIDS Memorial Quilt to foster healing, advance social justice and inspire action. The Quilt began in San Francisco more than 20 years ago with a single 3 x 6 foot panel and today this epic tapestry of hope and love includes more than 47,000 panels. These panels have come from every state in the nation and have been created by friends, lovers and family members in an attempt to transform loss and heartbreak into hope and healing.

To see the panels, just stop by the Playmakers lobby anytime between February 2 and March 6. And while you're there, why not check out a performance of Angels in America?

Here are the four panels that will be on display:
(Click the image to see a larger version)

Learn more about the display here.

Making angels

2011-01-24T11:24:00.002-05:00

Our scenic artists and carpenters are hard at work this week building the world for Angels in America. Check out this backstage photo of the Bethesda Angel in construction.

The original version of this angel stands on the Bethesda Fountain in New York City's Central Park, one of the many locations included in Angels in America.

You may also recognize this angel from the show art.

Hope you can come see her in person!

Kimonos for Angels

2011-01-19T09:15:00.001-05:00

by Rachel Pollock

In my previous post, i wrote about the ombre dye processes for the tunics and loose pants worn by the Angels of the Principalities in our forthcoming repertory of Angels in America: Parts 1 & 2 (the Principalities appear only in Part 2). And, ombre is nice and all, and a lovely effect, but not really anything super challenging when it comes to surface design on fabrics. Executing specific imagery is when things get really interesting, i find.

Now for the really cool part: their kimono over-robes!

If you had a chance to page through Costume Designer Jan Chambers' photoset for the Angel Robes, you saw a lot of cool influences, but the standout of which was likely the ornate "Symphony of Light" landscape kimonos of textile artist Itchiku Kubota. In our conferences with her, Jan was particularly interested in the idea of the robes of the angels evoking Kubota's work, but utilizing collaged imagery evocative of each Principality--Oceania, Africanii, Europa, Antarctica, Australia, America, and Asiatica.

Jan collected a folder of landscape images from which to create the artwork for the robes, then worked them into watercolorey collages using image editing software--Photoshop and Illustrator. She then made another set of images to discuss with Director Brendan Fox, to show what the finished kimono would look like: Angel Robe Tests.

But, how to get these images onto the fabric for the robes themselves?

Obviously in an ideal world, as the crafts artisan and dyer, I and a team of talented assistants would hand-paint the robes in the yuzen technique, creating masterful works of art. Of course, that would be extremely time-consuming and difficult; you can read about Kubota's process here--each kimono took him a year, and he was a master of the art! Obviously we needed another solution to realize Jan's inspiration, so we turned to the local textile technology and research organization [TC]2 (TC-squared) and their InkDrop printing department.

Technically, this took the project out of my realm entirely and it became a matter of coordination between design, research, development, and management, worked out collaboratively with Jan, Costume Director Judy Adamson, and Adam M. Dill, Judy's assistant and PRC's costume shop manager. It's been an amazing process so far, and fascinating to witness.

InkDrop custom-prints small batches of fabrics with digital image files, much like the services of a company like Spoonflower. Adam explained the project to InkDrop consultant Lujuanna Pagan and hashed out a projected calendar and budget--when the art needed to be finished in order for the silk to be printed and delivered in time for Judy's team to cut and stitch it together in time to have the garments ready for tech of that scene. Judy worked out the size of the pattern pieces needed for each kimono and gave the dimensions to Jan, who split up her artwork into sections of the proper size.

Judy and Adam and I printed the artwork onto paper at half-scale using PRC's plotter, in order to lay out a test-version of the kimono before InkDrop printed the fabrics. In this way, we could double-check that the art would match up across seams.

Lujuanna sent us this test-run of swatches of each of Jan's digital paintings, so she could approve the colors on the fabric before printing the multiple yards' worth.

Detail view of Africanii, showing some of the art and the color tests along the edge. This is the section i used as a match-swatch when ombre-dyeing the accompanying garment blanks.

Two of the kimono lengths laid out on the tables in the costume shop for Jan and Brendon to survey before cutting and stitching commenced...

So, that's where things stand right now with those pieces. Fascinating! Now Judy and her first hand Claire Fleming will assemble them, and we'll check them out onstage once we get into tech. I promise to share photos of the finished garments after photo call. For now though, i really want to find a copy of Dale Carolyn Gluckman's The Kimono as Art, which depicts many of Kubota's original works in detail.

What do Angels wear?

2011-01-13T10:00:00.003-05:00

by Rachel Pollock

At PlayMakers, we're well into production on Tony Kushner's epic two-part Angels in America, which we're running in repertory soon. I've got a ton of cool projects to share, the first of which being the costumes we're creating for the Angels of the Principalities, which appear in a convocation scene in Perestroika, Part 2.

Costume Designer Jan Chambers and Director Brendan Fox have a photoset of inspiration images that you can page through on flickr, to see some of the artwork that has informed the Angels' attire. Angel Robes photoset - This includes haute couture runway images and photoshoots, garment research, and textile art including the landscape kimonos of Itchiku Kubota.

This is the design by Jan Chambers of how the Angels will be dressed. You can see from the design collage that they will each be clad in a base costume of a loose tunic and pants, with an ornate kimono robe worn over top. We are making the kimonos (which will be the topic of a second post to come), but we decided to purchase dyeable pre-made garments for the tunics and pants. We bought seven of these rayon poncho-tunics and these loose pants from Dharma Trading Company, a vendor that creates a huge line of garments from dyeable fiber-content fabrics.

Though not an ideal dye, i wound up using RIT for the ombre effects because it's fast, familiar, and we had the color range in stock. In an ideal world where i had the time for the testing and processing, and the budget for the dyestock, i'd love to have done these in fiber reactives. But, I have to go with what will achieve the effect desired in the time required with the budget available, so RIT it was! C'est la theatre!

The robes will be quite colorful, and every Principality has a different robe. The tunics match them in a watercolor-esque wash of dyes. Jan picked out a range of Pantone colors that should be incorporated into each effect, pulled from the palette from each Angel's robe art. The ombre (which means the gradation from one color to another, or from one lighter value to a darker one, down the length of a garment) will go from top to bottom on each garment, so the progression from color to color that happens to a tunic must happen the same way to the pants.

Because there were so many colors and i needed to process these as quickly as possible, i did them in batches. I often had up to eight pots of dyestuff going at once!

Our two dye vats plus some pots on the dyeroom range...

...plus some more colors cooking on portable eyes set up around the facility! To achieve an ombre, you selectively dye the garment(s) in dipped washes, layering colors over one another like this:

Left: floral pastel washes for the Principality of Europa's garments.
Right: desert sunset colors for the Principality of America.

Those are hanging to dry after a rinse cycle, on our yardage hoist over the triple-sink. This is one of three batches of them that i did, all similar but in different color-combinations. The Europa garments are a three-color ombre--pink to peach to violet--and the America ones are grey to blue to brown.

Coincidentally, i'm teaching dye class this spring, so i've just overhauled my dye shop in preparation for sharing it with six students, all of whom will be novice dyers unfamiliar at first with the space. (That would be why i needed to push these dyed garments through the shop quickly over the university's winter break, before the course begins!)

This is the most exciting part:

Reorganized dyestuff shelving!
(Note spraybox and dedicated dye microwave, not for heating up lunches!) This is one of two shelving units i have for supplies and equipment, and with the aid of volunteer crafts assistant Rae Cauthen, we completely overhauled its organization to be much more intuitive and space-efficient. Because RIT dyes are the simplest to work with and the most common dyestuff stocked in on-site theatrical dyeshops, the students do their first project with them, so RIT accessibility and organization was our first priority. This also helped me out in efficiently processing these Principality garment ombres.

Check out our chromatically-arranged shelves:

RIT dye organization!

Design Comes to Life

2010-12-06T15:00:00.000-05:00

by Rachel Pollock

My mainstage design debut for PlayMakers Repertory Company, Shipwrecked!, is currently running this month. We had the final dress and photo call Tuesday night so some of the topics I wanted to write about that required a stage shot to fully illustrate are now up for posting.

First: customized vest back fabric for Louis de Rougemont!

At the top of the show, Louis enters in a high-button suit with a vest and ascot, like this:

Scott Ripley as Louis de Rougemont

We purchased his jacket and trousers, but the vest was patterned by draper Shanna I. Parks and constructed by first hand Samantha Coles Greaves. When shopping the fabrics, I found the vest front fabric quickly, but was a bit stumped on the back. Vests of the period typically have fine linen or polished cotton backs, but I wasn't finding anything locally that was appropriate. I didn't have time to get it shopped in NYC, but I did travel to some of the regional fabric treasure-troves.

I was specifically looking for a stripe, either coordinating or in a color range which could be dyed to coordinate. The play is performed on a particularly long thrust stage, which means that at any given time, a third of the audience is probably looking at an actor's back, and Louis pretty much carries this play. He's never offstage, and spends a fair amount of time without his jacket on--I didn't want people looking at a big plain flat expanse of solid color on the vest back. The concept of the costume designs is heavily dependent upon bold pattern.

At the Fabric Center of Walkertown NC (a strange warehouse-style store of mill ends, about an hour's drive from Chapel Hill), I found several striped linen and cotton shirtings, tickings, and other options. They were so cheap I bought enough of each to do the vest, and we set to experimenting.

First, Crafts Artisan and second year grad student Claire Fleming did some dye swatches, testing 2" x 3" swatches to see how they would change appearance when overdyed into the range of Louis's suiting and vest front fabrics. Several remained good contenders, but none retained the bold stripes I'd been hoping for. I realized it was something I was going to have to make happen myself.

First, I again turned to Spoonflower. I thought, perhaps having a striped fabric custom-printed would be the answer to my problem! They offer an organic cotton sateen that was a good weight and hand for the vest back, so I did a few textile designs and ordered swatches.

In the play, Louis recites Shakespeare a couple of times, once most prominently a speech of Prospero's from The Tempest, particularly apt as some of its themes dovetail quite closely with his own. In addition to standard stripes, I did one design in which the stripes were created with the text of Prospero's famous "We are such stuff as dreams are made on" speech. As soon as that idea hit me, I fell in love with it. I knew that I had to find a way to make Louis' vest back from "Tempest stripes," because, how excellent is that? That he'd play the show literally wearing Prospero's words upon his back? My digitally-rendered stripe design is viewable on Spoonflower at this link here.

These are the kind of little elements of a design that I LOVE putting in, whether anyone in the show consciously sees them or not. I know the actors can read them at least, if no one else can, and that's frankly enough--if everyone else only sees stripes, that's what I wanted them to see anyhow. And, some audience members will read this post and know the deeper significance of the stripes, and that too is excellent.

There are a couple of other specific instances of this that I can point out with the released press pictures, as well. For example:

Aborigines Lauren Klingman, Kelsey Didion, and Josh Tobin

Earlier in the script, Josh Tobin plays a pearl diver on Louis' seafaring expedition who is attacked and killed by a giant octopus. (Seriously, a giant tentacle comes out of the center vom and drags him away!) So, when deciding what pattern to paint upon his aborigine mask, i decided to go with an abstract tentacle motif.

Jimmy Kieffer as Gunda

In this scene, Jimmy Kieffer wears a feathered crown as Gunda, the leader of the aborigines. See that wavy black trim around the band, kind of like black waves? Later the play, Jimmy also plays Queen Victoria, and that black wave trim is used excessively all over her bodice and bustle train. Earlier, he was a pedestrian in 1869 London with a boutonniere on his frock coat lapel that featured two of those orange-tipped crown feathers.

I just really like the idea that graphical elements representing events and motifs of the play (waves, tentacles, feathers, etc.) exist to draw parallels between characters, actors, and to contribute to a cohesive whole. No one may consciously see them, analyze them and register what they mean, but they're there.

But, back to vest fabric stripes, eh?

The trouble I keep running up against--on this show and on others--with digital printing technology is that it is too unpredictable still in delivery turnaround to work with the regional theatre production schedule. Printers list a delivery window in which you will receive your stuff and when you get it in the early end of that window, it's great, but in this case, my swatch didn't arrive until a week later, and by that time we had to have moved on to layout and cutting. We'll make it work some day, either for a show where we have enough advance planning to work it out, or the technology's popularity and turnaround will catch up to our production schedule. Just not this time.

What I wound up doing to achieve my desired effect was taking the threadmarked vest back pieces and using fabric markers to write the text out in a predetermined stripe pattern. Here it is in process:

Vest front fabric at rear left, stripe sample swatch, and the piece mid-inscription.

Here's what it says:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And—like the baseless fabric of this vision —
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Opening night: Saturday! Hopefully i'll have time to write about how we dyed the ocean before then. :D

Shipwrecked! in Pictures

2010-12-02T11:41:00.001-05:00

Previews for Shipwrecked! have begun and Opening Night is only 2 days away! Here's a sneak peek at the production through photos. Shipwrecked! is on stage now through December 19 and is great fun for all ages. In the words of Louis de Rougemont... "Welcome to this temple of the imagination. This hallowed hall where stories are told."

Scott Ripley as Louis de Rougemont

Dee Dee Batteast & Jimmy Kieffer as Players

Scott Ripley as Louis & Derrick Ledbetter as a Player/Bruno the Dog

Scott Ripley as Louis de Rougemont

Jimmy Kieffer & Derrick Ledbetter as Players

Kelsey Didion, Lauren Klingman & Josh Tobin as Ensemble/Foley Artists

Derrick Ledbetter as Player & Scott Ripley as Louis

Scott Ripley & Cast

Kelsey Didion, Lauren Klingman & Josh Tobin as Ensemble

Dee Dee Batteast as a Player & Scott Ripley as Louis

Cast of Shipwrecked!

Jimmy Kieffer as a Player

Dee Dee Batteast as a Player & Scott Ripley as Louis

Cast of Shipwrecked!

Scott Ripley as Louis & Jimmy Kieffer as a Player

Scott Ripley as Louis, Jimmy Kieffer, Derrick Ledbetter & Dee Dee Batteast as Players

All photos by Jon Gardiner

SHIPTECHED!

2010-12-01T12:56:00.002-05:00

by director Tom Quaintance

It's about 1:00am - I'm sitting in the Paul Green Theatre after we just wrapped up our weekend of "ten out of twelve" tech rehearsals. We go from noon to midnight with a dinner break each night from 5:00-7:00. Long days. A common term to describe this time is "tech hell" - but it is my favorite part of rehearsals. An army of amazing designers, talented technicians and phenomenal artisans are putting together the complex technical elements of the show. I can't speak to how well the show is directed, but it is designed beautifully.

This is a particularly exciting show to tech. SHIPWRECKED is chokerblock full of theatrical challenges. We tell a story that ranges across decades and continents, from England to the Coral Sea. The show is a tight 90 minutes, but it feels like we packed the tech of a much longer show into the confines of this story. I love the old school theatre storytelling done with technical virtuosity; the shadow puppets, the Foley artists upstage creating the ambient sound effects of the show, the actors creating a storm by flinging their bodies across the stage, the list goes on and on.

This play could be done with three actors, a chair and a box of paper clips... this is not that production. Donald Margulies, in his afterword of the play, says of the story of Louis de Rougemont: "In it I saw the potential for a purely theatrical play about the power of the imagination." This production revels in that idea of pure theatricality. We demand much of both the imagination of the audience and our own imagination as artists. There is no conceit here that we are only going to tell this story using things Louis could have brought with him from the 19th century, or from a single box we drag on stage. We are celebrating our storytelling power as theatre artists - and tech is where we get to see it all come together.

I can't wait for previews to start. We've thus far been rehearsing without one of our most important characters. Finally, on Wednesday, the audience arrives.

The cast of Shipwrecked! in the rehearsal hall before tech

Director Tom Quaintance and cast members Jimmy Kieffer, Derek Ledbetter, Scott Ripley and Dee Dee Batteast

Stage Manager Sarah Smiley with Foley artists Josh Tobin, Lauren Klingman and Kelsey Didion

Some of the Foley instruments used on stage to provide the show's sound effects

The Aborigines of Shipwrecked!

2010-11-29T14:27:00.000-05:00

I finally have all the images for a post I've been itching to write for weeks: aborigine masks for Shipwrecked!

In the play, the main character Louis de Rougemont at one point meets an initially-hostile tribe of aborigines. Because all the actors play many roles, they needed to be able to "become" aborigines immediately by taking up some simple prop or costume cue and creating the rest of the character through physicality. We settled on a theatrical version of actual aborigine masks.

An image of several aboriginal masks. I was drawn to the dot-paint technique which connects them to their textile designs as well, as you may recall from the batik mentioned previously.

This is a graphic i made to talk with Tom Quaintance, the director, about the scale of the masks. How big did we want to make them? The actual masks are the scale of option two, and that's how big we decided we should make ours as well.

A maquette made from a cardboard fabric-bolt tube to experiment with shape. I wanted to see whether a cylindric section would work for our basic mask structure, and decided from this maquette that yes, it would.

I scaled it up in oaktag and cut out this mockup, modeled here by second-year graduate student and crafts assistant Samantha Coles Greaves.

Here you see a paint sample on the maquette, next to a section of the actual size oaktag pattern.

First-year grad student and design assistant Adrienne Corral tests paint samples and dot-making techniques on sections of black foamcore. These helped me to decide what types of paints we should use and how we could best make the dot pattern.

We cut the basic mask shapes from a giant cardboard tube product sold for the purposes of making concrete pylons and bollards. These are about $8 each at hardware stores and each one made two mask foundations.

I suspected we might need a wire reinforcement to help with the stability of the lower portion of the mask, where it narrows and will ride at the actors' chest level. I figured that the mask might take some strain there when worn depending on the physical moves of the actors--bending, squatting, etc. Here you see a heavy gauge wire (straightened coathangers, really) ready for securing to the mask's lower edge.

Adrienne sews the wire on with a wide bias casing, much in the same way you might wire the edge of a buckram hat brim. She's using our industrial walking foot machine, though, which can stitch through 1/4" thick cardboard tube, among other things!

Next i added features--a nose from carved styrofoam, narrow cord for eyebrows, and built up the surface over them with layers of papier mache.

Adrienne coats the insides of the masks with layers of Sculpt-or-Coat.

The masks were then painted black with plain black acrylic paint.

What makes the best dots? Q-Tips! Easy, fast, throw them away when you're done. Here i'm painting patterns onto one of the masks.

There they are, three aborigine masks for our show! I love them!

Post by Costume Designer Rachel Pollock

Join us tomorrow for scenes from the rehearsal hall and later in the week... production photos!

Batik Part 2

2010-11-17T08:00:00.014-05:00

The other day, I wrote about the first half of this story, namely, how the creative team and I came to the decision of what fabric pattern we were going to create, and how we were going to create it.

I left off with the choice of which sample fabric was going to be the one used in the show between two different base fabrics which had been batiked and two different digitally-printed fabrics from Spoonflower. I knew that the one to go with was the batik on a muslin ground, so here's what happened next...

Samantha considers the research and the sample in planning pattern layout.

First, we needed to scale up the frame on which the batik would happen. Crafts Artisan and second-year graduate student Samantha Coles Greaves measured our steel printing table and got some 2x4s cut to fit its perimeter for maximum surface area of the design. Then with the help of her assistant Adrienne Corral, they bolted the frame together, stretched a length of muslin and secured it to the frame with staple guns.

The muslin I purchase was PFD, which stands for "Prepared For Dyeing." This means it has no sizing or starch or other chemicals or finishes on the fabric which would impede the ability of the fibers to absorb dye. Fabrics which aren't sold as PFD will have sizes and starches and such in them and need to be laundered--sometimes multiple times--to remove those before they will dye well.

And, our muslin was larger than our frame by enough width that Samantha and Adrienne could staple it directly to the frame. If it were smaller or a delicate fabric or if we needed the dye treatment to go all the way to the edges, we'd have had to baste strips of framing fabric around it and use those to attach it to the frame.

We decided to use soy wax since it can be removed much easier than other kinds of batik wax--scrape off the excess then wash it in hot water cycles a few times, as opposed to boiling and skimming or ironing for days. We have a dedicated dyeshop microwave and melted the wax flakes (which you can buy in the candlemaking section at craft stores) in microwave safe containers. The wax dots are applied with a chubby round bristled brush.

Samantha Greaves applies the wax to the pristine muslin.

First, Samantha applied wax just to the white-dot portions of the design.

Red and brown fiber-reactive cold-process dye was applied to the areas
of the fabric where brown and red dots would go.

The full frame view at this stage of the process.

The frame and fabric got covered in plastic and left to sit overnight.

These kinds of dyes (Procion-type dyes) yield vibrant, dark colors on cotton fabrics, react with the fiber at room temperature, and are extremely washfast. They are safe to use (with nitrile gloves) in liquid form, and process fairly easily. In mixing them from dry form though, they are dangerous as particulates, being very easily airborne and shouldn't be inhaled. Samantha mixed ours into solution using an enclosed mixing box and particulate respiratory protection in our well-ventilated dye facility. If you use these dyes, it's safest to mix them into solution under these kind of circumstances (as opposed to, say, mixing them out in the open in a tiny room with your bare hands and sniffing around in the container of dry dyestuff or something).

The dyes need time to process--the longer the process time, the brighter the color yield if you have mixed your recipe right--and they need a moist environment in which to do it. Hence, the covering of the frame with plastic overnight. The dye facility has three huge (like 4' x 6') windows which face the setting sun, so Samantha and Adrienne drew the blinds as well to minimize evaporation from sun exposure/heat.

Adrienne and Samantha apply the next round of wax dots to the brown and red areas.

At this point, the process was repeated--mix the black dye solution safely, apply it to the wax dotted fabric, cover with plastic and wait overnight. Then the wax was scraped, the fabric washed several times in hot cycles and it was the moment of truth: how did it turn out?

My hand against the pattern for scale.
Beautiful!!

Design rendering for how the fabrics will be worn by the Players.

I think I mentioned previously that this show has three Players who perform a wide range of roles, changing character sometimes instantly and in full view of the audience. So, the feasibility of elaborate costume changes is minimal--they will have base costumes in neutral colors, plain trousers and tops that can be utilized to create character themselves (rolled up pant cuffs for sailors, for example, rolled shirt-sleeves for a barkeep) and added-on pieces to augment that. A flat cap for a newsboy, an apron for a mother cooking breakfast, etc. So, this rendering illustrates the fabric Samantha and Adrienne have made and how it is worn by the actors to "become" the characters of Yamba and her father Gunda. (Yamba has a baby brother, Bobo, who will be a doll dressed in the same fabric.)

I should note that, we are able to do this kind of work because we have such timely and clear communication among our design team, and because we started early enough with everything I wrote about yesterday to be at a point now that Samantha and Adrienne and I can spend three afternoons batiking one length of fabric. This kind of element of a show would not be possible if it were something the design team came up with two days before opening night, just because of the combination of active work time and passive dye-processing time.

This is something we talk about in all of my crafts classes--that there's almost nothing a skilled artisan can't do with the right amount of time, resources and skill. I teach the skills, and I expose them to and educate them about the resources and media. I can't, however, teach them how to bend time--that's the one constant factor which no theatre company can surmount if they fall short. So, learning about time-management, labor planning and process planning like this project has demonstrated is an invaluable part of our graduate program and our work as artists and artisans and professionals.

I'm so proud of my students on this project, in which I pretty much had to step away from my "usual" role as crafts artisan, function in the role of the designer and consultant and just let them run with it. They did such beautiful work, and I can't wait to see this fabric onstage, wrapped around our excellent cast members and flying as a sail above the ship they'll build every night, right there on our stage.

–Rachel E. Pollock, Shipwrecked! Costume Designer

Batik Part 1

2010-11-15T15:22:00.003-05:00

I'm designing costumes for PlayMakers Repertory Company's upcoming production of Donald Margulies' Shipwrecked! An Entertainment. This play affords a huge range of design challenges, not just within specific departments but collaboratively among all the elements of production.

One project we've already begun work on is the generation of some batik fabric yardage for the characters of Yamba, Gunda and Bobo, a family of aborigines who are shipwrecked on the same island as the play's protagonist, Louis de Rougemont. These characters will be wearing lengths of fabric as wrapped/tied costume items (Yamba with a sarong-style wrap and her old father, Gunda, with a shawl-style wrap), which they later remove to create sails for a ship they build onstage.

So, the look of these fabrics is extremely important, not only to myself as the costume designer, but also to the set designer (Robin Vest), who'll be incorporating them as "ship sails", and obviously to the director, Tom Quaintance, who'll be seeing them and using them in multiple contexts.

I began the process by researching what indigenous Australian aborigine fabrics look like. If you Google "aboriginal fabrics," you'll get a good idea what the common graphical theme is - pattern creation using dots! Very pointillist, yet abstract. I discovered that a company called M&S Textiles issues a line of cotton fabrics with aboriginal art prints, and this online vendor has .jpgs of the whole line. I then found a local fabric store, Thimble Pleasures, which carried the M&S line, so i dropped by to check out the scale of the prints.

It was immediately clear that the scale was far too small for theatre--the dots in the commercially-available prints are around 1/8" to 1/4" in diameter--onstage, those would blend together in the eye of the audience, and create a very different visual than the scale I had initially envisioned, with the dots being more like the size of an adult fingerprint. I realized that we were likely going to need to create this fabric ourselves. Still, I shared the links of the M&S thumbnails with the production team so we could talk about pattern and color with concrete visuals. This is the print to which we all felt most drawn.

So, my next step was to investigate the possibilities for digitally-printed fabric. I consulted some colleagues at the NC State College of Textiles as to the current leaders in print-on-demand fabric. The cool thing about the companies utilizing this technology is that you can create a print design and choose from a whole range of fabrics on which it might be printed--everything from canvas to charmeuse, and a whole range of fibers. (One of our graduate students is having some charmeuse custom printed for her historical reproduction thesis project, which I can't wait to see the results of!)

I knew I needed a cotton with a fairly soft hand. I looked at some custom digitally printed samples from KarmaKraft, First2Print and Spoonflower, and decided to give Spoonflower's cotton lawn a shot.

Spoonflower does their printing locally, right up the road in Mebane, NC, and they got me their sample fabrics quicker than any other company I contacted. This is not at all a criticism of the speed or competency of the other companies--it's simply an example of how speed is often the primary factor in theatrical production. The fast turnaround of orders and processes is why Spoonflower became the option I chose. KarmaKraft is based in Raleigh and also quite close, but they conduct a lot of their printing in China and were out of their sample swatch sets when I inquired. However, they did send them and have a lot of great options, so it's likely that, should we need digitally printed fabrics for some future production, they will remain a good contender.

I then created two print designs using Photoshop:

Yamba One, in which the pattern is made from crisp-edged "polkadot" style dots
Yamba Two, in which the dots have more brushy, irregular edges

I suspected though, that there would be issues with these digitally-printed fabrics that would make them less than optimal for our stage purposes--namely, the "flatness" of the printed colors under stage lights, the opacity of the fabric (so, the front and back would be starkly different when the fabrics are "flown" onstage as flags and sails), and the gridlike regularity that tiling of a print design would create. As I was working on the digital designs, I realized that if we had the ability to spend more time on the creation of the art and the money to utilize a printing service that would afford a larger repeat for the design, perhaps digital printing would still be a great option. In this case though, I decided to see whether my crafts artisan, second year graduate student Samantha Coles Greaves, could generate a couple batik samples as well. I bought two types of fabric for potential in-house batiking at the local JoAnn Fabrics: a bolt of Egyptian cotton and a bolt of dyer's muslin. (I figured, even if we didn't use either of them at all on this show, those are great stock fabrics to have around a costume shop for mockups and other uses.) Samantha then created two samples of batik inspired by our chosen aboriginal print.

Samantha used a compass to create a guide for the large circle elements. The research image above right influenced her pattern generation.
In batik, you layer wax application with dye application to create patterns. This is the sample on muslin, stretched in an embroidery frame. I'll write a lot more about the technical steps in the batik process in Part Two.
Here's the Egyptian cotton sample, stretched on a small stretcher frame.
You can see in the images of the two samples the different dot shapes created by different applicators--Samantha made dots in a variety of ways, using a round sponge, a wine cork, a dauber, her gloved fingertip and a round-tipped bristle brush. I felt that the brush gave the best result in terms of yielding a dot pattern that was both organic and controlled. The sponge and cork were too uniform, and the fingertip and dauber were too messy. At this point in the process, I was convinced that the Egyptian cotton was going to be my choice--the colors looked great on it. Meanwhile, the swatches of Spoonflower fabric I ordered arrived in the mail! Samantha removed the wax and washed the samples, and it was time to compare... Wow, look at those four different fabrics! Let's break it down, what's what. They're all so different-looking! One in particular though was clearly the one for Shipwrecked... Here I am with the finished yardage!

I'll be writing a second part to this process in a day or two, documenting exactly how we went from a tiny 9" x 17" sample of batik, to the huge three-yard chunk you see in the above photo. For now though, I hope you've enjoyed reading about the first part of this journey, literally halfway around the textile world and back again!

–Rachel E. Pollock, Costume Designer

Fences Production Photos

2010-11-01T12:58:00.002-04:00

All photos by Jon Gardiner.

Charlie Robinson as Troy and Kathryn Hunter-Williams as Rose

Thomasi McDonald as Jim Bono and Charlie Robinson as Troy

Erik LaRay Harvey as Lyons and Kathryn Hunter-Williams as Rose

Charlie Robinson as Troy

Ray Anthony Thomas as Gabriel

Ray Anthony Thomas as Gabriel and Charlie Robinson as Troy

Charlie Robinson as Troy and Kathryn Hunter-Williams as Rose

Yaegel Welch as Cory

Charlie Robinson as Troy and Erik LaRay Harvey as Lyons

Ray Anthony Thomas as Gabriel, Kathryn Hunter-Williams as Rose and Erik LaRay Harvey as Lyons

Charlie Robinson as Troy, Yaegel Welch as Cory, Kathryn Hunter-Williams as Rose and Ray Anthony Thomas as Gabriel

Charlie Robinson as Troy

Charlie Robinson as Troy, Kathryn Hunter-Williams as Rose and Yaegel Welch as Cory

Yaegel Welch as Cory

Tania Smith as Raynell

Yaegel Welch as Cory and Tania Smith as Raynell

Erik Anthony Thomas as Gabriel

Behind the Scenes: Fences

2010-10-29T20:39:00.001-04:00

Fences opens Saturday October 30 in the Paul Green Theatre.

A Brand New Hat!

2010-10-26T13:19:00.000-04:00

At work, we're in tech for August Wilson's Fences and our costume designer, Helen Q. Huang, wanted a porkpie hat for the character of Lyons. Trouble is, we don't have a porkpie crown block in the correct size! However, that was not insurmountable.

Here's how my crafts assistant, first-year grad student Adrienne Corral, built up a crown block to create this great hat!

Research images that Helen and our director, Seret Scott, love.

If there were time, we could have purchased one, but there was not.

A floppy Dobbs fedora from stock, whose crown has lost its pinch.

Can we make this a porkpie? Yes.

Base block, a cloche block carved by

former technical production graduate Laura Merola ('09).

This block is slightly smaller than the actor's headsize.

First Adrienne built up the crown to a bit of a dome shape with oil clay.

Dome covered with foil.

Piping core that will form our porkpie ridge,

and foil tape that will help smooth our block surface.

Two rows of piping stack to form the ridge, and a sleeve

of thin Ethafoam helps smooth the outer line of the block.

The top of the block, ready for foil covering and blocking...

Adrienne uses a pullerdown from DeCou Studio to block the hat.

The blocked crown in our ventilation box being sized.

Finished hat, ready for stage!

The Making of As You Like It...

2010-09-29T14:28:00.000-04:00

Today's video is a peek behind-the-scenes, edited and produced by Braxton Hood. It includes interviews with Director Joseph Haj, Composer Mike Yionoulis, Scenic Designer Peter Ksander and Costume Designer Anne Kennedy.

Another hat-making pictorial for As You Like It

2010-09-27T11:06:00.001-04:00

Costume designer Anne Kennedy had seen several hats she loved for the character of Corrin--some in her research images, and some on actual people she saw in the street. Ultimately, what she wanted for this man (whose clothes are distressed, and he lives in the woods) was a battered tall-crowned homburg with essentially a cattleman's-crease crown shape.

This was quite a fun project to pull off!

Annie loved this hat!

Except, the crown was too low and the brim too wide.

First, i saturated the straw with water, stay-stitched around the base of the crown in two rows 1/2" apart, and cut the crown from the brim in between those rows of stay-stitching. The water makes the straw stitchable and cuttable without splintering/cracking, and the stay-stitching keeps the weave from fraying.

The straw hatbody on the left has a section of similar vent-weaving as our existing crown, right. I decided to harvest that section of the hatbody to insert and lift our hat's crown to the desired height.

Here's the hat with its new tall crown (the insert's intentionally raggedy edge adds to its "distressed" look), it's brim cut down to a 2 1/4" width, and a wire inserted. The alligator clips hold the wire and brim edge in place for sewing, kind of like pins help orient a seam in fabric.

Wow, there it is as a totally different hat!

-Rachel Pollock, Costume Crafts Artisan

Dress Rehearsal!

2010-09-22T14:21:00.000-04:00

The cast of As You Like It performed their final dress rehearsal last night! Previews begin tonight, the first time the cast performs in front of an audience. The production is beautiful and a lot of fun. Here's a peak...


David Adamson as Adam, Derrick Ledbetter as Orlando, KG Garcia as Oliver


Brett Bolton, Jeffrey Blair Cornell as Duke Frederick, John Dreher


Derrick Ledbetter as Orlando, Brett Bolton as Charles


Alice Whitley as Celia, Marianne Miller as Rosalind, Brett Bolton as Charles, Derrick Ledbetter as Orlando


Jeffrey Blair Cornell as Duke Senior, Scott Ripley as Jaques


Marianne Miller as Rosalind, Jimmy Kieffer as Touchstone, Alice Whitley as Celia

As You Like It, Forest of Arden

KG Garcia as Oliver, Jeffrey Blair Cornell as Duke Frederick

Forest of Arden

Marianne Miller as Rosalind, Alice Whitley as Celia

Jimmy Kieffer as Touchstone, Katja Hill as Audrey

Marianne Miller as Rosalind, Alice Whitley as Celia, Derrick Ledbetter as Orlando

James E. Brinkley as William, Jimmy Kieffer as Touchstone

Marianne Miller as Rosalind, Derrick Ledbetter as Orlando

Marianne Miller as Rosalind

Scenes from a Rehearsal Hall

2010-09-17T10:31:00.000-04:00

Today is the big day! As You Like It begins tech and moves into the Paul Green Theatre for the first time in the rehearsal process. To mark this special day, here are a few images from the rehearsal hall.


Scott Ripley's Jaques observes the antics of Jimmy Kieffer's Touchstone & Katja Hill's Audrey.

Director Joseph Haj works with Jimmy Kieffer & Katja Hill.

More Audrey & Touchstone


Traveling! (submitted by stage manager Sarah Smiley); Marianne Miller as Rosiland, Jimmy Kieffer as Touchstone and Alice Whitley as Celia.

Tug, the most popular staff member on the Nickleby blog, has resumed his post in the rehearsal hall and oversees everything.

A Brand New Hat

2010-09-13T07:00:00.003-04:00

At PlayMakers, we are well into production on our first mainstage show of the season, Shakespeare's As You Like It. Our costume designer, Anne Kennedy, found a hat that she loved for the character of Rosalind, but it was a completely unacceptable color. It fell to me to make a reproduction.

Here's how i did it!

This is the original period hat that Anne loved.
Too bad it's dusty pink; the costume is periwinkle blue.

This original is a blocked buckram form covered in sculpted felt foliage. We also wanted something softer and fresher.

I found these silk flowers in our flower stock,
which perfectly matched the Rosalind dress fabric!
Here they're pinned on the original hat for a visual,
to see if Anne liked them.

I didn't have a block of the correct shape to block the base, so i flat-patterned it with darts and a seam, and steamed it into the appropriate curvature.

My crafts assistant, undergraduate costume assistant Caroline Long, disassembled the pile of flowers into their constituent parts for application to the buckram foundation.

Here is the hat after it has been wired, mulled with icewool, covered with silk crepe de chine. I am arranging some blue lily petals across the back, tiled like the leaves on the original.

Here's the finished hat!

Pretty cute! Post by Rachel Pollock

Costumes - All in the Research

2010-09-09T07:00:00.001-04:00

Any costume designer will tell you great design starts with great research. Today we'll take a peek at As You Like costume designer Anne Kennedy's research as she began work on Shakespeare's most beloved comedy. These only serve as inspiration, not the final designs, however. Check back here in the coming days to see Anne's sketches and swatches for the finished products.

Ideas for Rosiland and Celia at court


More Rosiland and Celia

Possibilities for Duke Frederick

More ideas for Duke Frederick's men

People of the forest

Ideas for women of the court vs. women of the forest

Possibilities for Duke Senior

More ideas for Duke Senior & Lords

More Duke Senior

Beckett's Happy Days Opens Tonight!

2010-09-08T16:06:00.000-04:00

Today we're taking a detour from our Mainstage production to bring you these "hot-off-the-presses" photos from PRC2's Happy Days, which opens tonight. Longtime company member Julie Fishell portrays Winnie, one of the great female roles of the American theatre, while fellow company member Ray Dooley plays her husband Willie.

Happy Days is Samuel Beckett's absurdist comedy masterpiece - at times whimsical and fantastical, while at others poignant and moving. It's rumored that the Nobel Prize winning playwright wrote it in response to a friend's request that he "write a happy play." You'll want to see this one if you can!

Welcome Back To Page to Stage!

2010-08-30T07:00:00.017-04:00

Thanks for tuning back into the PlayMakers blog for another exciting season! This year we'll be covering all the shows in our Mainstage season, starting with Shakespeare's As You Like It. We're excited to kick off our 35th season with one of the Bard's most compelling and fully-imagined female characters - Rosalind - as she flees to the Forest of Arden, only to find her soul-mate and herself.

The above photo is Robert Walker Macbeth's painting of Rosalind, in disguise in the Forest of Arden

With posts highlighting costumes, scenic design, rehearsals and more, we'll take you behind the scenes once a week for a sneak peek. This week, we'll start with the artists who will be making the play - the cast list!

Duke Senior: Jeff Cornell*
Duke Frederick: Jeff Cornell*
Le Beau: Matt Garner
Charles: Brett Bolton
Touchstone: Jimmy Kieffer*
Oliver: Kahlil Gonzalez-Garcia
Orlando: Derrick Ledbetter*
Jaques: Scott Ripley*
Silvius: John Brummer
Rosalind: Marianne Miller*
Phoebe: Kelsey Didion
Celia: Alice Whitley
Audrey: Katja Hill
Corin: David Adamson*
William: Jeb Brinkley
Martext: David Adamson*
Dennis: Josh Tobin
Adam: David Adamson*
Amiens: Katie Paxton
Jaques de Boys: John Dreher
Duke Frederick and Duke Senior’s First Lord: John Dreher
Duke Frederick and Duke Senior’s Second Lord: Brett Bolton

Followers to Duke Senior: John Dreher, Josh Tobin, Matt Garner, Brett Bolton, Dee Dee Batteast, Lauren Klingman.

Followers to Duke Frederick: John Dreher, Brett Bolton

Director: Joseph Haj
Scenic Designer: Peter Ksander
Costume Designer: Anne Kennedy
Lighting Designer: Charlie Morrison
Sound Designer: Ryan Gastelum
Composer: Michael Yionoulis
Choreographer: Erin Dangler
Stage Manager: Sarah Smiley*
Assistant Director: Nelson Eusbio
Dramaturg: Adam Versenyi

*Indicates member of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the U.S.

Check back in the coming weeks for photos of these talented artists as they rehearse under the guidance of director Joseph Haj. We'll also have photos from the scene shop as they build the beautiful Forest of Arden and other locations. For now, here's a sneak peek, submitted by scenic artist Eric Starke.

Part II in Pictures

2009-11-30T10:43:00.009-05:00

Part II of Nicholas Nickleby had its first post-Opening performance yesterday afternoon, so it seems now would be a great time to post pictures from that half of the show.

Before we get into Part II, however, director Tom Quaintance sent me this first photo. He received it on Opening Night from Chinatown screenwriter, Robert Towne. It's nice to have so many people rooting for the success of this show!

Onto the production photos (all taken by Jon Gardiner).

Jeffrey Blair Cornell & Scott Ripley as The Cheerybles

The Crummles Company

Dede Corvinus & David Adamson

Lenore Field & David McClutchey in front, surrounded by cast,

all part of The Crummles Company

Jimmy Kieffer as Hawk and Marianne Miller as Kate Nickleby

David McClutchey & company

Dede Corvinus as Mrs. Crummles

Kahlil Gonzalez-Garcia, Julie Fishell and Derrick Ledbetter

Jeffrey Blair Cornell, Justin Adams and Scott Ripley

Nicholas meets The Cherrybles

Jason Powers as Smike and Justin Adams as Nicholas Nickleby

Scott Ripley as Squeers and The Crummles Company

Justin Adams and Derrick Ledbetter

Ray Dooley, Weston Blakesley & Scott Ripley

Composer and Sound Designer Sarah Pickett provides all the show's sound effects & music from her nest above the stage.

Sleepless Nights, Endless Day & No Place I'd Rather Be!

2009-11-24T12:45:00.008-05:00

For the first time since I started working on this blog, this post is totally from my point of view as a member of the administrative staff. It had always been my opinion that the more interesting stuff goes on in the shops, the rehearsal hall and on the stage, but after this week's Opening Day, it dawned on me that a very important aspect of this entire process has been absent from this blog – the extraordinary team of 13 that make up the PlayMakers Administrative staff: from box office, to house management, to company management to marketing & development, every single person rolled up their sleeves this weekend to pull off the biggest day in PlayMakers history.

While you know that we ran both parts of the play on Saturday, what you may not know is that we turned our lobby into a bistro, complete with tables chairs, candles and the whole nine yards, so that patrons who chose to do so, could enjoy a boxed dinner without ever leaving the building. For those who wanted something more substantial than a sandwich, we turned our rehearsal hall into a beautiful dining room, complete with chandeliers, red silk table cloths and gold-rimmed china, and offered a catered holiday dinner. The set-up for these dinners was handled by the PRC admin staff, led by Assistant Development Director Shane Hudson and Company Manager Jeff Stanley, Production Manager Michael Rolleri, technical graduate students, and work study students. Shane and Jeff actually coordinated all the day's events, and not to be outdone by the costume designers, created their own giant chart! It was up to them to coordinate not only these dinners but all the behind-the-scenes events.

Our lobby turned bistro.

Our rehearsal hall turned restaurant.

The patrons weren't the only ones in need of a meal on Saturday. The cast, crew and staff didn't have time to leave the building either. Shane & Jeff arranged for two rooms to be set-up – one for a cast and crew dinner and one for staff hospitality. These two rooms were run by Information Systems Specialist Carli Webb and myself. Carli, along with cast member (and Director of Education & Outreach) Jeff Meanza, spent Friday morning stuffing 35 chicken breasts for the cast dinner. She and I spent most of the day Saturday running between the kitchen (cooking the rest of the cast dinner) and the class rooms where these events were taking place. All around us were students and admin staffers setting-up tables, moving chairs, arranging flowers, helping caterers, plating food trays – absolutely constant activity.

Carli Webb & the cast dinner.

The cast refueling between shows.

Did I mention that in addition to all of this, there were our standard donor receptions in the Paul Green Gallery for not one, but all three intermissions? And as always the evening was topped off with our traditional Gala in the lobby. So not only did all these dinners have to be set-up, most of them had to be broken down during Act I (approx. 1 hour) of Part II, so the Gala could be set-up during Acts II & III. All in all it was roughly a fourteen hour day for the administrative staff – nothing to new to folks actually working on the show, of course. As the Gala got underway and we could all breathe a sigh of relief, (before washing more dishes) all were still smiling through the exhaustion. That was the moment when I realized "This is Why I Work Here." When Carli actually said it out loud, there was resounding agreement. We know it on the days when total cooperation by all is a must; when it's do-or-die; when everything is at stake; when our minds are as tired as our feet; we know that this really is a once in a lifetime experience and we're all extremely lucky to be part of it. It's a feeling of wow – look what we did in one day. What a truly gratifying experience!

Our Box Office staff managed to stay chipper all night! Assistant Manager Scott Cowart, Rob Fox and work study student D.J. Rogers.

Shane Hudson takes one last turn with a mop before calling it a night!

If you've got what it takes to Spend a Day at the Theatre, you've got one more opportunity. Saturday, December 19 both parts I & II will be performed back-to-back and we'll be transforming our lobby into a bistro again! I highly recommend it. It's quite a sense of accomplishment to make it to the finish line and the show, by all accounts is fantastic!

—Andrea Akin, Editor

Nicholas Nickleby Page to Stage

The Countdown to Opening Begins with Previews

2009-11-18T16:50:00.002-05:00

Tonight is our first preview for Part II and it would probably be helpful for those not familiar, to explain exactly what a preview is. How is it different from Opening? How is it different from other performances? Previews are a time-honored tradition, practiced in most professional theatres from Broadway to Pittsburgh to Chapel Hill. Preview performances are works in progress, the final stage of the rehearsal process. They give a company the opportunity to “test-drive” a production in front of a live audience, while still being able to rehearse the production during the day. Directors, designers and actors are honing the performance to a fine point during the day, and “trying it out” it on the evening audiences. Broadway productions can have anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks of previews before the official Opening. PlayMakers traditionally runs 3 preview performances and then the big Opening Night. Nicholas Nickleby, like all of our rep shows to date, has a slightly altered preview schedule to allow for two shows opening on the same day. Part I had its technical rehearsals(“tech”) two weekends ago, then previewed Wednesday-Friday. There were no performances this past Saturday and Sunday, to allow time in the theatre for Part II to tech. Today Part II will get its first run in front of a live audience!

Unlike previews, Opening Night is the “finished product”. The rehearsal process can run almost up until curtain time on Opening Night, but once it’s open – it’s done! Once a show is officially opened, the directors and designers move on and leave the show in the capable hands of the actors and stage managers. No more changes are made. The lights are set. The staging is complete. No more costume additions. No more new direction of any kind. The hardest part of the process – rehearsal – is over and the production is, at last, ready for its run. As actors get more and more comfortable in their roles and live with them longer, the show’s energy might change a bit and every performance is slightly different based on the audience, how the actors respond to them, etc. – which is what makes live theatre so extraordinary.

Most theatres take Opening Night as an opportunity to celebrate the company’s achievements. A PlayMakers Opening Night is always a festive event filled with subscribers, single ticket buyers and invited guests. This is our opportunity to thank our generous supporters and invite our peers to share in our excitement. The performance is followed by a Gala reception with great food and wine provided by a variety of local businesses. For Nicholas Nickleby, the food will be provided by Durham Catering Company and the wine by La Residence. Both Preview performances and Opening Nights are open to the public. If you would like to join us for any of these performances, check out our website for more information. Tickets are still available for all remaining performances, but our Opening Day double header is selling quickly, and typically sells out, so Hurry!

The world is our closet! Er, sort of.

2009-11-16T07:00:00.001-05:00

Much has been made of the sheer scale of costuming a production this size--if you've been following the blog you know that not only are we making many costumes in-house, but have also pulled a lot from our own stock, borrowed them from partner theatres and drama departments in the state university system, and rented them from theatres and rental houses all over the country, from New York to Milwaukee to Seattle.

For the costumes we're making, our designers have the most aesthetic control over how they will ultimately appear onstage--they have chosen the fabric and trims, indicated where they want seams to fall or how big sleeves will be, sometimes even picked a color for them to be dyed. These costumes are custom made to fit the performers' exact measurements by our highly-skilled drapers and tailors using couture techniques. We are all absolutely certain that they will be exactly what the designers and directors want them to be!

When we pull costumes from our own stock, we still have a fair amount of control over what they will look like. PlayMakers owns them, so if our designers want them dyed a new color, or beat up to look raggedy for a poor character, or the sleeves removed and remade in a different fabric, fine! We can do all of that (and, have). The alterations we make on our own pre-existing costumes can happen without a thought to how the costume might be irrevocably changing.

For the costumes we have borrowed or rented, though, that's a whole different animal. We don't own them, and what we can and cannot do to them is limited by the rental agreements we have with the companies who do. We cannot dye them or paint on them or age them to look more worn or ragged. Anything we remove from them (like trims or ruffles that our designers don't care for) must be reapplied before we return them. Even alterations to fit our performers are a dicey prospect; generally, if you let a costume out to be larger, that's ok, but if you take it in to be smaller, you need to restore it to its original size before returning it! That's more difficult than you might think, since that means no bulk in a taken-in seam can be cut away, and if you raise a hem by several inches to fit a shorter-statured actor, you have to hide all that extra fabric inside. In our Costume Production MFA program, we teach our students that the general rule-of-thumb with rental costumes is, you send it back the same or better than you received it. It's not just professional courtesy; it's also just good business--if you don't restore your rentals, your company is fined a restoration fee, or even asked to pay for its replacement if the costume is severely damaged while in your possession.

For me, as the show's milliner, this has meant i need to keep careful records tracking how all the hats we have borrowed might be changing for the production. Many of them are definitely going to go back in better condition than we received them. Hats are often stored in boxes and baskets by rental companies and women's hats in particular often arrive dented or a bit "squished." My assistant, Candy McClernan, and I have been steaming and resizing them to freshen them up and make them more crisp and new-looking, and putting in pretty linings and interior grosgrain ribbons. Most hats for stage don't get lined, usually due to a combination of not having enough time to do so, and because no audience member will see the inside--if you have to make a sacrifice when pressed for time, leaving a hat unlined is a common choice for theatrical milliners. For this show though, since everyone changes characters multiple times--sometimes in a matter of seconds, potentially in full view of the audience--I am assuming that every hat needs to be able to go on and off onstage, and thus needs a lining. We started lining borrowed and pulled hats back in August!

Often our costume designers will request that hats be retrimmed to match dresses--Candy and i remove extant ribbons and flowers, bag them with a rental number tag so we can put them back on the proper hat when the show's over, and store them in a drawer set aside for the purpose. For the new trims we are adding, we use a method that allows our designers and directors the most freedom in terms of potential aesthetic decisions, while at the same time making sure the borrowed and rented hats are treated with utmost care. Ladies hats in this time have TONS of trim--flowers, feathers, ribbons, bows, even little stuffed birds!--so rather than sewing all our new trims directly to the rented hats themselves, we make what's called a garniture base, a small covered piece of buckram material that blends with the fabric of the hat. The trimmings get sewn to the garniture base, which then gets tacked onto the hat--in this way, we minimize the amount of wear-and-tear that the rented hats take (since they only take a couple of tacks holding on the base, rather than bunches of sturdy stitches securing lots individual pieces of trim) and we make it easy to reverse our work at the end. Once the shows close,we just have to clip the small tacks, remove the garniture base, and then put the original trims back on. Then our designers and managers can return them back to their original homes in costume storage facilities across the state and the nation, having had their moment in the footlights as part of this historic production, ready to serve future designers and performers for theatre yet to be made!

Silk foliage pinned on the garniture base for Madeline Bray's bonnet (borrowed from NC School of the Arts)

Can you spot the garniture base on this bonnet (borrowed from UNC-Greensboro) for a Street Person?

Assistant Milliner Candy McClernan works on a brand-new ragged headwrap for Jackson

Nicholas Nickleby Begins!

2009-11-12T10:48:00.007-05:00

Previews for Part I began last night and continue through tomorrow. Part II previews next week and then Opening on the 21st!

You can join us and spend a day at the theatre on November 21st. We're even serving dinner, if you make your reservations by Friday, November 13. See both parts of the show, eat dinner in between and join us for our Gala reception afterwards!

For now, check out these great production photos by Jon Gardiner. These are from dress rehearsal for Part I. We'll have pics from Part II next week. And check back tomorrow for another post from blog favorite, Rachel Pollock!

The Company

Justin Adams as Nicholas Nickleby

Justin Adams as Nicholas Nickleby; Julie Fishell as Mrs. Nickleby;

Marianne Miller as Kate Nickleby

Weston Blakesley as Newman Noggs; Ray Dooley as Ralph Nickleby;

Jeffrey Meanza as Mantalini

Joy Jones as Mrs. Mantalini; Jeffrey Meanza as Mantalini

Derrick Ledbetter, Kahlil Gonzalez-Garcia, John Brummer & Flor De Liz Perez as Milliners; Lenore Field as Miss Knagg (center)

Dede Corvinus as Mrs. Squeers; Matthew Murphy as Snawley;

Jeffrey Meanza as Young Wackford

Scott Ripley as Squeers

Jason Powers as Smike; Justin Adams as Nicholas Nickleby

Marianne Miller as Kate Nickleby; Lenore Field as Miss Knagg

Allison Altman as Fanny Squeers; Alice Whitley as Tilda; Justin Adams as Nicholas Nickleby

L to R: Matthew Miller, Flor De Liz Perez; Sarah Berk; James E. Brinkley, Derrick Ledbetter, David McClutchey, Kahlil Gonzalez-Garcia & Prince T. Bowie (in back) as the Dotheboys

Jeffrey Blair Cornell as Crummles; Alice Whitley as Percy Crummles; Jason Powers as Smike; Matthew Murphy as Master Crummles & Justin Adams as Nicholas Nickleby

Justin Adams as Nicholas Nickleby

Allison Altman as Fanny Squeers; Scott Ripley as Squeers; Jeffrey Meanza as Young Wackford

The cast of Nicholas Nickleby as the Crummles Company