Patrick Holt's Brilliant Renderings and Costume Concepts Come to Life

Patrick Holt is renowned for his stunning, detailed costume renderings, as pictured below. His costume designs for An Enemy of the People encapsulate the 1950s era of fedoras, tailored suits, and feminine, pastel skirts. Limited to the subdued colors worn by business men of the 1950s, Patrick's palette was more muted, but one character needed to stand out.

Patrick's inspiration behind Peter Stockmann's flair, as worn by Anthony Newfield. Photo by Jon Gardiner.

Peter Stockmann, the Mayor, needed to exude a certain importance, explains Rachel Pollock, costume craftsperson. She said the design team received an email from director Tom Quaintance stating, "The Mayor's hat needs to clearly be the Mayor's hat." She and Patrick jumped into action, finding exactly the right details to complete Peter's ensemble. They searched for a way to ensure Peter would stand out, but it had to be subtle. "We needed some way to set it apart him an official capacity that wouldn't be cartoonish or absurd," said Rachel. Patrick and Rachel chose from a collection of unique feather ornaments to make Peter's costume flourish. This subtle detail proves effective, along with the touch of red, to evoke a sense of authority, wealth, and importance in Peter Stockmann's character.

The concept of water is prevalent throughout the plot, as well as the design concepts. The designs for dresses worn in the second act by Petra and Catherine Stockmann use teals and dim browns evoking the polluted springs that drive the plot, Rachel explained.

"It's a visual representation of the taint in the water."

With water being a common theme throughout the play, it's no wonder Patrick was inspired to create visual representations of the contaminated spring in his designs for the Stockmann women.

Patrick's rendering for Catherine Stockmann as worn by Julia Gibson. Photo by Jon Gardiner.

Patrick's rendering for Petra Stockmann as worn by Allison Altman. Photo by Curtis Brown.

For the angry mob scene in which Dr. Stockmann is pelted with water, precautions had to be taken. Rachel says they spent time Scotch Guarding the costumes they expected to be exposed to the most moisture. However, this was not Rachel's first time working around water in a production. After the 4,500 gallon pool used in PlayMakers' 2014 production of Metamorphoses, she had more than enough skill and experience to collaborate on the challenge of costumes getting soaked throughout the show.

The mob throwing water at the face of Dr. Stockmann. Photo by Jon Gardiner.

We are pleased to have Patrick Holt's costume designs featured in another production at PlayMakers. He served as costume craftsperson for PlayMakers early on in his career. Rachel said Patrick's past experience with PlayMakers simplified the process for the collaborative costume team. "He ran this dye shop. So he is very familiar with this facility and what it can do."

Patrick's rendering of Dr. Stockmann's costume worn by Michael Bryan French. Photo by Curtis Brown.

See Patrick Holt's beautiful renderings come to life onstage. Book your tickets for An Enemy of the People - onstage through March 15!

Click here to buy tickets or for more info or call our box office at 919.962.7529.

Director Tom Quaintance on creating a true "Enemy of the People"

Tom Quaintance, director

Although An Enemy of the People was written by Henrik Ibsen in 1882 and adapted by Arthur Miller in the 1950s, director Tom Quaintance believes it is as relevant today as it was for those eras. With characters that grapple with corruption, the influence of money, and the power of the media to shape public opinion, Tom says this play "feels like it could have been written yesterday."

The plot follows Dr. Stockmann, played by Michael Bryan French, who tries to alert citizens when he discovers an underwater spring feeding the successful town spa is threatened by toxic waste poisoning. His brother Peter, played by Anthony Newfield, serves as Chairman of the Board of the spa. He works against his brother, feeling it's in the town's best interest to conceal Dr. Stockmann's findings.

In our current age of leaders with questionable ethics, nonstop surveillance, and unverified media sources, the story of Dr. Stockmann could not be more pertinent. Tom explains:

"It is the story of science versus politics. It is the story of a whistleblower. It is the story of how money influences everything. It is the story of how the media shapes how we view the world. In today’s increasingly divided society, where people increasingly only hear the news and the spin they want to hear, it is an important play."

With the show holding many themes, Tom has collaborated with scenic designer McKay Coble and costume designer Patrick Holt to create a production that evokes the truth and realism Arthur Miller sought to portray when adapting the play.

McKay Coble's scenic design model

Tom describes the costumes as extraordinary. He says Patrick's "control of the color palette and specificity of cut and style tell each character’s story."

McKay's detail-oriented design complements the natural exchanges of the dialogue and allows the actors to discover their own truths within the space. Tom calls it, "both strikingly realistic and beautifully abstract."

Although the play is set in the 1950s, the scenic design utilizes a surrounding water feature inspired by a modern treatment plant. This is purposeful, "to invite the audience to consider the contemporary relevance of the play."

Bottom line: Tom believes An Enemy of the People is timeless and "a critical play for 2015."

An Enemy of the People is onstage February 25-March 15. Do not miss this critical play!

Click here for more info or call our box office at 919.962.PLAY (7529).

Patriot Acts: Ibsen, Miller, and Other (Un-) Reasonable Men - Part 2

By Gregory Kable

 (Continued from Part 1)

In 1950, Arthur Miller was commissioned to adapt Ibsen’s play by the actor-director Robert Lewis, a
prominent member of the seminal Group Theatre which established both modern acting and political commitment on the commercial American stage during its existence from 1931-41. Beloved Broadway veterans Fredric March and his wife Florence Eldridge would play the Stockmanns, and Lars Nordenson, a passionate, Swedish senator’s son would serve as producer. Not unlike the driving force behind Ibsen’s original, this revision of An Enemy of the People was rooted in indignation. March and Eldridge had been implicated in the rising tide of the Communist witch hunts led by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy under the auspices of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller immediately grasped the affinities between the play and the current climate, identifying its core theme as “the crushing of the dissenting spirit by the majority, and the right and obligation of such a spirit to exist at all.”

To highlight this focus, Miller rang major changes on the original, tightening its action from five to three acts, leaving motivations more ambiguous than explicit, and rephrasing dialogue in contemporary colloquialisms to purge any semblance of Victorian sensibilities. Miller altered Ibsen in other ways as well, most significantly in suiting the tone of his version to the grimmer mood of the time. Still, Miller’s devotion to Ibsen, already apparent from All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, which had opened in 1947 and 1949, respectively, asserts itself as forcefully in the timing of this project as much as in its substance. To revisit An Enemy of the People at all in the Fifties was an act of political conscience. Miller has reflected on the decade throughout his career, coloring it an era of “gauze” with a theatre correspondingly sapped of vitality and heat. “For one thing,” he wrote in a 1983 essay, “it was a post-Odets and pre-Brecht time, when things artistic were supposed to deal with sentiments and aspirations, but never with society.” In taking up the Ibsen challenge, Miller was leading by example, publicly avowing the need to reengage with the world.

Though cautiously received by audiences who had mastered reserve as a survival strategy, the endeavor was liberating for Miller, who would go on to amplify his rallying cry three years later in The Crucible. Initially cowed by McCarthy’s power, when Miller found himself called before HUAC in 1956, he refused cooperation, ending in a contempt of Congress charge. As with The Crucible’s John Proctor, Miller “had his goodness now” and affirmed the same faith in personal dignity he had admired in broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow’s 1953 television rebuttal of McCarthy, which concluded with Murrow’s defiant assertion, “We are not a nation of fearful men.”

The paradox, of course, is that such lofty individualism is as frequently resented and persecuted as lionized. And in our present context of heavy surveillance and heavier hacking, of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, of inflated college transcripts and deflated championship footballs, it can be more difficult than ever before to distinguish between the heroes and villains. More than three decades after his adaptation, Miller championed Ibsen’s play as “but one more evidence that the artist’s powerful desire to penetrate life’s chaos, to make it meaningfully cohere, has literally created a truth as substantial as a sword for later generations to wield against their own oppression.” 

But like Ibsen before him, Miller’s Enemy and his subsequent works acknowledge the fragility of such a weapon, comprehending both the courage and potential folly in revolutionary zeal. A possible reconciliation of these viewpoints can be found in a statement made by an aged Ibsen at an honorary banquet in 1898, where he insisted on being “more of a poet and less of a social philosopher than people seem generally inclined to believe”, a claim as appropriate for Miller as well. 

In his landmark study of Ibsen first published in 1891, fellow Ibsenite Bernard Shaw concedes the hazards of regressive majorities while cleanly identifying the shared battlelines Miller vividly dramatizes. In defining the contrary perspectives of idealists and realists, Shaw makes a strong case for reconceiving of such allegiances as follows:

“To the idealist, human nature, naturally corrupt, is held back from ruinous excesses

only by self-denying conformity to ideals. To the realist, ideals are only swaddling

clothes which man has outgrown, and which insufferably impede his movements….

It is always a case of ‘The ideal is dead: long live the ideal!’ And the advantage of

the work of destruction is that every new ideal is less of an illusion than the one it

has supplanted; so that the destroyer of ideals, though denounced as an enemy of

society, is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies.”

However welcome or unwelcome, justified or misguided, reasonable or treasonable, the stubborn resolve of Shaw’s realists prevails. And as Ibsen and Miller’s linked plays suggest, there must be something in the human psyche to account for this deep sense of mission. But Ibsen and Miller go further in interrogating the limits of human reason and exploring the relativity of truth. Perhaps Shaw’s certainty is yet one more layer of protective illusion, and we are less available to ourselves and compelled by self-interest than we’d like to admit. An Enemy of the People refuses to comfort us with a definitive answer. It’s completely plausible that our rebels are informed by a higher awareness that legitimizes their opposition. But the contrary and darker perspective may hold equal validity: as Enemy might have it, in the end, maybe there’s just something in the water after all.


PlayMakers Repertory Company’s production of “An Enemy of the People” by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Arthur Miller.

February 25 – March 15, 2015. Directed by Tom Quaintance

Call 919-962-PLAY (7529) or visit www.playmakersrep.org

Patriot Acts: Ibsen, Miller, and Other (Un-) Reasonable Men - Part 1

by Gregory Kable

“All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

--Bernard Shaw, 1905.

Like its steadfast protagonist, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is itself a play which refuses to give way. One hundred and thirty-three years after its premiere, it remains undiminished both in its power and topicality. Its situations and characters, even specific references in the dialogue could have been conceived by any number of contemporary playwrights, and we’d be forgiven for assuming some of its dominant actions have been altered by translators to more closely approximate current events. But as our adaptation by Arthur Miller confirms, the underlying concerns of Ibsen’s play collapse time and cultures to speak directly to our historical moment, proving the aptness of Miller’s chosen title for his autobiography, Timebends.

Such resonance can be partially accounted for in that Ibsen fearlessly strode right into one of the primal conflicts of democratic society, that of the individual taking a principled stand against the collective will. This dilemma is as old as Western drama, and in that light we can approach Ibsen’s play as a modern variant on Sophocles’ Antigone. But Ibsen fiercely pursues this conflict to the point where its quixotic extremity commands equal attention. As Ibsen confided to his publisher, “I am uncertain as to whether I should call it a comedy or a straight drama. It has many of the traits of comedy, but is also based on a serious idea.” That tragicomic tone contributes as much to the modern feel of Enemy as its parallels with whistleblowers, environmentalism, science colliding with vested interests, public debates driven by rumor and opinion, violently partisan politics and all collusions of the press.

Befitting an artist in the vanguard of Naturalism, upon beginning his play in 1882, Ibsen was already familiar with a pair of real-life models for his plot and protagonist. Fifty years earlier, a doctor in the spa town of Teplice (then part of the Austrian Empire, today of the Czech Republic) drew attention to a cholera outbreak during the height of the tourist season, necessitating his flight from a mob of vengeful locals. The second and more recent example was of a widely reported incident in 1874 involving a Norwegian chemist prevented from making a public speech denouncing his capitol city’s prosperous Steam Kitchen industry’s neglect of the urban poor. In both cases a determined crusading figure is beset by guardians of the status quo.

But the immediate catalyst for Enemy was the scandalous reception of Ibsen’s play Ghosts, published in 1881 and to be pilloried and denied Scandinavian production for several years. Ghosts critiqued conventional religion, bourgeois values, and included venereal disease as part of its narrative, resulting in an unprecedented storm of protest as critics strained to outdo one another in trumpeting their disapproval: “[A] disgusting representation” sniffed one review; “an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged, a dirty act done publicly”, proclaimed another. “Gross, almost putrid indecorum”, “literary carrion”, and “crapulous stuff” are further representative samples of the frenzied condemnations.

Ibsen responded with another work for the stage, unleashing the full brunt of his contempt for this

epidemic of provincial attitudes whether associated with conservatives, liberals, or moderates. Thus, An Enemy of the People, written more swiftly than any other Ibsen play, is a withering indictment of majority beliefs. But it is also a crafted and deliberate drama which is carefully contained in a five-act structure, and exhibits Ibsen’s characteristic mastery of symbolism and metaphor. Alongside its social problem play exterior, lie a moral parable about human corruption, and even a potential religious allegory of institutionalized faith (Peter), spiritual sickness (polluted water as an image of the impure soul), and a Doubting Thomas in the protagonist himself. In this, Ibsen’s play transcends the merely literal and his Stockmann takes his rightful place among a host of the playwright’s most notable characters, from the renegade Pastor Brand, and the prodigal Peer Gynt, to the non-conformist Nora Helmer and the tragically conformist Hedda Gabler, through the desperate architect of The Master Builder, the doomed financier John Gabriel Borkman and the decadent sculptor Rubek in Ibsen’s final play, When We Dead Awaken. Any and all might be designated an enemy, an identity which, in the name of progress, Ibsen dares us all to embrace.

PlayMakers Repertory Company’s production of “An Enemy of The People ” by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Arthur Miller. February 25 – March 15, 2015. Directed by Tom Quaintance. 

Call 919-962-PLAY (7529) or visit www.playmakersrep.org.

Another peek behind the scenes of "Sweeney Todd"

Rehearsals for Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street continue for the actors and techies of the PlayMakers Summer Youth Conservatory, and the experience continues to be both challenging and exciting.

Check out this behind-the-scenes video featuring Theatre Intensive actors Jacqueline Helgans and Symone Crews discussing the commitment put into the early weeks of rehearsal and the straightforward advice given to them by director Tom Quaintance.

Sweeney Todd, presented by the PlayMakers Summer Youth Conservatory, runs July 17 - 21, 2013. Get tickets and info at www.playmakersrep.org/sweeneytodd.

Giving Up The Making of a King

Tom Quaintance

By Tom Quaintance

Twenty-some years ago I met Joe Haj working on the Guthrie Theatre’s History Cycle: Richard II, Henry IV part 1 and 2, Henry V all together in rep.  I was a directing intern just out of college, and Joe was in the acting company shortly after finishing the Professional Actor Training Program at UNC. 

It was an extraordinary experience.  I have more vivid memories from that show, both in rehearsal and performance, than most plays I have directed myself.

Henry V was the also the first Shakespeare I directed, with a $40 budget in a black box, with actors who were in other shows, so we’d rehearse from 11:00pm-2:00am.  I was in grad school in San Diego, and Joe came down and watched me work through the tennis ball scene early in the process.  The note he gave me was perhaps the most important in my entire time at UCSD.  We were struggling through the scene - aside from Henry (Scott Ripley) no one was really prepared.  Here I was, directing in front of the best actor I knew, trying to show what an “actors' director” I was.  We took a break and Joe took me aside and said something along the lines of: “It’s great to give the actors a chance to make a choice, but if you’ve got a better idea, say so. Especially if they have no idea at all.”  I think of that moment as the beginning of our work together as collaborators.

After grad school I directed Henry V twice more, once with Joe in the title role.  When Joe asked me to co-direct “The Henrys” as we were calling it a few years ago, I jumped at the opportunity.  To tackle those plays again! In the context of a country in a constant state of war! With Joe!  Thrilling.

I stopped by a rehearsal a few weeks ago.  I was in town after a meeting with the North Carolina Arts Council for my new job.  The last seven months has seen the birth of my beautiful baby girl Mireille, a move across the country from Los Angeles to NC with my wife Wallis, and a new title: Artistic Director of Cape Fear Regional Theatre in Fayetteville.  Like so much else in my career I owe this opportunity in large part to the support of Joe, McKay Coble and all the good folks at PRC.  We go into rehearsal next week for our production of Othello, and I’m having the time of my life, but to take this amazing job I had to give up The Making of a King.  For that brief visit to that rehearsal it was almost physically painful to be in that room watching all my friends bring Henry V to life.  From what I saw “’Tis wonderful.”  I’ll be there opening day and night, and I imagine a few tears will be shed…

- - - - - - - - - -

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

SHIPTECHED!

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

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!

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 1

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

Part II in Pictures

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.