Costume Design
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Machinal (Adelphi University - Alumna Guest Designer)
Sophie Treadwell wrote Machinal as a reaction to the story of Ruth Snyder, who became the first woman to be executed by electric chair in the United States after murdering her husband in 1927. Our all-women+ design team sought to focus on what happens to a woman's voice in a world where the forces of technology, industry, and patriarchal influence are overwhelming.
My design concept uses color to isolate Young Woman from the characters who are part of the "machine;" soft and vulnerable pinks evolve to intense red as power and energy build. Ultimately, color is stripped away as Young Woman is sentenced to death. Texture and silhouette were crucial visual elements in collaboration with the Lighting and Scenic designers.
She-She-She
(Actors Fund Art Center)
"Six Women - Two Decades - One Mountain: This vibrant collaborative piece tells a modern tale of alienation through the stories of six women across generations. Set in a New Deal-era women’s work camp on New York’s Bear Mountain, She-She-She highlights the nonlinear nature of progress, and explores how we wrestle with the intersections of our inheritance as we are informed and molded by our past."
She-She-She, by Cynthia Babak, combines narratives from the 1930s and today. While my designs needed to distinguish between time periods, I also used color to link the contemporary women with their ancestors, and chose styles to give clues about the socioeconomic factors driving their journeys.
Generation T
(Adelphi University)
Generation T, by Pia Wilson, was a new play first produced at Adelphi. It tells the story of two young men who return from serving as Marines in Afghanistan and struggle to reconnect with their friends while battling PTSD, depression, and schizophrenia. We see the different ways that young people react to war, mental illness, and terrorism in a post-9/11 nation.
In my design, I focused on the contrast between urban and suburban styles and how they reflect the importance of classism and cultural appropriation in the play. I also incorporated subtle elements of Middle Eastern garments, such as scarves and military uniforms, that were meant to act as triggers to the two main characteres.
Hopper (Adelphi University)
Hopper, a new musical by Anton Dudley, is a modern re-telling of the classic fairy tale, the Frog Prince. In this version, the title character is a high school nerd cursed with geekiness and bad hygiene, who meets a witch by a magical well and believes he must get the most beautiful girl in school to kiss him and reveal his inner prince. Bullying, respect, and self-esteem become major themes in this interpretation of the story.
The design team for this new work had to create a world where magic could believably exist. For the costumes, this meant that I created whimsical styles with exaggerated shapes and colors.
God is a Verb (Actors Fund Art Center)
"In 1969, an eccentric professor gathers a team of offbeat academics to play a game with one goal: make the world work for all humanity. What unfolds tears spacetime as we are whisked from a beatnik cafe to a treetop congressional hearing and back by way of a university telephone. As the clock ticks, the lines blur between the game and the real world and we wonder if we've detached from reality altogether."
Written by Gavin Broady and directed by Chad Lindsey, this new play is inspired by the philosophies of Professor R. Buckminster Fuller. This production was my first design as a college graduate.