Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1985 - 8

style of the painting. If it were simply a matter of
making them look as though they had stepped off
the canvas it might not be too difficult, but there
is also the character of George who is "real" and
must visually blend with the other characters.
Zipprodt describes the result as "pulling a picture
on top of the characters and letting the character
punch through."
While set and lighting designers begin with a
blank canvas, as it were, the costumers have to take
the colors and textures of the fabrics into consideration in creating the costumes. To create the
shimmering effect of Pointillism, the costumers
used a technique virtually invented by Zipprodt for
Fiddler on [he Roof and continued in eil Simon's
Fools-a technique involving painting, dyeing,
"underglazing" and texturing fabrics. Zipprodt
recalled that the difficulty in Fiddler was to deal
with the "tough realism" of the clothing in an exciting manner. "I had to take these drab costumes
and theatricalize them; make them vibrant onstage." In order to make a pair of brown pants, for
example, she would first make a pair of pants from
a rust red fabric, then dye them green. The re ult
was brown. But as the pants were rubbed to make
them worn in appearance, bits of red showed
through that were barely perceptible to the audience but created a vibrancy nonetheless. In Fools,
Zipprodt and Hould- Ward began to use nets and
mesh fabrics to achieve the effect and create richer
textures by placing netting of one color over fabric
of another. "In Sunday in the Park," said Zipprodt, "It was natural to scoop all of it up and
push it as far back as we could."

A comer of I~quierdo's S/lldio.

Martin Izquierdo's costume shop-a loft on
West 22nd Street-is where most of these effects
were accomplished. This is not an ordinary costume shop-there is not a sewing machine in sight.
A very large red apple from a Fruit of the Loom
commercial overlooks a room full of steaming dye
vats, shelves of glazing and fabric paints imported
from West Germany, and people painting clothes
and fabrics with paint brushes, sponges and plant
sprayers. In a corner a man carefully dips part of
a blouse into a vat to create an effect known as
"ombre" or pour dyeing-a technique of dyeing
6

Theatre Design & Technology /

SITT / Winter 1985

"Skin" for The Balher sequence.

or painting a garment so that it gets gradual I
darker toward the bottom. This allows the blous
to blend into the skirt, just as in the painting.
Izquierdo explains that the patterns are createl
on various garments by using a stencil made eithe
with a piece of thin plastic or an interestingly pat
terned piece of lace. First, bleach is sprayed on th
fabric through the stencil, then vinegar. This cre
ates a pattern that can be painted. Part of th
process is simply finding suitable stencils. But pat
terned fabric is hardly sufficient for pointillist ef
fects-all sorts of textures and colors are over
layed. In Seurat's painting a woman sits beneath
tree wearing a cape with her back to the viewel
There are shadows in the cape. Rather than let th
natural fold of the material and the lighting creat
the chadows on the stage, the designers have tex
tured parts of the costume with embroidered flow
ers and pieces of net, all subtly painted. From th
audience the effect i simply one of interesting tex
ture and shadow. Should anyone notice the flow
ers, however, Zipprodt and Hould-Ward have a
explanation: In Fools there were similar flower
in the trees, also as a textural element, and, the de
signers explain with a laugh, "the flowers just fe
from the trees and landed on the cape."
Along with the tableau of Sunday Afternoon ..
there is also a brief tableau of Bathers, an earl
Seurat work. This sequence presented its own chal
lenges because the skin of the two boys in the paint
ing is mottled. Off-white unitards were painte'
with sponges dipped in flesh-toned paint to creat
something that looks at once like skin and Seurat'
effect. Of course, these costumes have to bien
seamlessly into the real skin of the boys' faces.
But the masterpiece is the jacket worn by 001
In the painting it appears almost black, but Seur2
never used black. The base fabric is silk with broa
tripes of blue-green, peach, blue, and shades 0
red and green. This is covered with navy blue nc
and threads, ribbons, and yarn of all colors ar
woven through the net. The jacket is then ombre
so that when Dot stands in profile in the final tab
leau, the garment will have the same highlights a
in the painting. Up close the jacket looks like.
belongs to a psychedelic derelict. From the audi
ence and under the lights, it looks like a perio
jacket-only the colors keep shifting ever s'
slightly.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Winter 1985