Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2012 - 68

book
arnold wengrow

review

editor

Ray Diffen Stage Clothes
By Ray Diffen; Bloomington, IN, Xlibris Corp., 2012. 228 pp.
Cloth, $29.99. Paper, $19.99.
Reviewed by Gregory DL Morris
Ray Diffen Stage Clothes is new required
reading for anyone who loves the theatre.
It brims with life, most of it exuberant, and
also with the essence of inspiration and
drive that makes a life in the stage business a
success. It is also a rare, forthright glimpse
into a part of the theatre of which most actors, directors, and even other technicians
are little aware.
All drapers make clothes. Ray Diffen
made history by transforming an entire industry. Before Diffen came to New York, costumes
for Broadway shows, and, by extension, for
much of the rest of the United States and Canada were made either by artisans, sometimes
the designers themselves, or by one of the big
commercial rental businesses that served stage and screen.
Diffen came to North America by way of Tyrone Guthrie
and Tanya Moiseiwitsch and the Shakespeare festivals in Stratford-upon-Avon and then Stratford, Ontario. When Ray Diffen
Stage Clothes (RDSC) was founded in 1956 in the shadow of
the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, it was sui generis. A commercial
shop, not an artist's atelier, but a commercial shop with a rigorous eye for historical accuracy and a passionate hand for making beautiful clothes.
In his memoir Diffen writes, "Many of the period plays I saw
on stage in New York in the early 50s convinced me that I was
needed in the industry. I was appalled by their heavy, ponderous
approach to costume design and construction. If there was ever any
spark or invention or mystery in anything I saw, Karinska's name
was bound to be in the back of the program." Today the big rental
shops in New York are gone, and while there are plenty of artisanal
shops, all of the major costume operations serving the greater New
York theatre are not just run in the Diffen model, many of the owners are drapers who have a direct lineage to Diffen.

Frank, quirky, fun
That story can be gleaned from the pages of this memoir, but
Diffen did not set out to write a definitive history. There are a
few gaps, inconsistencies, and non-sequiturs. But what it lacks
in rigor, it more than compensates for in richness. The book is
intensely personal, always frank, always quirky, mostly fun, and
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occasionally prickly. Much, no surprise, like the man himself.
There is a bittersweet element to the book. Diffen's friends -
Jane Greenwood, Desmond Heeley, and the pantheon of designers and costume makers-had been urging him for years to
finish it. He finally did in the summer of 2011, working from his
lovely brick home near the beach in Eastbourne, on the Channel coast. It was just in
time. In November he suffered a stomach
ailment. He survived but never fully recovered. He died in March approaching age
ninety.
Diffen opens his book near the end of
his career, the night in 1999 when he was
presented with the first-ever Irene Sharaff
Benchmark Award, which in now known
as the Irene Sharaff Artisan Award. Sharaff
and Diffen, both larger than life figures in
the costume world, had a famously fraught
relationship. They collaborated to great
success in the early 1960s, but as often
happens with proud, strong, creative souls,
they had a falling out.
Diffen worked with luminaries across several eras, from
Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor to William Shatner.
One of the delights of the book is that he is never shy about
dishing but rarely in a mean-spirited way. There is far more
praise and admiration of his colleagues and contemporaries
than there is snarkiness. That said, there are a few catty comments sprinkled around.
In turn, Diffen was much admired himself. In 1963, Women's Wear Daily wrote a piece on RDSC as the shop was building
costumes for New York Shakespeare Festival's As You Like It and
Anthony and Cleopatra, both designed by Theoni Aldredge.
"Ray is a young Englishman who has run his own shop for
six years. He is now considered the prestige costume maker
in New York, and designers are lucky to have Ray accept their
shows. . . . Irene Sharaff is at Ray's almost every day working
on her show Jennie. . . . Some of Ray's workers have fabulous
backgrounds, and bring with them enormous knowledge."
Of the six major commercial shops serving Broadway at
the end of 2010, the founders of two worked directly for Diffen:
Barbara Matera and Sally Ann Parsons. Three others, Kathy Marshall, owner of Tricorne, Werner Kulovitz, co-owner of EuroCo,
and Carolyn Kostopoulos, owner of Carelli, all worked for Matera. Diffen brought the then Barbara Gray to New York, where
she met Arthur Matera at RDSC. In 1967 Matera opened her own
shop, which carried on for ten years after she died in 2001.
Diffen left his shop to Parsons and her husband, Jim

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