Theater

Behind the Curtain at The Gamm

Playing dress-up with the Gamm’s costume designer

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What makes a character? Is it all accent and affect? Or is it psychological underpinnings – questions of motivation and precedent? In theatre, the answer of course is all of this, but not just all of this. There’s more. Each show’s design team works to help create the universe for those characters, and allows those characters to reveal themselves as they interact with that universe. All of the unseen hands backstage play a part in this, of course, but only the costume designer literally builds the outer shells of those characters, helping the actors bring their creations to life.

At the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre, this is a role played largely by David Howard, the theatre’s resident costume designer. David has been working at the theater since 1999, when happenstance brought him together with Artistic Director Tony Estrella when the pair shared an office at the University of Rhode Island, where Howard had taken a post as an adjunct filling in for a professor on sabbatical. Now, Howard has 32 productions with the company under his belt, and he has nothing but praise for Tony and the rest of his team. “The people I work with are so generous in their belief in me,” he says.

Just like the Gamm has a long history with David, David has a long history with the creative arts. He says he was always drawn to them, particularly live performance. “I was always the kid who wanted to put on crazy plays in school,” he says, laughing as he recalls his early work. “They were interminable and awful. But what can you expect from a six-year-old?”

From there, David pursued his interest in the arts, learning many instruments (“though I was a master of none”), painting and crafting in his bedroom, singing and acting. His senior year of high school, he realized he wanted to go into theater, though he said the department at SUNY-Fredonia “didn’t really know what to do with [him]”– he says he wasn’t a particularly wonderful actor, and had a propensity for involvement in a lot of different aspects of the theatrical craft, but hadn’t really focused in on any one thing. After graduation, his best friend got him a gig in a summer theater where he worked as a wardrobe supervisor, readying the clothes for the actors for each and every performance as well as caring for them afterward.

After David moved to Rhode Island to work as a costume designer and performer at the Astor’s Beechwood in Newport in 1993, it wasn’t long before he began to get more serious in his theatrical thinking. On something of a lark, he applied for and was accepted to the University of Connecticut’s costume design program, where he earned his MFA. There, he says, he began to think about his work on a more intellectual level and in a more immersive sort of detail. This would ultimately prepare him for his teaching career at URI, which continues on to this day.

Howard says that the job always begins with reading the script and looking for both instructions and possible interpretations for the characters. “I look at who the character is. What would this character need? What are we trying to say about the character?”

For a period drama, David says, historical accuracy is obviously an important factor, but there are other considerations at play as well. ”I think more often than not, actors are more willing to accept the rules of period clothes and give themselves over to it. They don’t judge period clothing,” he says, adding that his job is then to make an actor’s character feel and look as comfortable in a boned corset as a modern woman would in leggings.

And speaking of contemporary productions, David says that those are some of the more challenging shows to costume, despite notions to the contrary. “People think that contemporary clothes are easy, that you can just go to Macy’s and pick them out,” he says. It’s not just about being able to run out and get any blue sweater, he says. “It’s getting the blue sweater. The right color. The right v-neck. The right texture.”

For The Big Meal (Jan.-9-Feb.9), the theatre’s upcoming production, David will have to overcome not only the challenge of outfitting the eight actors in contemporary garb in exactly the right way for the right price, but will need to deal with weaving a thread between characters as they progress in age on stage. The Dan LeFranc script leaves little time for quick changes, so David will need to design and implement costumes that make sense for a character who in one moment appears as a seven-year-old and in another moment has transitioned into another stage of life, all the way through old age.

“There are a lot of exciting possibilities,” he says.

the gamm, gamm theatre, ri theatre, costume design, david howard, providence monthly

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