BY LUCIA MAURO
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After navigating through the interior road maps of their characters’ emotions, most actors feel like they’ve arrived at their real dramatic destination the moment they step into their costumes. Mara Blumenfeld was one of those actors. In fact, the fabric spoke so eloquently to her as a performer that Blumenfeld eventually left the stage to express herself at the drawing table and sewing machine. The costume designer–closely affiliated with director Mary Zimmerman’s productions and the clothing conscience for scores of local and regional productions–went on to deliver textured performances of a different kind.
"As an actor, I always loved the dressing up aspect of theatre," says Blumenfeld, 31. "But with costume design you get to play all the characters. I think, because of my acting background, I have a love and appreciation for the actors and can be sensitive to their needs. I can put myself in their shoes."
Although based in Chicago, Blumenfeld shares her insights during a phone conversation from New York City, where she’s doing fabric swatching for Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s upcoming production of Sunday in the Park with George, directed by Gary Griffin. Initial plans were to rent the costumes for the first act from the Kennedy Center. But after traveling to Washington, D.C. to check out the garments (originally designed for the Broadway stage), Blumenfeld found them too grandiose for CST’s intimate upstairs studio.
"So we’re going to build act one," she announces, barely containing her excitement. "One of the major issues with the original costumes was that the fabrics and patterns were too huge. They would look cartoonish at CST. The new designs will not necessarily be more muted in tone, but more delicate and refined in scale."
Blumenfeld obviously approaches design with the detail and focus of a serious actor. Theatre engulfed the artist’s life from an early age. She remembers acting "since I was a kid" in her native Philadelphia. By high school, she was working as a props person and dresser in a small Equity theatre, Cheltenham Playhouse, where she also performed in children’s shows.
She came to Chicago to study acting at Northwestern University, where she received her BS in Speech. Originally intent on pursuing an acting career, Blumenfeld unexpectedly found her calling in the college’s costume shop during her freshman year. At Northwestern, students are required to participate in all aspects of theatre. When she began working with design professor–and respected professional costume designer–Virgil C. Johnson in the school’s costume shop, Blumenfeld remembers "being bowled over by his renderings."
"Virgil has a rendering style that’s so expressive," she continues, "and captures the character, while conveying a movement and energy."
Blumenfeld was so inspired that she mustered the courage to ask Johnson if she could take entry-level costume-design classes. He agreed and continued to encourage during her years at Northwestern, which did not have an official costume-design program. She crafted her own program, which included graduate-level classes. She majored in theatre with an emphasis in costume design. Blumenfeld officially settled on a costume design career after a schedule conflict between an acting and a design course. She chose design.
"I’m very lucky to have made that decision," notes Blumenfeld, "because the design classes made me figure out what I loved about costume design as opposed to staying in acting and figuring out what I didn’t like about acting."
Because actors’ adornments often allow them to inhabit a character, the designer’s process is not unlike an actor’s. Blumenfeld says that she reads a play about five times. The first read-through is very general; by the second, she highlights anything that relates to costuming or characters. Then she will re-read to help her define the characters. By this time, she enters into meetings with the director and her fellow designers. Research follows and, once the rehearsal process kicks in, Blumenfeld gains a stronger sense of what colors best match actors’ skin tones. While she has a definitive design idea, she remains flexible, since changes are inevitable.
She points out that what they don’t teach in costume-design classes is how to relate psychologically to an actor during a fitting. Actors must feel like they are part of the process but, ultimately, Blumenfeld needs to be conscious of how the bigger stage picture will look.
"You have to strike a balance of meeting the needs of the individual actor or character," she states, "while not losing the overall integrity of the design."
After graduating from Northwestern, she considered going to graduate school, then decided against it–a combination of having taken high-level courses and wanting to get real-world experience. Blumenfeld worked for one year at Vogue Fabrics in Evanston. Then a fortuitous opportunity came her way. Her roommate, also a costume designer, had been working at the Goodman’s costume shop but was leaving to attend grad school in New York. Blumenfeld interviewed and was hired as an assistant costume designer. Over her three seasons at Goodman, she had the opportunity to work with scores of professional designers.
"What I learned the most," says Blumenfeld, "was seeing how the designers communicate with a shop, and how much a designer’s energy with the shop can affect how something comes out–good or ill. You have to be able to communicate your ideas clearly and respectfully to the shop."
Meanwhile, she was freelance designing around town. She also helped found Roadworks Productions. An artistic associate at Lookingglass Theatre, Blumenfeld has designed costumes for several of their shows, including The Vanishing Twin, The Idiot, The Baron in the Trees, Eleven Rooms of Proust, Hard Times, Summertime, Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses.
Blumenfeld left the Goodman to embark on what has evolved into a highly successful freelance career. Her impeccable and subtly revelatory costumes designs have been seen in The Cryptogram, Time to Burn, Space, The Berlin Circle and The Royal Family at Steppenwolf; Mirror of the Invisible World, The Odyssey, Griller, House and Garden at Goodman; The Cherry Orchard, Nora, The Learned Ladies and The Chairs at Court; Pacific Overtures at Chicago Shakespeare Theater; and many regional productions, including Art and Dracula at Milwaukee Repertory, Chicago at the Weston Playhouse, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Huntington Theatre, and Idiot’s Delight at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Future projects are The Violet Hour and Homebody/Kabul at Steppenwolf; Race at Lookingglass; and Present Laughter at Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Blumenfeld acknowledges that costume design–while it exists in the insular world of the play–is a naturally collaborative endeavor. She points out, however, that Zimmerman (with whom she has worked on 10 productions) "is more closely collaborative and has such a strong visual sense." The same design team works on each show, and this close relationship fosters a consistently unified–and more "communal"–vision. With other projects, Blumenfeld does not always know the other designers. So it may take a little time to get acquainted with each other’s style.
"One thing I’ve gained as a designer with Mary [Zimmerman]," she says, "is how to roll with it and allow the director a certain amount of freedom to change things. But you have to maintain that fine balance between freedom and the practical timeline of what the budget allows. You have to be an artist and a business person."
Blumenfeld cites Zimmerman’s Tony Award-winning Metamorphoses (which originated in Chicago) as an example of a long-term malleable show. An original budget of $3,000 forced the costume designer to be creative in a minimal way. The Broadway budget provided more options.
"With a show like Metamorphoses," she explains, "what often happens is that you get to the end of what you can afford. Then, during subsequent productions, you add things. You want to fully realize those earlier cheaper solutions. It’s more about augmenting than drastically changing the costumes.
Her recent collaboration with Mary Zimmerman-Philip Glass on the Goodman’s Galileo Galilei entailed a trip to Italy, where the ornamental paintings of Medici court painter Bronzino and the chiaroscuro mystery of Caravaggio’s canvases mirrored themselves in Blumenfeld’s lushly embroidered, ocher-brown-gold costumes. But, despite the luxury of abundant resources, she does not want to lose sight of the resourcefulness required of designers on leaner budgets.
"As fabulous as it is to do a show like Galileo," she admits, "it’s good to do a show at Lookingglass. I love working with gorgeous fabrics, but you can’t lose that same sense of creativity that comes with making something great out of cardboard and glue. The first show I designed in college was a kid’s play–a woodsy fairy tale with lots of critters and creatures. I went to a thrift store and bought bath mats and fuzzy toilet seat covers, which I cut up and made into these silly and colorful costumes."
Another challenge, says Blumenfeld, is achieving a seamless cohesion with scenic and lighting designers. For The Royal Family, the dense and layered set consisted of a cluttered, bric-a-brac mix of upholstery, printed wallpaper and embroidered pillows.
"Because we wanted the set to be jumbled and chaotic," she says, "I kept the costumes to a solid color."
On lighting, Blumenfeld stresses, "The lighting designer can make or break your costumes. The right color or angle can really bring out the fabric. I will give the lighting designer samples of fabric, and it’s important to be in regular communication with each other. Remember–it’s much easier for the lighting designer to change gels than for you to change the fabric."
On her current Manhattan shopping trip for Sunday in the Park with George, Blumenfeld is trying to find solutions to the challenge of "how do you take an incredible work of art [Georges Seurat’s "An Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte"] and make it a living, breathing thing?"
She also has been studying the original pointilist masterpiece at the Art Institute of Chicago–looking at it from various angles. Her concerns? "You have to be true to the original colors of the painting; and I’m looking for fabrics with multiple threads and a shimmery or model quality."
Then Blumenfeld adds, "With Sunday in the Park, the silhouettes and colors are dictated. The fun comes in with the way you interpret those basic facts."
While sketching and sewing are important skills for aspiring costume designers, Blumenfeld warns against becoming too wrapped up in these requirements. "These are essential skills you need to learn and work with for the rest of your life," she says, "My renderings are useful tools that clearly communicate my ideas to the shop. You don’t have to be Renoir. After all, the rendering cannot go up on stage. You must translate what you draw into a living thing."
Drawing, for Blumenfeld, is how she brainstorms. And, while she rarely does her own sewing now, she says that a designer must know something about how a garment is constructed in order to speak the language of the tailor or seamstress.
On the less tangible side, she encourages all artists to make a concerted effort to escape the tunnel vision that an intense production can engender.
"I go to see theatre that I didn’t work on," she states. "It’s also great to people watch, travel and go to a museum. You’re replenishing your creative well."
The designer is also attracted to the idea of affecting an audience on a subliminal level–tapping into their internal responses to color, texture, light and shape.
Costume design has allowed Blumenfeld to be an actor on a whole other level.
"As a designer," she enthuses, "I get to be on stage every night. But I don’t have to show up at the theatre."