TOP GIRLS, Caryl Churchill's groundbreaking play includes characters from several different centuries, as well as the challenge of creating costumes for actors playing multiple roles. Laura Bauer, a frequent MTC artist, sat down with Marketing Associate Andrea Paul to talk about the challenges of creating costumes for this particular production as well as what inspires her signature realistic style.

AP: How did you become interested in costume design as a career and what was your path to being a costume designer?

LB: I have always been interested in being a costume designer, even as a little kid, but in high school I started to get really into it. I went to an average school filled with really remarkable people, and all these people from the drama department are still working professionally. Joe Mantello was an actor who was a couple years older than me, Bob Greenblatt - who now runs Showtime and is working on the musical 9 to 5 with Joe - was a stage manager, and Jodie Benson, another actor, later played the title role in the film The Little Mermaid. We didn’t realize we were all in really good company when we were young. We got into theatre at the same time and then ended up working in the same capacity as adults. I went to the University of Illinois for costume design and have been designing ever since - a lot of the time keeping the same company from high school! We’ve all branched off and worked with other people, but we still come back to work together.

AP: That’s so fantastic! I noticed that you’ve designed a number of productions at Manhattan Theatre Club including last season’s Blackbird. What do you notice in your approach when you’re designing a show with two characters with one look each versus many characters with several looks? Do you find that the way you design changes?

LB: Over the years the way I do my designs has adapted to include the input of the actors. It is important for me to see how an actor is going to play a certain role rather than first telling them how they dress and then having them perform based on my visual representation. I like to hear or see in rehearsal how someone is going to play a role. Maybe someone is going to play something in a really fatherly way, maybe they’re going to play something in a very corporate way, or maybe somebody’s going to be strung out. It didn’t make sense to me anymore to decide what people were wearing without considering the way they were going to portray the character.

When a show is just two people, you can approach it two different ways. You can say “There’s one right thing and it has to be perfect,” or you can think of that person’s closet and the world they live in and what were they doing that day. In Blackbird, Una was driving for a long time - would she wear comfortable clothes or would it be more important to her that she was going to see this person from her past in a specific outfit? That choice will tell the audience something. Now, if I were going to get in a car for five hours, I wouldn’t wear a dress, so it must have been really important to her to look that way if she chose to do that. I considered her age and if she knew how to walk in heels. When I work, I go through a list of things and put the design together like a puzzle. When there are only two characters onstage you have to be really specific about details because the audience is going to be looking at those two people for a really long time. You have to make sure there are idiosyncratic personal pieces for each character so the audience never questions a character’s authenticity. You also have to be really careful with your color palette because it’s going to be so present. It has to suit the set and the characters without being distracting.

AP: I was curious how you researched for Top Girls. What was your process?

LB: In Top Girls, there are characters that are “famous” but they’re not the most famous female characters in history, so although they all have books written about them, they aren’t necessarily books that you’ve read. It’s not like a biography of Jane Austen . If you mention Lady Nijo, people say “I have no idea who that is,” but there are all kinds of writings and books on each of these ladies. Reading all those books reminded me of a college exercise. My associate Bobby Tilley is really interested in pattern construction and period costumes. He used to be a curator at the museum for FIT; he’s also a really brilliant draper and tailor, and as a result, did all this fantastic period investigation. We read these books, we found all kinds of photo documentation and paintings, and then we put them all together and chose a color palette based on the Bruegel painting that Dull Gret comes from so that they would all sort of live in the same world. But the costumes are pretty true to historical research.

AP: Do you find yourself looking to visual art a lot when you design?

LB: No, I don’t. I’ll go through times when I do but I usually work from the character first. My research is sociological, psychological, or character driven. I work a lot from what I see on the street. I’m constantly taking pictures of people on the street and putting them into my phone so that later when I design a homeless person and someone says “That’s so unreal,” I can just click to a photo and say, “Really? Because there it is.”

AP: When you were looking at the differences between American 1980’s versus British 1980’s, what was the challenge of articulating those differences, if any?

LB: We looked at period fashion magazines from England and France and Sears catalogs. I always want to have a source that would be realistic for a lower income level. Socioeconomic levels can create dramatic differences in terms of what people are wearing. I pointed out specific items that were popular in the USA in the 1980s to James Macdonald and asked him if the same trends were popular in 1980s Britain. I looked at slight regional variations in fashion, but the development changed from character to character. For example, the character of Joyce would be much more out of date or out of step fashion-wise than her sister; she’d also have a sort-of have a low rent quality to her clothes because she just didn’t have any money to invest in her clothing. Instead of her hair being an asymmetrical bob like her sister who lives in the city and actively follows trends, Joyce might still wear a shag haircut from the 70s.

AP: What has your experience of collaborating with James Macdonald been like?

LB: He’s been really sweet and really helpful. When he has something to say on a subject, he’s very clear. When I showed him renderings he seemed to be really positive, almost like a film director. Lots of times film directors get involved when they see something they don’t like, while theatre directors have a tendency to walk with you step by step through everything they do and don’t like. James would only step in if there was something that wasn’t quite jiving, but other than that he just let my concepts flow. If there was a problem, James would step in and say things from the character’s point of view and then let me adapt it rather than just saying a statement like “I really don’t like blue.”

AP: Would you say both of you were always looking through the eyes of the character or examining the motivation of the character?

LB: Yes. This is the first time that we’ve worked together. The first time that we met, I had already been hired, James had sent Tom Pye, the set designer, to meet with me because he was out of town. I was hired before James ever got to meet me so we are lucky that we get along so well.

AP: With the double casting for different characters have you found any connection via costumes between the first character and the second character that people are playing?

LB: That’s an interesting question. We were thinking about that, but I didn’t go that way. I’ll tell you why: the thing that I specialize in, and why people hire me is not because I make things that are the most beautiful, but because I make things that are real. If somebody wants something to look absolutely real, then they come to me. Even though these historical characters are not current, they need to be real. James wanted them to look as though they could have just gotten off the bus. I don’t want things to have a “theatricality” to them, so I didn’t link any characters through the color palette. Later while speaking with Caryl Churchill, she noted that there was no connection between characters and double casting – theaters can’t afford to hire 17 actors for one production. Martha is wearing this chartreuse-gold color as Pope Joan and I could easily have had the little girly dress she wears as Angie be chartreuse, gold or even 80s primary yellow, but I just didn’t want to have those little “hooks” from character to character.

AP: Based on your design process and what I’ve seen of the other production elements, would you say that the costumes are the most realistic design element of the production?

LB: It’s true. James wants things to look very real. Because the set is more abstract, the costumes will be grounding the show. The 1980s have just recently become a historical period. If a show is in the 1920s, you can put a 1930s sweater on a character and no one will notice, but you can’t do that when everyone is literally an expert on the period – which everyone will be. Everyone in the audience knows these fashion trends so you can’t get anything by them.