BWW INTERVIEWS: Costume Designer Richard St. Clair

Philadelphia costumer Richard St. Clair recently sat down with BroadwayWorld to give us his insight on the Arden's current production of Peter Pan.

Press from the show talks about the steampunk feel applied to this production of Peter Pan as coming out of your suggestions. Can you give a definition of the term steampunk?

Steampunk is also called neo Victorian. It's almost creating an alternate universe where things like nuclear power aren't used, but things like steam and electricity are. It's a contemporary look that's cross-pollinated with a Victorian look. I can't really explain the gadgets and the set aspect of it as easily. There have been certain movies and comic books that have had a great visual influence on it. The one that comes to mind is League of Extraordinary Gentleman that was sort of a revisionist take on characters like Sherlock Holmrs. There are other movies like The Golden Compass that have a slightly steampunk look.

So why this steampunk feel for the classic show Peter Pan?

Peter Pan played in Edwardian times [play was first produced in 1904]. The director [at the Arden - David O'Connor] - the first thing he said was he really wanted this to be happening now, not to be this precious, set in the past play because he wanted it to be something really volatile and able to touch kids' lives today. I thought that was a really interesting take. I had done preliminary research before I met him and so I had all these pictures of steampunk costumes that I showed him and I said 'these are contemporary, but it's kind of a use of contemporary pieces and period pieces all mixed together.'

That one conversation was a springboard for how this show took shape and then the set designer and the puppet designer took those ideas and kind of flew with them. Also this using contemporary things and cast off things just felt right. It was also the idea of the Lost Boys--even Peter Pan's costume traditionally is made of leaves sewn on the costume, so it looks like he's used found objects. So the combination of this Victorian idea and found objects started driving the beast. And the deeper we got into it and talking about each of the characters, the more we felt this concept would work for the play.

Also, we were saddled with the fact that this play has a cast of six as opposed to the original Peter Pan, which has a cast of more-like thirty. Peter Pan, Wendy and Captain Hook, as we started exploring the script, it became obvious that they needed to be played by one actor only and that they would only play those roles. And the three other actors would do everything. When the play was first performed at the Children's Theater in Minneapolis, they hired this very high-end, very beautifully done Italian shadow puppet maker to do shadow puppets for all the characters played by the other actors. Because the Arden was going to be set up as a thrust, David [the director] felt the use of shadow puppets wasn't going to be particularly useful for this production because there were going to be sightline issues for many of the people in the house. And so early on we decided that this needed to take a different direction than just being a proscenium show with shadow puppets. Then the other designers started exploring ways they could create interesting effects whether they perhaps were using shadows or not using shadows. 

I think what's brilliant about the play Peter Pan is that the first ten minutes is about your shadow, so by incorporating shadows into the play, as a conceit for the whole play, seemed to work very well. It's interesting sometimes you work on a show, I do a lot of operas mostly, and I did one show, which I won't name, but the designer wanted it to have a post-apocalyptic feel. And whether it suited the opera or not, but to my mind it was almost like we were applying a concept or conceit that didn't serve the piece. The more we explored this whole steampunk, found object concept, the more we felt very strongly that it really served Peter Pan, and is a lot about what Peter Pan and the Lost Boys being cast off is about. It started out being a neat idea, but as it grew and took on its own life we realized that it actually served the piece brilliantly.

The other thing that I added into the show, that was partially steampunk, was that because these three actors became puppeteers for much of the show and the puppets started becoming not two dimensional shadow puppets but a lot more three dimensional puppets made of, as Morgan so brilliantly called them, detritus objects, because they're all made out of cast off kitchen objects and cleaning objects. Each of the Lost Boys has a theme of what they're made from. So I brought in some research on Bunraku theater from Japan and the actual costumes worn by the puppeteers, which are all black. We started developing this idea that the three puppeteer actors who play everything, if they were dressed mostly in black they became a mostly neutral figure that we could then add one piece to or a couple pieces to, to create different characters quickly to keep this play going at a good clip. Then also when they were acting as puppeteers for these now three-dimensional puppets of the Lost Boys, they would actually be Bunraku puppeteers.

The actual costumes then developed into this mostly black steampunk feeling costume. So each person has these really cool black pants with zippers, and lace-up boots. One of the girls has a corset and another girl has a jacket covered in buckles. We didn't want there to be a completely neutral black outfit, we wanted the black outfit to tell the neo-Victorian look of the show even more so than the more iconic looks on Peter Pan and Captain Hook. (Even though we tried to give them a steampunk twist also.)

As this is a children's theater play, and you had several actors playing multiple parts, the costumes were most likely a big consideration in helping them differentiate characters. How did you address this issue?

A lot of it happened in a rather organic way, that I would go in and watch a scene in the rehearsal hall. From the first day of rehearsal, I gave them a language of clothing. So I gave them a bit apron for the woman playing the mother, a smaller apron for the girl playing Wendy and some extra long coats that they could work with however they wanted. From this language of clothes that I gave them that were rehearsal items, I sat in rehearsal and they would say 'now we're going to have everyone change from this character to this character.' And they did it for me in real time either miming putting on a piece of clothing or putting on something they had there. In a way, that triggered my imaginative juices and I then said 'what if this became this' or 'what if she put this on in this way.' It has changed in the course of the show, but originally the entire cast dressed Captain Hook from his steampunk look into Captain Hook in view of the audience. Because of time constraints, because they felt that was going on too long, they changed it to one actress changes him off to the side. It was originally a very ceremonial kind of thing.

[The costume design] was done in a very organic way, using stand-in items for items that hadn't been made yet so they could work on the rhythm of the piece. We felt that in terms of this show, it wasn't the kind of show where someone goes off stage and changes into a costume and then comes on as Captain Hook. What was exciting about this show, was that all the magic is out there for kids to see and replicate on their own. The changes became very important to this, so that if we see someone put on a jacket and then their voice changes, we see the transformation from steampunk Bunraku puppeteer to Michael, just by putting on a hoodie.

The hoodie was one of the last things added into the show because I was watching another rehearsal, and we had given Michael a teddy bear, which is iconic of the character Michael from all the illustrations of Peter Pan. But then I felt he needed to thematically in terms of palette be tied more closely in with Wendy, so we decided he needed something to put on. So I wanted something more contemporary for kids, and I had a gray blue hoodie in my closet at home that felt right for the show and so I brought it in and it's actually now in the show.

I think one of the most clever transformations in the play is in Act Two, the actor Dave Sweeney has gone into the belly of the ship, and he goes down as Smee. They tell Smee 'bring up the Lost Boys and let's see who's going to walk the plank' and then the Lost Boys are brought up in this giant net, so you see all these pieces of junk in the net. When they're lowered they say 'now bring up that kid,' so he goes down in the hole and changes into that hoodie down underneath the theater and comes back in his hoodie as Michael, and then he goes down in the hole and comes right back up again in his little glasses and his tricorne [three-cornered hat], which are the costume pieces for Smee. It's the magic of theater, where this same actor just keeps popping his head up and he's very believably these different characters.

The hoodie became iconic of Michael and what a young person would wear. Obviously they didn't wear a sweatshirt with hood in Victorian times, but it added something for the kids, like what the kids would wear, a contemporary touch. And because he was playing a kid, we didn't feel the need to steampunk that up like by sewing on gears.

There's a transformation where Sarah, who's one of the puppeteers, is Tootles, she goes through the door of the underground hideout of the Lost Boys and her steampunk pirate hat, which is a tricorne with a skull emblazoned bandana tied around it, is waiting for her on the stage.  So she goes through the door, she plunks that hat on, she comes around the corner in full view of the kids and now she's a pirate. Seeing the process was very important in terms of encouraging children to use their imaginations in the best possible way.

After the show in the Q&A a lot of the kids were asking where you got the costumes; the actor playing Peter revealed some secrets but are their any interesting stories you can share?

The fabric for Captain Hook's jacket was given to me when they were finished making the movie The Last Airbender, here in Philadelphia. I had been working in the costume shop the last few weeks of that movie and they had some scraps of fabric they were getting rid of and I was like 'gimme gimme,' especially anything that was green. There was this really weird, somewhat steampunk feeling black and red fabric, it almost looks like red paint was put on the wheels of a bicycle and the fabric was ridden over by the bicycle, it had a really interesting texture to it. We didn't want just the iconic red jacket on Captain Hook. Because the set is rather dark and this whole world is rather dark with these people dressed in black, we wanted everything to have blackness to it, more so than Disney colors. The whole coat was designed around the fact that [actor] Frank X has a fabulous figure and really wears clothes beautifully, so it was a very cut tight to the body jacket. It was inspired by an illustration I found of steampunk Star Wars, Darth Vader was wearing this really cool pirate jacket. And then I was thinking wouldn't it be really cool if the buttons were skulls, because in that house when you do details, a good portion of the audience can really see those details well because they're close to the stage, and because the kids were really close to the actors in the lobby, I thought it would be really cool to have these skull buttons.

I spent several days online and everything was either too expensive or too big or too small. And I was shopping in New York and there's an amazing store on 46^th Street called Metalliferous, and it's a store of junk findings. I guess it's mostly for the jewelry trade, but costume people use it a great deal. There are bins with things in them, like the clocks on Dave Sweeney's vest, the clock faces came from there. And one of the stage crew guys has a vest trimmed in clock keys that also came from there. But there on this rack in Metalliferous were twenty-three rhinestone-crusted skulls that were exactly the size and scale of what I had drawn on my sketch. And also on my sketch were two belt buckles [with skull and crossbones from Daffy's that I had found in like October. It's funny but you can kind of find steampunk items  in stores right now. He has a sash that has these two belt buckles on it and they read very well from the audience. So there became this skull and crossbones theme for his jacket. Those pendants are heavy so that jacket weighs a ton when he puts it on.

As you mentioned, the stage crew is also all in costume for this show, so was that a challenge having to costume them to fit the steampunk look as well?

As we started talking about this idea that we might see someone here or there, I gave myself the assignment of dressing them as well because it felt like they were going to be very intrinsic to the whole motion of the show so we didn't want someone dressed in their own version of stage blacks. I'm also a big control freak, so I thought if I could dress them, then I'd have absolute control over what they wear. Plus, the only one of the stage crew I knew before was Eric Snell, who is this 6-foot-3, red headed Viking of a man and I thought it would be really cool to see him in his steampunk costume pulling on ropes. This whole idea of there not being stage magic, of seeing people really pull ropes that do things and push buttons that do things, [made it] important early on that the stage hands live in the same steampunk world as everyone else. They even double as pirates in one scene where they steal the Lost Boys because the three actors who are everything are being the Lost Boys at the time.

Any upcoming projects that our readers should know about?

I'm designing a very exciting project called Golden Age for the Philadelphia Theatre Company. It's the world premier of the new Terrence McNally play and it plays here in Philadelphia and then it goes to the Kennedy Center for several weeks in March.

Peter Pan plays at the Arden now through January 31st.

Check out the BroadwayWorld review here.

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