Theatre and Dance interviews costume designer, Sarah Mosher

TD: I just saw "Ashes, Ashes" last night. Those are some gorgeous costumes.
SM: Thank you very much.

TD: What the toughest challenges with that design?
SM: That’s a tough question to answer. The script was very challenging, because Eve [Eve Tulbert, MFA 2007, the playwright] left it very open to the imagination, she didn’t really answer questions about how the world [of the play] was conceived, or how it functioned. So it was really up to us as a design team to create a world from scratch.

TD: So this was a real collaboration.
SM: Extremely. To the point where Dustin [Wills, director], Lisa [Laratta, scenic designer], Paul [Hancock, Lighting Designer] and I really were sort of one collective mind creating this world. So many of the elements, we’d have a hard time pinpointing who thought of what, there was so much overlap.

TD: That either sounds exciting, or like enough to make you crazy.
SM: : It was fantastic, actually. It’s the reason I’m in theatre. I feel that the costumes were really successful, but the most successful part of the production was the level of collaboration, and that’s what I’m most proud of.

TD: What can you tell me about the design for the History Book character?
SM: We were trying to solve the problem that Eve had laid out for us: the record of the factory world. It’s constantly referred to throughout the production, and pieces of it are taken away and thrown down the hole. We felt that in the recycled world that we’d created, it wouldn’t be quite right to have an actual book, since the character’s name was History Book, we realized that it made the most sense for him to actually BE the book, as opposed to having a book.

TD: So that wasn’t in the text?
SM: No, in the text he actually has a book. And I had already conceived of putting writing on his suit, which is part of what led to us realizing he WAS the book.

TD: Again, collaboration.
SM: Definitely. Sarah Lankenau was the tailor on the project. She had to not only create a suit out of canvas with a thirty-foot tail, which is difficult enough, but she also had to screenprint all of the fabric. That particular aspect of the process was the most problematic for us. She and I spent a lot of time working out how to solve those problems and make it happen. I think it might also be the only fitting I’ve ever done where the actor had to be sitting for most of the fitting. We had the scenic designer in the fitting as well as me and Sarah.

TD: Did you make him sit thirty feet in the air?
SM: In our final fitting we did, to make sure everything was working properly. Although it’s twelve feet, I believe.