USING COSTUMES TO HELP CREATE CHARACTER

Often the first question a young actor has is:  “What’s my costume going to look like?”  It’s important to them, but a costume should do more than just make an actress feel pretty or an actor feel cool; it should define character and enable an actor to add action to his role.  Both the performance and the young actors will benefit from paying attention to what a costume can do to help a performance. I think I can describe it best by giving some examples:

In an adaptation of the Emperor’s New Clothes, I was having trouble getting the actor playing the king to put any energy into his movements. To show his vanity, he was wearing a large wig with sausage curls, and I told him every time he moved he had to make those curls bounce up and down. The laughter of the other actors when he did this gave him the impetus he needed to create a physically hilarious character.  The wig helped him look like he was flying apart in his mad quest for clothes, even as his kingdom fell apart around him.

In the same show, I told an actress to pretend that her apron was the king’s neck. As she got more frustrated through the course of the play, she could show us her desire to wring his neck by taking it out on her apron. So although she, as a maid, couldn’t be anything but subservient to the king, her inner thoughts were obvious in how she twisted, wrung and stretched the apron.  When actors have actions such as these to perform, they lose the stiffness and timidity that is the curse of the young actor.