A Look at Costume Design Interview with David Zinn
Ted Sod, Education Dramaturg, sat down with costume designer David Zinn to discuss his design for Look Back in Anger.
Ted Sod: When did you realize you wanted to design for the theatre? Tell us about yourself and your education. David Zinn: I was just reading Sam’s interview in American Theatre and he said somewhat facetiously, “like everyone in the theatre, I started as an actor.” And I too, like everybody, started as an actor. I was under the misapprehension for a while that that’s what I wanted to do. I had a family that was very supportive of my interest in the theatre. I grew up on Bainbridge Island outside Seattle and had a lot of theatre available to me: community theatre and a rich Seattle theatre scene in the early ‘80s. Importantly for me, they had just reopened the 5th Avenue Theatre in 1980 and it was reopened with a tour of Annie, which my parents took me to see. I loved it and how all the scenery moved. I remember that made me think theatre was great. I went home and made my own little model of the set. I quickly became fascinated with backstage, how things happened behind the set. Through high school I designed and performed and I was lucky to do things outside of high school that fostered this passion. There was a woman named Susie Burdick who ran this theatre company on the island, and when I was in 8th grade I asked if I could show her my ideas for a show we were doing and she said sure. Susie tapped into my enthusiasm and honed it, fostered it. So by the time I left high school, I knew I wanted to be a designer and I applied to NYU as a set and costume designer as an undergrad, although all of the design courses were in the grad program. I did this weird thing where I was in the graduate design program; but I got my BFA and I did it in four years.
TS: Let’s talk about Look Back in Anger. Both Sam Gold, the director, and Matthew Rhys, who plays Jimmy, have spoken to me and they’ve had similar takes on the play. What do you think this play is about? DZ: My least favorite question—I don’t know what the play is about. In general, I really don’t think about what plays are about. I don’t understand how to think like that. I don’t say that churlishly; I’m just never interested in defi ning that. I’m interested in watching the people in the play. Period. I think the intensity of the love story, which crosses the line into hatred, is a fascinating situation. I think it’s so beautifully articulated: the hunger that these people have for each other. With Look Back in Anger, I knew it was an “angry young man” play from the ‘50s, but I’d never seen it and never read it before I was asked to design it. There was so much passion in it that I found moving. It’s a beautiful, intense love story to me, and extreme in the way that beautiful love stories are. And, you know, I have huge respect for Sam, so I was excited that he was excited about it.
TS: What’s your process? I’m sure it’s different for a contemporary piece, but this is a period piece. DZ: I think about costumes for every show, period or not, as though I was going to go shopping for them.
TS: You become the characters? DZ: Yeah, or I “channel” the characters. It’s such a nutso thing, to go into a store and imagine you’re one, or two, or three different characters and fi gure out what they’d like, what they’d shop for, what would catch their eye. So, yeah, I become the characters and I also try and fi gure out how to create a wardrobe for them. A closet that they/we can pick from. The possibilities available to you, when you’re doing a modern show, can be really inspiring, and so even when I am doing a period piece, I try to think of the clothes in this way: I try and build a “rack” to pull from, to try to make things look like a person’s choices from their closet and not a drawing on a page. I’m also really interested in how people wear clothes – not in the catalog, but in real life – what happens to them once someone gets their hands on them and makes their own ‘outfi t’. For Look Back in Anger, I started thinking about Nan Goldin, the photographer.
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Charlotte Parry and Sarah Goldberg. Photo by Joan Marcus.
TS: She seems like the modern Diane Arbus to me. DZ: I think she and Diane Arbus have very different agendas, and I think Goldin captures people when their passions have become extreme. Also, what I like about her photographs from the ‘80s is that, with the kind of East Village person she was documenting, it was cool to wear 1950’s clothes. So it’s interesting to watch relatively modern people wearing period clothes, and for me, that’s my way into how to think about this show. It’s not a costume. It’s not like, “It’s a ‘50s thing, so it has piping on the collar.” It’s more like: “I’ve been living with this guy, my things are dirty, I don’t want my things to match and I’ve thrown away the privileged life I’ve come from.” I want the clothes to feel like those people felt, like the Nan Goldin photos. There’s also a British photographer named Roger Mayne who also did a collection of photos called Southam Street, and they felt similar. I just want it to feel like the characters grabbed these things themselves.
TS: Will your designs be built? DZ: Who knows how it’ll end up, but we will probably build some things. We do have some ideas about needing some color. Especially with Helena, we’ll want the sense of some strong color coming into this environment. In addition, she hasn’t done to herself what Alison has done living with Jimmy, so I want her to feel alien in a couple of ways, and color is part of that. I would like to be open to using things we fi nd for her, but I just expect if we fi nd it, it’s going to be black, blue, or maybe gray. And I need her to have some more “oomph” to her.
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