by Cate House

t’s the dress rehearsal for PlayMakers’ production of Side Man, and up in the costume shop, Bobbi Owen is calling out orders: "Make sure you know where those pants are if I ask for them. Please don’t put a crease in that shirt—that’s not how it was done in the fifties. Help me pick out a tie clip." Then she’s out the door, down the hall faster than her assistant can keep up with her. Stopping at the men’s dressing room, she swaps the tie hanging on a rack with the new one she’s picked out and is on to the women’s dressing room. She hands a handkerchief to one of the actresses and demonstrates exactly how it should be folded in an upper right pocket.

Having designed costumes for more than 30 years for productions from Twelfth Night to The Glass Menagerie, Owen, professor of dramatic art, knows that if even one detail is out of place, the audience will notice. "Today’s audiences demand reality," Owen says. "And it’s my job to know, for instance, how women carried their lipstick in the fifties."

But it hasn’t always been that way, says Owen, who credits the reality shift to the close-ups in movies and television. Think back to Elizabethan plays. While the clothing may seem extravagant by today’s standards, most outfits were not made specifically for the theater. To represent different characters, actors would use devices such as masks. In the nineteenth century, as Owen explains in her book Costume Design on Broadway, Designers and Their Credits: 1915 - 1985, Broadway actors typically picked out their own costumes. For present-day productions, stars would simply wear their own clothes or go to Saks Fifth Avenue and buy an outfit. "There was rarely a unified look to a production," Owen says.

t wasn’t until the early twentieth century that specially designed costumes were seen as a necessity for a production. The growing number of theaters and plays being produced in New York City, along with performer demands that costumes be provided, gave rise to the modern "costume designer."

For each production, Owen starts researching months in advance. After consulting with Drew Barr, Side Man’s director, and finding out how he wanted to interpret the play and cast the characters, she started listening to and watching jazz performances to get ideas. She also looked at books on jazz history that included some of the icons—Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington. While the play begins in the 1980s, it flashes back and forth through the 50s, 60s, and 70s as a young man reminisces about his father, who is a horn player. To help differentiate among decades and get a sense of what to look for when picking costumes, Owen put together a collage for each decade using clippings from old newspapers and fashion magazines.

Next: "Does this need to be 'quick in,' or 'quick out?'

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