Hostage
Costume Designer for the Original Opera
Written + Directed by Craig Wich
Music by Sam Headrick
11th Annual Fall Fringe Festival, Boston 2007
Story + Concept
From the Playbill: “The opera is told through the dreams of Jonathan Orfeo, who is being held hostage, and his wife Laura, who is trying to free him. The plot interweaves their personal struggles with his current hostage crisis, focusing specifically on the international issue of hostage taking, while relating it to the intra- and interpersonal relationship of Jonathan and Laura. The ways in which we hold each other “hostage” in our domestic lives is expressed in the international world of nations and states and their unwillingness to communicate and find forgiveness.”
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The inspiration for my design concept came from the classic riddle, “What is black, white and red all over?” The answer: a newspaper. The wordplay between ‘red’ and ‘read’ spoke to me because the press in “Hostage” play a key role in securing Jonathan’s release. I wanted the costumes to create a narrative which mimicked this riddle, while also establishing a surrealist state of consciousness to illustrate that the account is told through a mixture of memories and dreams.. I achieved this by dressing the cast in structured suits using a greyscale color scheme, with splashes of red and yellow accessories which acted as highlighters, as if the story were a newspaper article come to life and the reader/audience member had annotated the article using a red pen and a yellow highlighter. Research examples and stills from the original production are interwoven in the slideshow above for your reference.