Talk about a production.Bringing to life the 17th century comedy "Tartuffe" - with its sumptuously tiered dresses, poofy wigs and steel-boned corsets - is no small feat.
You can't buy the time-sensitive regalia this show demands. In fact, you can't even buy the patterns to sew the costumes that make this play a visual feast.
So where in Missoula do you find technicians trained in the art of 17th century dressmaking? At the University of Montana, of course, where 50-some students learned costume-making skills while at the same time producing all of the outfits and accessories for the play's 12 characters.
Talk about pressure. Each student had just over two months to pull off their assignments. This week, their work goes center stage for all to see.
"Tartuffe," Jean-Baptiste Moliere's most popular work, performed by UM's Department of Drama and Dance, opens on Tuesday in the Montana Theatre. It is the story of an aristocratic family in Paris who is mesmerized by a scheming criminal posing as a man of great religious integrity.
Costuming plays a significant role in defining Moliere's characters and shaping the actors' movements on stage, said Wendy Stark, UM professor of costume design and technology.
"We create the first five minutes of an audience's experience and their interpretation of a play's characters - and then the actors take over," Stark said. "Everything the audience will see on stage we have built from scratch or modified for this show - everything."
What does "everything" mean? It means everything on an actor from head to foot - breeches, jackets, skirts, dresses, shoes, shirts, hats, capes, garters, stockings, petticoats, vests, corsets and wigs.
To pull off the period piece, planning for the play began last spring, with Stark researching the fashion of 17th century Paris and drawing outfits for each character.
From vision to reality was the work of 40 novice and intermediate costuming students, some of whom had never threaded a needle before fall semester.
The most difficult skills - corset and wig making - fell to Stark's advanced costuming students, who learned about the process in a new fall semester course called "Body Manipulation through Historical Corsetry," which was created to help produce "Tartuffe." Wig-making instruction was provided by Angelina Herin, UM's costume shop manager.
While pattern making, sewing and fitting are routinely required of professional theater technicians, corset making is nearly a lost art - a skill few people can list on their resume.Learning the art of corset making is a formidable challenge, Stark said, but it will serve her students well.
"We are a learning institution, and they need experience," she said. "Technicians in all our fields of costuming have been in shorter and shorter supply, and there are jobs out there in professional theaters for these students. If they learn the skills we are teaching here, they can go and work anywhere."
It takes a pro skilled in corset making about 40 hours to make one corset; it took Stark's students about 80 hours each.
Making one begins with precise measurements of each actress, followed by pattern making for a "mock-up" corset, which is made of muslin and fitted to an actress, explained Lela O'Bryant, a UM junior. When those steps are completed, work begins on the real thing - a steel-boned, flesh-compressing bodice made of heavy twill cotton."It is an incredible process," O'Bryant said. "One of the most amazing things about the corsets is seeing how they change an actress' shape. They really do make a big difference in how people look and how they carry themselves."
Although they had to wrestle with the unfamiliar creation process, students couldn't dawdle making the corsets. The actresses in "Tartuffe" needed to wear them during rehearsal for about three weeks in order to learn how to carry themselves while being constricted.
Often, they found themselves working together late into the night trying to perfect their handiwork in the basement of the PAR-TV Center.
Creating the wardrobes had numerous challenges which contributed to the long days, O'Bryant said.
"There's a whole lot more volume to the clothing from the 17th century, and things like pleats and arm seams are sewn in different places than we are used to," she said. "All of the women's skirts, for example, have over 16 yards of fabric in two skirts - and that includes an overskirt, an underskirt and a petticoat.
"It is really different from what women wear today - normally there's about 3 to
4 yards in a skirt."
Creating the costuming for a scheduled show with a firm deadline just weeks away is a powerful way to learn, said Brynn Moll, a UM junior.As she worked through the final days leading to the dress rehearsal, Moll said, "I have my moments when I have so much to do it really freaks me out, but I generally try to take one step at a time and everything works out."
To thrive in any costume shop, the trick is to find and perfect the skills that don't drive you insane, she said. "Wendy said my lesson this year is to learn patience - and I am with wig making."
Ten wigs were needed for "Tartuffe," and in order to make a wig for each character, replicas of the 10 actors' heads were made - including the exact mapping of their hairlines.
It was a complicated,
time-consuming process that involved Saran Wrap, a measuring tape, colored markers and wadding to make a mold with the exact dimensions of each actor's head, Moll said. Once the mold was crafted, each strand of hair was hand-tied into a cloth mesh placed over the mold. When all of the hair was in place, the wig was steamed and coiffed according to the look of each character.
"There are no books out there to tell you how to do this, and that's one of the things I love about it," said Herin, the costume shop manager who learned the craft at the hands of masters while working in professional theater.
"You explore and experiment a little bit, trying to figure out how the wig will turn out the way you want it to," she said. "You use photos and drawings if you can to help guide you. It's a process a lot like doing hook rugs, but on a microscopic scale."
Moll said learning how to make wigs was fun, and made for an exciting semester in the costume shop.
"Our program is like the equivalent of a master's degree program because it is so in-depth," she said. "And everything we do we can take a picture of it and put in our portfolios to show people.
"Everything we have worked on and done here makes us very employable, which is why we all work so hard."
Taking a break from pattern work, junior Sarah Pac dramatically announced to the sewing room: "My dream job is stitching for 'Cirque du Soleil.'
"I know, it's a big, big dream," she said, "but it's what I want."
From across the room, Stark chimed in: "Get practicing."
The students laughed at their professor's humorous nudge to stay on task.
With showtime just days away, there was no time to waste.
"We have about two hours of personal time," she said. "We live in a state of constant vigilance of what needs to be done. Who can do it?"
Brynn Moll styles one of the 10 wigs that will be worn in “Tartuffe.” “Our program is like the equivalent of a master's degree program because it is so in-depth,” says Moll, a UM junior.
Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at bcohen@missoulian.com.
Reach photographer Michael Gallacher at 523-5270 or at mgallacher@missoulian.com.
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