by Charlene Gross
Assistant Professor of Costume Design, Penn State School of Theatre

If this year were like any of my past 20 years, this weekend would mark my third opening night of the summer season. Damn Yankees, which would open this week at the 2020 Ohio Light Opera, is a production that will never be. Theatrical designers, performers, directors, stage managers, technicians work all the time. We work as a team. For most of us, the summer is a busy season when our audiences attend festivals across the country.

Perhaps some of you will agree with me regardless your discipline. It is not the social isolation which is so strange; it is the abrupt appearance of weeks without any production demands. And with those lost demands, a gnawing need to work. Stay sharp. Participate in producing something.

What am I to do with all this time? With all my skills? How do I help my community? What do I have to offer?

I’m a costume designer. I design and make real clothing for imaginary people. Before arriving at Penn State, I was known as a go-to person to collaborate on complicated costumes. I have enjoyed building costumes with special effects, and costumes which could survive punishing production demands and dance movements at the extremes of human flexibility, all in the service of a larger team.

Theatre is all about collaboration, but suddenly being forced to pause from constant production, I realized my collaborators reached far beyond the stage. I’ve worked on and designed over 200 shows, but I’ve also collaborated with visual artists on installation pieces. I designed outfits for use in the Joshua Tree National Forest designed to survive rattlesnake bites to shins and arms. I designed light weight clothing with ice packs built in for endurance athletes. I worked with PhD chemists setting up fake crime scenes for CSI students’ final exams (a good workout for special effect makeup skills)! I consulted with a public defender office on clothing choices for clients facing trial, developed comprehensive SfX scars that reproduce the effects on the body of surviving an F3 tornado, and worked with industrial companies on best choices in uniforms for ergonomics and chemical handling safety at EPA Superfund sites. I contemplated how many odd ways I have shared my skills, built over my career in costume design, with the world outside of costume design.

So as Covid-19 hit, and every one of my upcoming theatre, dance and opera shows were cancelled, I looked around to see how my skills could help.

Of course I can sew. That’s easy for me. And cloth masks? Well, there was debate of their usefulness for the first 2+ weeks but I knew something was better than nothing, so I began to sew. Requests first came from friends and family. Then members of my own department at Penn State. Then multiple departments. Eventually from across the entire University.

I like to organize people. We had a lot of scrap material in the PSU costume stock. I organized our graduate costume students and costume staff into mask making teams. We have now produced over 3000 masks and organized distribution to dozens of business units at Penn State, and dozens of community organizations across the state and region.

I did what any good theatre person does—I figured out how to solve a series of problems. I budgeted time and money. I used my limited resources. I phoned friends. I got great advice.

As I reached out, expanding the network of who we helped, and who helped us, I met the amazing group at the Manufacturing and Sterilization for COVID-19 (or MASC). They were taking on problems as they arose across the state and region. I offered my expertise.

I was asked if it was possible to use construction Tyvek to make respirator hoods. They had one example of a commercial hood. They potentially needed hundreds of them. I told them I had a friend and former student who had built the costumes out of Tyvek at Santa Fe Opera. So, I did what I do with a tricky costume problem; I called a friend (Ashley Bellet) to get her insight on best practices for sewing Tyvek.

I was asked to figure out how to help a headband to stay on the head properly, and provided headband input for a 3D printed face shield.

I was then tasked to develop a flat pattern, both digital and paper, for a Level III surgical gown for Susan Purdum. I did it with my graduate student, Alyssa Ridder over Zoom, working methodically through the measurements of a gown that took up half of my living room floor.

Then an email popped up asking if I knew of someone in theatre who works with makeup. I’d be the person. I teach stage makeup for School of Theatre every semester. The question of how to remove makeup from the now highly valued N95 masks they were sterilizing for reuse came up. Well, I can remove makeup from most fabrics, but the N95 mask is a highly oleophilic fiber which binds the oils from the skin and makeup doesn’t release oils. I offered to try if they sent me a few masks, suggested possibly an industrial surfactant would work, but the easiest solution in my mind? Ask the wearers to not wear makeup. Touchy, I know (I work with performers!) but it may be worth asking to see if that helps with some of the issues. Guess what the solution was?

Let me pause here and say, for my first two and half years at PSU, I’ve worked with amazing colleagues. Best in the field of theatre. But to do things which are truly interdisciplinary, while theoretically encouraged, is really hard given the demand on all of our time. Between course loads, production loads, mentoring student designers, designing shows myself, outside creative research, recruiting… there is little time to work on other things. Let alone find others in the University who want to do the same. The first three years have been about navigating Penn State and demands of my day-to-day academic job.

Suddenly, with performance production stopped, and having fortuitously found the MASC team I was working among 300+ engineers, surgeons, epidemiologists, materials scientists, airflow engineers, proto-typers, business procurement experts and 3D printing technicians with amazing skills, many of which were completely outside of my prior experience.

But my skills were completely outside of theirs, and much needed to meet several of their goals.

Now I have become part of this astounding group of problem solvers. I read our daily MASC reports on innovations in testing, containment, process and treatment, and marvel at how many people with novel skills have contributed.

I hope someday soon to once again be designing real clothes to put on imaginary people in the theatre, but in the meantime I am continuing to expand my skills, and, I believe, expand to many other people how valuable the thinking and process of theatrical design can be, when applied to many other demanding tasks. I have met some amazing people during this process, and was deeply honored, even embarrassed, when my colleagues awarded me one of the MASCed Marvel Awards for our COVID response. They cited my unique contributions to developing protective clothing and organizing cloth masks when supplies were extremely difficult to find. I am personally humbled, but extremely proud I was able to represent our Theatre and Performance community to the larger world in this way.

We are Theatre people. This is what we do.

Stay Safe.  Wear a Mask*.  We will get through this.

*If you don’t have one, send me an email and I’ll make sure you have one or 25 within 24 hours.