Design Statement

This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place in Athens, Ohio in the year 1969. I ultimately was tasked with costume designing for the group traditionally known as the “Mechanicals” or the “players-within-the-play.” Our director, Oliver Mayes, ultimately wanted to take the typical retelling of Midsummer and flip it on its head, which included completely reinventing who the Mechanicals were. Through the themes of love and its many shifting forms, Oliver began to define the worlds of the play and their characteristic look, and between the staunch upkeep of the Rulers, the optimistic Lovers, and the acid-tripping Fairies laid the Mechanicals, now removed from their traditional job titles to become the “Artisans,” a group of we came to describe as “trust fund hippies.” In this, this group of players came to be defined as a college theatre troupe whose parents could afford to send them to college but all they really wanted to do was put on plays and smoke in the woods. 

Through this reinvention I came to three goals/themes I wanted to accomplish while designing for this show: collaboration between myself, the director, and the actors who were building their characters, creating references of each character’s play-within-the-play costume into their main look, sort of like easter eggs to look out for, and lastly creating varying degrees of “hippie-ness” within the group of artisans in order to create a wider ensemble of styles, textures, and patterns to both individualize and harmonize the group.