"If a reviewer flatters my costume design in the first couple of sentences of his critique, then I know I've failed to do my job," says Virgil Johnson one of the most sought-after designers in Chicago and throughout the country. A professor of Costume Design at Northwestern University, Johnson has designed award-winning costumes for countless productions, including The Government Inspector, A Little Night Music, and The Libertine.
"My work should not be whistled. I'm designing for an ensemble effort. I'm not trying to create a runway show, where the costumes come out one at a time and are to be admired! You see, it's more flattering if a reviewer perceives the costume design as a part of a very carefully constructed whole."
Johnson's latest contribution to an "ensemble effort" is Love's Labor's Lost, the first production to open Chicago Shakespeare Theater's 2002-2003 season. The play centers around King Navarre and his three clever courtiers who forswear all worldly pleasures for three years while pursuing the more cerebral subjects of study and contemplation. No sooner is their ascetic oath sworn than it is swayed by the arrival of the Princess of France, with her three ladies-in-waiting. When the gentlemen's bookish studies give way to secret letters and amorous vows, the women armed with a will and wit of their own teach the men a thing or two about true love, until life intervenes with a lesson for them all.
This particular production of Love's Labor's Lost will be set in the in 1913, just before the First World War, in order to showcase the innocence of the male characters...the kind of innocence that can only exist before experiencing the tragedy of war.
"Barbara [ Gaines ] , who is directing the play, and I have been informally discussing doing this for years and when it was decided that it would open the season, she asked me if I could create designs that would support her vision: to sort of recreate the romantic, natural settings of the Philadelphia artist Maxfiled Parrish. Parrish's work has been very vogue-ish lately. He painted these wonderful landscapes and vistas with all this incredible foliage and used what I refer to as a palette of feminine colors...pinks, lavenders, soft golden sunsets ... it's all quite thrilling. Now, when Parrish has people in his landscapes they are generally very Peter-Pan-like, like little sprites with chiffon shirts, sort of sitting around daintily clothed. The challenge was to dress the men, who traditionally wore suits in early 20th century ( men's wear hasn't changed that much over the last 100 years ) within this Parrish-context."
Johnson's solution to this creative dilemma? Dress them all in white! "I've never done a play where I have put all the men in white for the entire production," he says, his voice trilling with excitement. "But I wanted to have something to counter point [ Michael ] Philippi's wonderful palette, so that the audience's eye is focusing on the performer, as it should be. It's one of the tips in my bag of tricks, using white, because the characters sort of glow in front of the audience. White commands tremendous focus. And of course Robert's [ Perry ] lighting design is very important here, and that is another trick of the biz, because the lighting reveals and enhances what you have on stage. If I've done my job well, he will be able to enhance it. And he was totally undaunted by the fact that I am using white."
The key to insuring your "labor of love isn't lost," whether it's mounting a Shakespeare play of any other production, according to Johnson, is to have all the creative elements of costume design, scenic design and lighting work together under the guidance of the director and what they are doing on stage.
The way a production "looks" is also influenced by one other ( less vocal ) member of the creative team: the stage.
"I've designed operas at the Lyric, I've done shows at the Goodman, Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens ... the point is, is that each theater has a different audience size and fosters a different relationship between the audience and the actor, and these have different requirements of what I put on the stage in terms of scale. Color arrangements from 60 feet away have a certain boldness that up close look garish. For the Shakespeare Rep, the audience is five feet away and so you would design from a much more subtle stand point. And the finished product has to be quite good, because the audience can actually see any irregularities in it."
As individuals file out of a theater, generally one of the comments savvy theater-goers will whisper to each other concerns the show's costume design. Though Johnson would prefer the show to be recognized as a more collaborative creative effort, he understands why audiences react so immediately to the costumes.
"Intellectually, clothing is the closest thing [ on stage ] to our own personal lives. We create ourselves every day. Every morning we make the decision of who I am going to be today ... will it be blue jeans or a nice pair of wool slacks? Consequently, when we are watching human behavior on stage we are fascinated by how and why people look the way they do."
Johnson says he has always wanted to design costumes, beginning with the clay models of people he made as a child, or "small person," to use his phrasing.
"Then I remember my father bought me a coloring book that had the costumes of the nations ... and I was galvanized by it all. I grew up in Minnesota, where there was no theater, and so when it was time to go to college I was sent away to Boston where I enrolled in Boston University's theater department. I didn't even know there WAS a career in costume design at that point!"
Fortunately for audiences in Chicago and across the country, Johnson would soon realize that the coloring book of costumes given to him by his father was in many ways, not only a career, but his one true destiny.
Love's Labor's Lost, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Sept 6-Nov. 17.
