On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to sit with our charming guest costume designer Genevieve V. Beller for A King Lear.

NC: Where do you come from?

GB: I’m currently living and working in New York City.

 

NC: So how did you come here to Harper Joy Theater?

GB: I have previously worked with Robin Smasne. She was designing a show in North Dakota

and I was brought in as a technician. We got to know each other and became friends, then she

said: “Why don’t you come and design here?” So I designed hair in 2015, and after that they

invited me back to come and design King Lear.

 

NC: What is the source of your inspiration for this production?

GB: Well, it all started with a conversation because theater is collaborative art, so the director

and I talked, and he said that we wanted to go mixed period. We didn’t want to set it in the time

it was written but we wanted to reference it. So I went to style.com, the Vogue archives, and I

looked at fashion history in the medieval era from lots of my books. I visited the Metropolitan

Museum of Art and went to the Medieval section to look at the sculptures. And I went through

old fashion magazines and ended up being really inspired for this production by the works of

Valentino. He has spent the past five years or so been really playing around with medieval

silhouettes, and that’s where the embellished sweater idea came from.

 

NC: I was very impressed with the costume designs since they are unlike any that I’ve ever

seen for King Lear. They’ve got a modern twist.

GB: It’s very much world-building. When you’re doing this period, you can’t just throw a modern

garment on stage. You have to make up rules for your world. For example, in this one, we came

up with the idea that people of lower status wear dark denim and grey and people of higher

class get to wear gold. There is a moment where a character of lower class starts out with grey

sweater with the embellishment. He is then given a jacket with gold embellishment which

signals he is moving up in the world. But if I were to put that gold on one of our other servant

characters, the whole metaphor would get mixed-up.

 

NC: That’s one interesting rule. Can you tell me more about other rules?

GB: We have a lot of mixed-gender roles in this play. Our king Lear and other several male

characters are played by women. Thus, when we decide what we should do with the hair, we

don’t want everyone just do a braid. We decide that masculine medieval hair is when you put

your hair back it’s a low pony tail. So anything higher than that level, that is the signal of a

woman. When you have something a little lower down towards the nape of the neck, this tells us

that is a men. This allows us to create different hair silhouettes for men. Also, at one point,

Lear’s hair is unbound and become loose. Because we do not rely on hair being up and tight to

signal male, when Lear’s hair is down, it doesn’t read as female. Most of the audience doesn’t

know that we have these rules, but they know when the work hasn’t gone to it, when there isn’t

any rule. You may not, as an audience member, be able to identify what all the rules and subtle

details are, but you can tell when something is off.

 

NC: Does the history of the play influence your creative process?

GB: I was definitely familiar with Lear before I came here. I also have a family member who is a

Shakespeare scholar, so I may know Lear a little bit more than an average person. It is very

interesting to look at the different ways that Lear is done. A lot of time you will see Cordelia and

the Fool being double cast and that adds a dimension. Briefly after Shakespeare’s death, there

was a vote to change the ending to a happy ending. So for a couple of decades, it was a happy

ending that people saw. Cordelia live and ruled the kingdom together with Lear, father and

daughter. Chris and I definitely discussed that history and Emily as well because this Lear in

particular makes a point to explore that history and the Lear that we know. It takes beyond the

story of an old man. The strongest choice that we made is by casting a young woman to play

Lear. It asks us as artists and also the audience to consider what else this play is about, other

than a king who is past his prime. You start to look at relationships, the politics of power and

gender roles especially. There is a video at the beginning that talks about Lear as a mother

figure. We are not used to see Lear as a parental figure that has motherly tenderness. It’s

difficult to find tenderness in Lear often and I think by casting a woman we can see that, which

makes the moments of rage so palpable.