(1995) Burned Out City: Housing Works Theatre Project at Theater for the New City, NYC. My first professional costume design work, beyond the school setting in which costume design was part of my teaching position, brought together community work and AIDS activism with an opportunity to design costumes for an original musical created by the participants in the Housing Works Theatre Project. I joined Victoria McElwaine (Director) and the production team which included Elaine Sabal (Set Design), Joe Saint (Lighting Design), Gregg Guinta (Video Design), Choreography (Daniel Banks), and William C. Tinsley (Music and Lyrics). The cast, individuals experiencing homelessness and living with HIV and AIDS, wrote and performed in a production that shared their voices in a dystopian circus tent of a set in a mixture of Theatre of the Oppressed Augusto Boal meets Brecht-inspired serious clown play. Elaine Sabal’s immersive set with video design by Gregg Guinta playing on monitors found in shopping carts and other sculptural details, all hauntingly lit by Joe Saint, provided an evocative landscape for the cast wearing my war zone clown troupe themed costumes.
From an HX Magazine article about the show: “McElwaine says this is the Theatre Project’s edgiest and most politicized production yet. ‘All the stories come out of the cast member’s everyday experiences of fighting with the DAS, the government, their neighbors. The last song is called Wake Up Call. Hopefully the audience will stand with us, too, and engage with us in the fight again. We’re looking for the kind of energy of ACT UP in its early days.’”
Some of the cast were in permanent homes, some were without housing, and some in various stages in-between. The show, as result of six months of work together as a “harm reduction” program provided consistency of support, developing autobiographical material through writing and improvisation, stage work and meals together before rehearsal, culminating performances at Theater for the New City for a limited run in 1995 to receptive audiences and praise in news media.
As costume designer for this show, I worked very closely with each cast member to represent the archetypal role they had developed. The costumes were created with repurposed clothing from the Housing Works Thrift Store collection, working with a red, white, and blue but “dust covered” or “charred” color palette; additionally, each performer wore custom designed giant clown shoes, which I had to maintain and also make sure were “slip proof” as the physical theater comedy of the piece was very active.
Looking again, all these years later, at production photos and my sketches of the cast, I am remembering each of these incredible performers and the challenges they faced, their empowered actions of making it to rehearsal each day, and the struggles after the show opened when attention and success pressed hard against realities of their daily lives. I remember that not all the cast managed to complete the run of the show, with addiction being a tenacious foil for months of progress and effort. There were trans cast members that faced intolerance even in places that should have been a refuge from the violence encountered on the street. I worked on one more of Housing Works Theatre Projects, a fairy tale styled-work performed at the Irish Rep Theater in 1996, telling the stories of HIV-positive parents and their children. I don’t have any photos from “Mom in the Moon,” but my experience as an educator greatly helped me approach that project with care and skill in supporting the younger performers in the production.
In one of the interviews for Burned Out City, McElwaine noted: “Unlike most of Off-Broadway, ‘where friends and family are always in the audience,’ Housing Works clients are often bereft of a personal support network. Thus, the audiences who come see them are generally total strangers. By the time they leave, however, they are friends.” I am grateful for the learning this community-engaged design work provided younger me, and for the ways in which activism is still, for me, very much about the caring for others. Almost twenty-years later, I am remembering these determined people, their efforts to survive, and the art-making that provided opportunities for support, truth-telling, as they fought to make changes for themselves and for society.
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