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Continuing our plan to give you a peek backstage, I’d like to introduce you to Emilie Rommel Shimkus, who will be playing the part of Stella in our upcoming production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Emilie had an interesting morning this week. But let her tell you about it herself…

Ask just about any actor, and they’ll tell you: The best part about acting is the chance to “try on” someone new. The most important part of creating a character is learning how to pull on someone else’s skin and get into their head and heart. You try on their emotions, their situation– you see how it all fits, wear it around the block, and you get ready to show off your new skin on stage.

Ok, so you’ve gotten that far (which is hard work!)… but no matter how much you feel the part, most audiences want to see you look the part too. The look of the actors on stage goes a long way to creating the universe of a play. And that’s where the second best thing about acting comes in: The excuse to play dress up.

For the upcoming production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the production team decided that Stella should be blonde, like her sister Blanche. Well, I’m a brunette in the real world. With very long hair right now that never wants to hold curl for a vintage hairstyle. And –because I don’t want to damage my own, everyday, real-world hair too much– I’m not ready to bleach it all out… so what to do?

Call in the costumer! It’s wig time!

This morning, Sarah Mosher, our fantastic Costumer and Hair Designer plunked me down in a chair and took all kinds of crazy measurements of my head. Temple to temple. Ear to ear over forehead. Jaw to jaw behind neck. It looked something like this:

Then she swathed my head in saran wrap and scotch tape, leaving just my ponytail sticking out the back. Once my whole head was a little helmet of clear wrapping materials, she sketched on my hairline. “Hey we could call it A SPACESHIP Named Desire!” (She did give me a courtesy chuckle for that.)

See, Sarah knows some people in the wig-biz. She’s going to send all the weird little head-measurements and the “wig-tracing” (aka, saran/tape helmet) off to her friends. They’ll find and dye some natural human hair and then handcraft the wig.

Here’s a picture of the kind of look she’s going for:

As you might expect, Sarah knows a lot about costumes and hair and make-up. She told me that, apart from the saran wrap and tape part of it, wig-making is an art that has hardly changed since the Victorian era. “It’s one of those rare things that hasn’t gotten better with technology.”

(All kind of neat pictures and information on how wigs are made right here: http://www.makeup-fx.com/perukmakeri1eng.html)

Master wig-makers today take the same measurements they did 500 years ago. The saran/tape helmet is “nice additional information,” but it’s not the most important part. And at least for wigs made of human hair instead of synthetic fibers– the actual construction is largely the same too. Lace, hair of course, some ribbons, and maybe some wire, and… voila! A new personality, just waiting to be tried on!

I’m really excited to be a blonde for awhile (it’s actually my natural shade), and to see how it will help us show the audience that Blanche and Stella are family. Also, by making the sisters look alike at first glance, maybe it will make it more interesting for the audience to discover their differences over the course of the play? We’ll see.

In any case, at the end of the each performance, I’ll get to the third best part about acting. The moment you take off a new skin, put it away neatly, and get back to being the one character you’ve spent your whole life creating: You.