Sarah McCarroll, MFA, PhD

Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega

Costume Design; Georgia Southern University Spring 2012

This production of Lope de Vega’s seventeenth century play was reset to the period of the Spanish Civil War; the director based her concept on Picasso’s famous painting Guernica and asked the designers to use this image as their starting point. I had two immediate responses to this conceptual starting point. The first was to create a very tightly controlled color palette, one comprised of black, blue, grey, and white. The exceptions to this narrow band of color were strategic: the wedding party featured deeply saturated reds drawn from research into traditional Basque costuming. In addition to adding warmth to the most joyous and lively scene of the play, this choice created a marked contrast to the saturated red light used to emphasize the menace of the evil Commendador. The use of red in the celebratory garments of the wedding also created a stark counterpoint to the bloody red of Laurencia’s wounds after her rape. Red thus functioned in the production as an important signifier of emotion, one that could range from the most uplifting to the most despairing. The other significant exception to the tight color palette was found in the costumes of the royals; as the dei ex machine of the play, they needed to be visually separated from the other, malevolent, authority figures. I kept to the neutral hues already in use, but put Fernando and Isabel in earth tones; this had the effect of setting them off from the rest of the characters and creating a semi-divine aura for them, which was reinforced by their onstage placement at a level above the characters who were members of the commons.

My second response to the director’s concept was to ground my imagistic research firmly in the 1930s, during the period of the Spanish Civil War. It was important to me and to the production that the peasant characters visually inhabit a real world; this helped to ground the characters in an environment apart from the surreality of the set, which reflected the insanity, horror, and violence into which they found themselves thrust. Simple dresses and aprons were worn with headscarves and shawls in the womenswear, while the men wore a motley combination of trousers, collarless shirts, undershirts, vests, soft jackets, suspenders, and caps. The younger men appeared without coats, and were often bare-sleeved to emphasize their vitality, while the silhouettes of the older male characters were softened with layering.