Costume design professor helps students fashion their careers

One day, Laura Crow and her students are headed to a performance at the Metropolitan Opera. Another day, they’re in Manhattan shopping for fabric.

“One of my missions is to make my students less afraid of New York City,” says Crow, a professor of dramatic arts specializing in costume design. “There’s so much available there for them.”

No stranger to Manhattan, Crow, who joined the UConn faculty in 1994, has been designing costumes for Broadway, off Broadway, regional theater, film, and opera for more than 30 years.

She was resident costume designer for the Circle Repertory Theatre for 13 years. With some 300 productions under her belt, she is perhaps best known for her work with playwright Lanford Wilson and the poetic realism movement in American theater.

Crow works with graduate students, who design costumes for UConn’s Connecticut Repertory Theatre.

Choosing fabric for a particular costume isn’t easy, she says: “You need to choose the right fabric for the right costume, and that takes a great deal of education. You need to learn how to hold the fabric in your hand, see how it drapes, and feel what we call the hand of the fabric. That’s only learned with experience.”

Crow enjoys designing for period plays. She recently worked on The English Channel, a new play by Robert Brustein about Shakespeare and Marlowe during 1593, a plague year in London, when the theaters were closed.

“It was fun,” she says. “I liked the fact that I was doing Elizabethan clothing from a modern vantage point.”

Crow says proportion is key when designing a costume. “Proportion can make everyone look graceful,” she says. “If you’re designing for an opera star who is more zaftig, you need to design so the proportion is more elegant. Many costume designers don’t teach this to their students.”

Shoes are at the top of the list when building a costume, she says. “Sometimes it can take four weeks to find the right pair,” she says.

“When we did The Magic Flute at the Bushnell Theatre, the women wore platform shoes with six to eight inch heels. They needed to rehearse in them most of the time. They performed on a raked stage [sloped upwards]. It was asking a lot.”

Crow likes to know who is cast before she designs, but that’s not always possible.

“In regional theater, often you have to design before you have any idea what the cast is going to be like,” she says. “When I present the designs to the company, I tell them it’s my beginning conceptual idea, and we need to work together. I want them to feel at home in their costumes.”