KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) – Costume designer Marianne Custer has wrapped actors in plastic wrap, cracked open a VCR for costume parts and sewn fake hair into bonnets.
Over four decades Custer has done wonders with fabric, feathers and quick changes that required extremely long zippers. She’s designed from Knoxville to Istanbul in shows from Shakespeare to Steinbeck. Her favorite – the dress she loved so much she designed it for three productions – involves tiny red sequins and country music legend Patsy Cline.
Custer is resident designer of the University of Tennessee Clarence Brown Theatre, a UT theater professor and head of the department’s Master of Fine Arts design program. Plain-spoken with a love of art, theater and literature, she’s taking her final CBT bow.
She officially retired from UT last year but returned one last season, wanting to work with design graduate students another year. “Urinetown, the Musical,” playing through May 6, is her last CBT show. Her designs help delineate between wealthy “Urinetown” citizens in 1980s-inspired, well-tailored dark suits and its poor in what she calls clothes of “colorful filth.”
The Minneapolis native stresses she’s leaving UT but not theater. “I still love what I do,” she says. She’s now freelancing. This fall she will design costumes for a Charleston, South Carolina, theater’s “Of Mice and Men.”