Deborah Dryden, Head Costume Designer

Deborah Dryden

Deborah Dryden is the Resident Costume Designer at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Interview Excerpts

ON CLOTHING CHOICES

DEB DRYDEN: Well, it’s a huge—but the beauty of Shakespeare is that there are myriad interpretations. Some plays are much more specific about where this person is in terms of their choices, or in terms of their class, or where they are emotionally, whereas—using Shakespeare as an example—there are many more possibilities of interpretation.

So the conversations that we’ve had so far about this particular Hamlet have to do with things that will affect clothing choices. For instance what—you know, trying to dig a little deeper into, even at this very stage before rehearsals have started, we have to figure out what the dy—family dynamic might have been between father and son.

Is this a military world? Hamlet’s father is referred to as a military man, has all that military prowess. What’s the son of that? And how does that influence behavior, how does that influence his psyche, how does that influence what he might choose to wear?

Also, specific circumstances tell me very clear things about what—the way you might dress someone. Hamlet, of course, is notoriously dressed in black, he is stubbornly—if you choose to view it that way—wearing funeral black in the midst of this much more celebratory beginning of the play when he—we—we first meet Claudius and—and the queen.