KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — 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.”
Custer’s designed — and sometimes cut and sewn — costumes for plays from the experimental to the classics. Her first CBT show in 1974 was the 15th-century morality play “Everyman.” Her work reads like must-know theater, including “As You Like It,” ”Pygmalion,” ”Medea,” ”Grapes of Wrath,” ”A Streetcar Named Desire,” ”Merchant of Venice” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
While she’s “not a big musical person,” she designed for plenty, from “West Side Story” to “The Music Man” to what would become the 1979 Broadway show “Sugar Babies.”
