When you're starting out, you pretty much take whatever you can get, just for the experience. You work really long hours for practically nothing, but you learn an incredible amount. I went to an art school for fashion design, but didn't like the business part of it. After taking a couple of years off from school to work in theaters, I went back to UMass to get my degree in fine arts and ultimately landed a job with the Round House Theater, a professional resident company in Silver Spring, MD, where I worked for eight years. A lot of people take the classes to fulfill their humanities requirement.
Students are generally unaware of our operation here until they show up for class.
Then, depending on their interest, we hold onto them for dear life because without our students, we couldn't possibly complete our work. I do, with the director and other designers. The director, Michael Ouellette, recognized that the kind of gossiping and scandal sheet stuff that goes on today is the same as in the play. Because we're mixing the old and new, we took contemporary patterns and made them look period. For example, we put boning in the bodices instead of putting the actors in corsets.