Quick Take
A highlight of Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s production of “Hamlet” this summer has been the costume design. Lookout caught up with designer Austin Blake Conlee on what inspired the late-1960s, early-1970s look he applied to the play.
There are many enriching and ennobling reasons to catch Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s ongoing production of “Hamlet” this summer. But, can we just for a moment set aside the literary conversation, and talk about the clothes?
This year’s “Hamlet” is a feast for the fashion-conscious, and that’s largely thanks to the show’s costume designer (and SCS first-timer), Austin Blake Conlee.
Conlee’s idea was to set “Hamlet” in the burst-of-color era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when fashion styles exploded into many different directions, reflecting the anything-goes stakes of Western culture at the time. The result on stage in 2024 is a parade of eye-catching looks that give the timeless drama an added panache.
“We went for this vaguely late ’60s/early ’70s world,” said Conlee by phone, walking the streets of London, “where we have this politically corrupt leader in charge of a country …” He’s referring to Claudius (Mike Ryan), the usurping stepfather of Hamlet. “There’s a little bit of Nixon in him, but there’s a slight quality of Kennedy in him as well. He’s slightly charming, but he’s also very paranoid.”
Though it’s possible I might have imagined it, at a recent performance of “Hamlet” at the Audrey Stanley Grove, I noticed many of the actors taking a dramatic pause when they entered their scenes for the first time, as if to give the audience a beat or two to register the magnificent outfits. We’re talking swank vintage power-wear shoulder to shoulder with splashy Barnaby Street color.
For Gertrude (Marion Adler), the queen of Denmark and Hamlet’s mother, Conlee drew on that immortal muse of the 1960s, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, though he also borrowed from other more traditional first ladies such as Lady Bird Johnson and Pat Nixon. “I wanted her to look like a First Lady without being exactly a Jackie O knockoff,” he said. “I even looked at some European monarchs of the time as well.”
Hamlet, played by SCS Artistic Director Charles Pasternak, opened the play in a traditional and dark look, much like a young Gomez Addams, you might say. But as the play unfolded and Hamlet’s obsessions got the best of him, his look moved decidedly toward a mod/hippie aesthetic.
“When he is descending into madness,” Conlee said of Prince Hamlet, “he sort of takes on this hippie Beatles-inspired flower-child [look] with earthy things like a scarf and the round tinted glasses. We wanted to give the echo of what was a generational conflict that was going on in our culture at that time, y’know, his parents were like a lot of other parents who didn’t know what to do with these hippie kids who were listening to rock and roll.”
For many of the other women in the cast — some of whom were playing traditionally male characters — Conlee opted for eye-candy colors such as lavender, plum, fuchsia. And then, with the “Mousetrap” play-within-a-play scene, the fashion goes full-on drag queen with a riot of color and hey-look-at-me accessories. The riotous “Mousetrap” fashion was based on the avant-garde queer theater troupe of the era, the Cockettes (which also inspired the period looks of stars such as David Bowie and Elton John). The ostentatious drag styles served as a compelling contrast with the tailored, chic, often pastel-colored look of the royal court.
“We were super lucky that we were in Northern California, where the ’60s and ’70s were so big,” said Conlee on the experience of finding the vintage wear on display in the production. “There were great finds in thrift stores in Santa Cruz and in San Jose, and especially on Eighth Street in San Francisco. We probably spent half our time in Santa Cruz looking in vintage shops for that perfect tie, that perfect set of earrings.”
If there was one character who begs the most attention from costumers in “Hamlet,” it’s the ghost of the dead king, Hamlet’s father. Conlee wanted to evoke the political assassinations of the ’60s in his portrayal of the Ghost, played by Raphael Nash Thompson. But bad timing caused him to rethink the look.
Hamlet’s father was killed by poison pouring into his ear, and the initial thought would have him with blood coming from the actor’s ear. Then, in the middle of rehearsals, the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, in which his ear was bloodied, presented big problems on set, Conlee said:
“As soon as it happened, I immediately said, ‘We cannot put a bloody ear on this stage,’ because I did not want the audience to make that association.”
What followed was an emergency brainstorming session. The solution turned out to be a kind of silver ooze from the dead man’s ear which, paired with a single starkly colored contact lens, added a deeper dimension to the eerie vibe of the Ghost, and unmoored the play from any association with Trump.
Conlee praised the actor Thompson for agreeing to wear the ghostly contact lens, particularly challenging since he has to take it out mid-play to inhabit his other role as a gravedigger.
“I thought it would be too much trouble for him, but he was a real trooper and he went with it. And everyone was just floored by it,” Conlee said. “It’s a haunting image of an idealistic politician assassinated in his prime, and now he’s trapped in Purgatory, and how haunting and devastating that is.”
“Hamlet” plays live at Santa Cruz Shakespeare through Aug. 31.
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