Roe

Roe
By Lisa Loomer
Directed by Bill Rauch
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2016

Creative Team:
Scenic Design by Rachel Hauck
Costume Design by Raquel Barreto
Lighting Design by Jane Cox
Sound Design & Composition by Paul James Pendergast
Video Design by Kendall K. Harrington
Voice & Dialect by Rebecca Clark Carey
Fight Direction by U. Jonathan Toppo
Dramaturgy by Tom Bryant
Stage Management by Jeremy Eisen
Associate Costume Design by Sarah Beata DeLong
Hair/Wigs crated by OSF Wig Shop

Cast (OSF production):
Sarah Weddington: Sarah Jane Agnew
Norma McCorvey: Sara Bruner
Aileen/Barbara/Ensemble: Gina Daniels
Linda Coffe/Judy/Ensemble: Susan Linskey
Helen/Ronda/Ensemble : Amy Newman
Molly/Mary/ensemble: Kate Mulligan
Ofelia/Connie Gonzalez/Ensemble: Catherine Castellanos
Henry McClusky/Robert Flores/Ensemble: Barret O’Brien
Ron Weddington/Jay Floyd/Flip Benham/Ensemble: Jeffrey King
Justice Blackmun/Dr. Kennedy/Ensemble: Richard Elmore
Melissa/Emily: Zoe Bishop
Roxanne: Nemuna Ceesay

Lisa Loomer was commissioned to write “Roe” by Bill Rauch, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare festival, for its “American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle”, a Shakespeare-inspired project to create 37 plays about moments of change in American history. Highlights have included Sweat, a drama by Lynn Nottage that captures blue-collar despair, and “All the Way”, Robert Schenkan’s Tony and Drama Desk Award winner. “Roe” was co-produced with Arena Stage in DC and Berkeley Repertory Theater. The play went on to win the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Drama 2017 and has gone on countless staging across the country. AT OSF, it performed in the Bowmer theater (601 seats) in repertory for over six months, drawing school groups and hosting various talk-backs.
It became clear in the months of collaboration that led up to the opening of “Roe” that the language of the costume design was deeply tied to the storytelling. Costumes were keys in bringing to light the abismal class differences between Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”) and Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court. I find that class is often an overlooked theme in contemporary American theater, and I was drawn to research that highlighted the intersectional conversations at play in Loomer’s script, mindful to include women of color and lower-class women. The transitions required of the two main characters speak to their personal journeys and the cultural climate through the decades. I collaborated with the OSF shop and the cast to create many changes that happened in full view of the audience, often including wigs and padding (the dresser assisted onstage and at point it became a playful competition to see who’d finish first, with an audience-favorite moment of breaking down the fourth wall.) In total there were over 100 looks and over 50 wigs in the show, and which was largely build from vintage fabrics found in Los Angeles and NYC, as well as purchased and stock vintage items.
Some questions that informed my work were: What is line between evoking a historical character and impersonating one, and how does my design work support the actor’s choices in that space? When is it important to stay true to what the research shows us and when do you deviate from the archives to create a unified language and respond to the specificity of your cast? I decided to include “Roe” in my significant works as I believe it stand as a contemporary epic, a consequential chronicle that follows the parallels between the public and personal choices of women over a generation. It was also epic in scale, demanding extraordinary transformations and superhuman nightly feats of our cast, wardrobe, and wig crew.