Local talent shines

YOUNG AMERICANS features Pittsburgh costume designer

by LYRA LAURELEI for The Public

Look down on stage when the lights come up on Young Americans and you’ll see a contraption that will take a family across the country twice, 20 years apart. Just as important to the story are the costumes that bring Joe, Jenny, and Lucy to life on stage, clothing that communicates incredible amounts of information in just a glance about each of their characters. Costume Designer Susan Tsu, who grew up in Pittsburgh and is a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, made sure there’s more than meets the eye in Young American’s costuming.

“There are psychological things inside each of the characters that I’ve tried to make little touches of in the costumes,” Tsu said. “I want people to take in the character the way they would any new person they meet.”

Tsu is a top talent and well-known professional in the costume design industry, who grew up in an immigrant family that pushed her to pursue her interest in the arts and took road trips much like one in Young Americans. From one of her very first productions as an undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, her work was noticed – as a sophomore in college, just 18 years old, she designed the costumes for Godspell, a musical that left the university a year later and went on to have incredibly successful national tours, including a 2011 revival on Broadway.

Her work went on to bring her and her designs around the world, including a firsttime collaboration between Chinese and American companies in The Joy Luck Club and The Balcony at the Bolshoi Theatre for a U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange program. As a Chinese-American theater designer and artist, Susan feels a deep connection to Asian-American road trip stories like Young Americans.

“The play we’re doing is a wonderful metaphor for what it means to be an immigrant, or an American version of one’s parents who are immigrants, and what they do in order to understand their newly adopted country and how they want to expose their children to it,” she said. “The road trip is a beautiful story of caring from one generation to the other, of teaching, and of learning for both generations. It’s a deeply touching kind of journey, and it’s not a journey that just Asian people would experience.”

Tsu’s costuming reflects that, and many children of immigrants may see certain familiar idiosyncrasies on stage, including in Joe’s costumes. But the costuming process for Young Americans had to also consider the technical challenges of dressing a three-person play with stories 20 years apart. All the while, Tsu designs for the characters’ cultural backgrounds and accounts for how their lived experiences would impact things as seemingly simple as their casual attire.

“When (director) Desdemona Chiang and I started talking about it, we saw our fathers in our imaginations,” Tsu said.

In addition to continually working in the field, Tsu is a passionate educator. She previously headed the costume programs at Boston University and the University of Texas at Austin before returning to CMU, her alma mater, in 2003. She has been a strong advocate for access to theater and helped push the Free Night of Theatre initiative across the U.S., which now is active in hundreds of cities. She has been a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant recommender, helping bring the top minds resources to support their work.

Nowadays, you can often find her driving over to Oakland and taking her place in front of the class, ready to teach the next generations of designer who might put on the next Godspell to launch their own careers.

“Teaching is one of the best ways to learn that there is,” Tsu said, “because you have to figure out why you do certain things the way you do, be able to articulate them, and keep a student’s own sense of their process and their inspiration clear and achievable.”

THE CAST (in order of appearance)

Rat Rios

LAUREN YEE (writer) Lauren’s Cambodian Rock Band, with music by Dengue Fever, premiered at South Coast Rep, subsequent productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Victory Gardens, City Theatre, Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Signature Theatre, and Jungle Theatre/Theater Mu, with an upcoming national tour. Her play The Great Leap has been produced at Denver Center, Steppenwolf, Seattle Repertory, Atlantic Theatre, the Guthrie Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Arts Club, Pasadena Playhouse/ East West Players, InterAct Theatre, and Asolo Rep. Honors include the Doris Duke Artists Award, Whiting Award, Steinberg/ATCA Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, Horton Foote Prize, Kesselring Prize, Primus Prize, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton, and the #1 and #2 plays on the 2017 Kilroys List. She’s a Residency 5 playwright at Signature Theatre, a New Dramatists member, a Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab member, and a Playwrights Realm playwright. TV credits: Pachinko (Apple), Soundtrack (Netflix). Upcoming TV credits: Interior Chinatown (Hulu), Billions (Showtime), The Sterling Affairs (FX). She is developing pilots for Apple and Netflix. Current commissions include Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, Portland Center Stage, Second Stage, South Coast Rep. She has a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from UCSD. laurenyee.com