The West Albany High School theater department puts on many shows throughout the year, and with each show, costumes and sets have to be made. There are multiple costume designers for each show, one being Gwen Christensen.

     Christensen has been designing costumes since her work-study position in college, and she’s designed costumes for about seven WAHS productions, her first being “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

     To pick out the costumes, Christensen and the other costume seamstress, Holly Rose, get input from what the performing arts teacher Cate Caffarella wants.

     “We start with talking about what we want, then we go through what we have, and see what we have that we could use,” Christensen said.

     The costume department frequently reuses the same clothing items for different shows.

     “There is a red smoking jacket I made for ‘Anything Goes’…we’ve used that several times,” Christensen said. “We used it in ‘Mary Poppins.’ I believe we [also] used it in ‘Anastasia.’”

     If the costumes they have don’t fit or don’t work right, sometimes the costume designers borrow from other theater departments.

     “We borrow from some local theaters, from Oregon State University. We borrow from as far away as David Douglas High School near Portland,” Christensen said, “We do a lot of driving around and scrounging and going to thrift stores.”

     Senior Nicki Ito has been doing theater her whole life and has been in all the Shakespeare plays and musicals during her four years at West.

     “We borrow costumes from different schools and different departments: NAMS, Memorial,” Ito said.

     “The way you build a professional costume, you build it so that it can be reused,” Christensen said. “So usually there’s three layers of fabric in a real professional costume: there’s the outside that you see, and there’s an interlining and a regular lining.”

     One costume Ito recalled being reused in multiple shows at West was a dress her friend, Senior Bethany Olufson, had worn in ‘Anastasia’ her freshman year.

     “It was used [again] in the ballroom scene in ‘The Sound of Music,’” Ito said.

     The person who builds sets at WAHS is Brian Thompson. He has been designing sets since 2004, while he was still a student, and has continued to assist in building sets since then. Thompson’s responsibility is building the frame and general shape, while others add the little details and paint them.

     Reusing sets doesn’t always mean repurposing the set piece exactly as it was built. If a set piece can’t be used for a show and they don’t have the room to store it, they cut up the wood from it and make something new.

     “Besides the two pieces that we’re saving as a whole, if there’s pieces that we want to save, like a section of it, we store it in the room next door,” Thompson said.

     Just like the costume department, the set department makes things with the knowledge that the materials will be reused.

     “Every set is built with the intent that it will come apart, as even as big and cool and elaborate as it might be…we only have so much room, so we can’t keep things built in structure,” Thompson said.

     One of the most commonly reused pieces in the set storage is canvas flats, which can be painted and repurposed for many different things.

     “It’s just canvas stretched on top of a wood frame, so kind of like you use for painting. Those are 20 years old this year. We built those for ‘The Sound of Music’ in 2005, and we’ve kept them ever since,” Thompson said.

     The theater department at West, and many other theater departments, reuse materials to save money and conserve resources.

     “In the world of recycling, I would just say that’s what theater does,” Thompson said. “We try to repurpose everything.”