Challenge: Make actor look 450 pounds heavier
Brandie Frye didn’t realize how much she learned from her mother’s work as a seamstress until she took the challenge of building a realistic-looking outfit to enable a tall, lean actor to portray a 600-pound character.
Frye, who lives in League City, “has done an incredible job,” said Colton Berry, who directed “The Whale,” a Bayou City Theatrics production that runs through April 24 at The Kaleidoscope in Houston.
“We are such an intimate space that we couldn’t use cinematic makeup and prosthetics,” Berry said. “The audience is so up close and the play is so rooted in reality that there was no room for error.” Job required research
Frye, who is 44 and married, said she relied on trial and error and extensive research that she and her daughter, Ashley, conducted in human anatomy and muscular structure.
“We gathered photos from the Internet of actual people that weigh between 500 and 700 pounds,” Frye said. “I scoured YouTube, Google and Pinterest searching for how other costumers have undertaken building a fat suit and compared that to our situation and the supplies and tools we had available.”
Costuming is a far cry from accounting, which Frye studied at the University of Houston-Clear Lake after graduating from Texas City High School in 1986.
“My mother made all my dresses and all my brother’s shirts,” said Frye. When her children began performing at Bay Area Theatre and Voice Academy, she found herself
helping out in the costume shop.
“Within three weeks, I was building jackets and all kinds of costumes.”
However, designing and constructing a suit that depicts extra weight became her biggest challenge.
“We threw her a curve ball,” said Berry, who also directed Frye’s first costuming job at BCT, last summer’s “The Great Gatsby.”
Wearing the suit is Travis Ammons, 44, a Houston stage and film actor and director.
Frye explained how she devised a costume that makes Ammons, who is 5 foot 10 inches and weighs about 150 pounds, look morbidly obese. Suit has cold packs
Cold packs were included among stuffed pieces to help regulate the actor’s body temperature, Frye said.
“I wanted Travis to be comfortable yet uncomfortable enough to add to his characterization,” she said.
Frye explained that Ammons’ character, Charlie, “buries himself in eating as a relief to his personal turmoil” as a frustrated teacher, divorced parent and victim of religious zealots in northern Idaho.
“His overeating comes from how bad he feels about himself and some of the decisions he’s made,” she said.
Refusing medical care, he accepts his pending death, but in return he forces the other characters — his ex-wife, daughter, best friend and a visitor — to confront their painful lives with honesty.
“It is such an incredible take on real life,” said Berry, that Charlie must be costumed realistically for the audience to buy into the authenticity of the entire production.
Said Frye, “The materials I used to construct the fat suit depended on the section and the effect necessary. Polystyrene beads were used for the stomach and chest pieces and as filler within pieces that were custom-made to fit the actor’s measurements.”
Frye employed BB pellets to drag the character’s chest down.
Down feathers and soft polyester fiber added weight and density to the bottom stomach section of the suit.
“The top chest piece was made by creating pockets to hold Poly-fill in the shape of base muscles,” said Frye.
“The arms and legs were created using a base Tshirt and pants with quilt batting wrapped inside of a four-way stretch, openweave fabric attached to the base garment. These were then shaped with a solid two-way stretch fabric to taper the stuffing.”
Frye highly recommends that audiences check out the play by breakthrough author Samuel D. Hunter.
“You really get lost in the storytelling,” she said. “This is the kind of theater that I love.”
“The Whale” won two prestigious “best play” honors when it premiered off-Broadway in 2013.
The production continues at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday April 22-23 and 5 p.m. Sunday, April 24, at Bayou City Theatrics’ downtown theater, The Kaleidoscope, 705 Main St., Suite B.
Tickets cost $30 to $35 and are available for purchase at www.BayouCityTheatrics.com or by calling the box office at 832-8178656.
Don Maines is a freelance writer who can be reached at donmaines@att.net