Costuming 5: The Beard

In our interpretation, Sir Oliver Martext was actually a decent man, he was just a back wood preacher. So he served as our Hymen too. However, the actor also played Adam and has a very youthful face. To help both give him age and to build his characters, we gave him facial hair. A grey mustache for Adam and a big ole beard for Sir Oliver Martext.

I have made facial hair pieces in the past, and reusable ones at that. By attaching the crepe hair to netting or tulle, it can be removed for future performances, saving hours of prep time. However, for each of those, the hair was supposed to stay on the entire performance (mostly). And I had time to build the facial hair piece on the actor.

For this piece I had neither of those options. The Beard could not be glued to the actor's face, but able to be added and removed easily. And I had no time to build it on him since I made it either the day or the day before the play opened. I also realized that my latex glue was completely dried up and the spirit gum was glued shut.

I took a brown felt ribbon and in the middle sewed a little piece forming a little pocket for the chin to fit into. That way it wouldn't slip while he talked. Using our Yorick Skull (that we got for our pirate party), I glued the tulle onto the ribbon with felt glue. I then untied the ribbon and added the beard hair, still using felt glue. The funny thing about felt glue is that it doesn't dry as quickly and leaves all sorts of residue on fingers and combs and scissors and anything that it touches, but at least it dries clear. I used a lot of glue, but some of the hair still didn't want to stick.

It was a tricky, sticky process. But when it was done, I was very proud of it.