Stephen Wise Temple Rabbi Sari Laufer was featured on a special Purim edition of the “Tov!” podcast this week.
To coincide with the festival of masks and costumes, “Tov!”—which discusses Jewish ideas and the beloved NBC sitcom, “The Good Place”— brought on the show’s costume designer, Kriston Mann, as a special guest. Rabbi Sari, Rabbi Ilana Schachter, and Rabbi Jon Spira-Savett spoke with Mann about how themes, ideas, and character development play into costuming and wardrobe.
How do costumes help serve the function of storytelling on television? How can a costume (or lack thereof) help an actor step into a role? How do characters influence their costumes, and vice versa? What do costume changes for a character signify? What can certain modes of dress, colors, and design choices reveal about a character, their arc, or an entire show? These are all questions that are addressed in the course of the show.
Rabbi Sari draws the parallel between the statements about character made by wardrobe choices and Parashat T’rumah (which she will discuss in Wednesday’s Daily Kavanah), which details the colors prescribed for use in the building of the Mishkan and the fabrics to be worn by the High Priests.
“In the Torah portion, it really is like the priests put on this costume almost as armor,” Rabbi Sari says. “Like, ‘I’m going to put this on, and once I put it on, I know what to do and how to behave,’ and I sort of love this idea that for both the characters and for the actors, there wasn’t that sort of suiting up in armor, that it was this reminder of, ‘Actually, I’m going to wear things that are maybe how I dress … in the world,’ and not having, ‘I’m going to put this thing on and I become this other figure.'”