Perspectives / Marcia Dixcy Jory Marcia Dixcy Jory has worked as a theatrical costume designer for more than twenty-five years. She designed for Humana Festival plays from 1984 to 2000. I’m sure any experienced parachutist remembers her first as her most momentous jump and likewise, my first Humana Festival was an incomparable costuming experience. The year was 1984 and I was told to design nine full-length plays simultaneously as a routine part of my new job as ATL’s resident costumer. Routine for Paul Owen perhaps, but I was used to immersing myself in one play at a time. On the Pamela Brown stage that year were plays by Emily Mann, Kent Broadhurst, William Mastrosimone, Ken Jenkins and Horton Foote. Combined, they included some seventy characters: twenty recognizable 1970s political and social figures including a transvestite nun, twelve nostalgic recreations in 1918 period finery, assorted vaudeville clowns and five life-size puppets. The “smaller” VJ plays, by Patrick Tovatt, Lee Blessing, P.J. Barry and John Patrick Shanley, had fewer than twenty characters; most of them changed clothes, eight of them into elaborate Halloween costumes. The problem wasn’t so much covering all the bodies as it was resisting the temptation to become absorbed in any one of the intriguing plays to the extent of missing some of the excitement of another. To distribute my attention fairly, I came to think of the entire Festival as one giant production with nine disparate acts. I’ve similarly synthesized the plays I’ve designed for every Festival since that time, so each set of characters and themes is incestuously tangled in my memory. The Humana Festival is one of the world’s finest working models of synergy. The dynamic atmosphere created by so many exceptional writers and actors working under one roof pushes everyone to the outer limits of his ingenuity and productivity. The thrill of being one of the sum of its parts has been an indelible joy.