MasterMind Award, performance Arts Georgianna Londre

As Shakespeare has it, a flimsy masquerade mask cocked across your eyes will fool the world. Anyone so disguised won’t just confound friends, enemies and cousins; he or she will leave even the closest servants and family members unsure about — well — him or her.

In real life, it’s not that easy.

Just ask costume designer Georgianna Londre, a young and lively talent who, toiling on behalf of gender-bending Late Night Theatre, has invested great heaps of time flattening women into men … and plumping vice versa.

With sports bras and Ace bandages, she strapped down the all-female cast of Bonanza until they could fit into all the darling cowboy gear she’d assembled. As for the boys, she says: “With them I just make sure it’s the right size, and that they’re wearing good underwear just in case something goes wrong.”

That’s a shock: The Late Night crowd, for all their professional fabulousness, sometimes strut around in ratty briefs?

Still, her boys look good.

“When we did Valley of the Dolls, those boys were thinner than the girls in the original,” she said, referring to Late Night’s recent drag mounting of Jacqueline Susann’s pill-popping classic.

Even if that fine, falsie-dependent show had been a disaster, Londre’s lollipop dresses and sexy-grandma underthings would have delighted. Whether bought or built, each skirt and slip fit its man with just the right whiff of the sweetly innocent sexiness of the late ’60s. (Plus, they were color-coded as clearly as a paint-store sampler.) So important were Londre’s perfectly outré outfits that director Ron Megee (himself a smashing onstage girl) and set designer Jon Cupit (likewise a hot little muffin) set the wardrobe rack center stage for the entire show.

In seven years as a professional costume designer, Londre has outfitted 85 shows, from the lace-and-lingerie extravaganza Purple Rain to the soberly realistic Matthew Shepard story The Laramie Project. She has worked at the most exciting theaters in town: Late Night, American Heartland, the Coterie and the Unicorn. She has worked at colleges and community shows. Her summer gig designing at Colorado’s highly regarded Creede Repertory Theatre has worked out so well that, this year, she’s been named costume shop supervisor. Instead of raiding thrift stores and fretting around backstage about possible wardrobe malfunctions, she’ll have the time and resources to focus on constructing her own designs.

“I’m more focused on building my own costumes lately,” she says. “You have to make it sturdy enough for the run but easy to get on and off.” Zippers need the most midrun maintenance, she says, and someone has to keep the wigs straight. But at Creede, that won’t be her job. Sounding a little struck at her own good fortune, she laughs and says, “I’ll just design and hike.”

She’ll be back, fortunately, once the summer passes.

“One of the things I love about this is that each theater has a different feel,” she says. At Unicorn shows, Londre’s work is — at best — invisible to audiences. “There, the costume should be a visual extension of the character. It shouldn’t be obvious it is a costume.”

Just this week — before leaving for Chicago to audition for Project Runaway — she hand-clipped fur for the Coterie’s upcoming Ferdinand the Bull. “At the Coterie, we don’t want to just put people in animal costumes. We want to suggest the animal. Ferdinand will have fur that’s not mangy but muscular and a mock-up headdress, while for the pig” — played by the decidedly unpiglike Jessalyn Kincaid — “we’re just making ears, a curly corkscrew wig, and long dance gauntlets with flaps to suggest hooves.”

At Late Night, she’ll cram a two-stepping actress into a ridiculous sheep costume. At the Coterie, in shows such as the seal-becomes-woman myth Between Land and Sea, her lighter touch invites audiences — mostly children — to savor each costume’s inventive theatricality. The kids see how things work and must exert some imaginative effort to embrace the fantasy. The effect, a collaboration between artist and audience, is often magical. — Alan Scherstuhl