The cast of characters who work in theater extends far beyond the actors who enjoy the spotlight night after night. So we decided to turn that spotlight on some hard-working pros in a wide range of roles—from wig designer to playwright to artistic director (and, yes, to one leading lady)—and get the inside angles on Boston’s spring theater season.

Jason Allen, Wig and Makeup Designer

Boston Lyric Opera’s I Puritani
May 2-11 at the Citi Shubert Theatre

Allen pulls double-duty for BLO’s closing production of the season, creating handcrafted wigs and makeup designs for Vincenzo Bellini’s opera about a young woman who spirals into insanity, believing her love has rebuffed her. Each wig takes him 30 to 35 hours to make, a painstaking process that seems a bit maddening in its own right.

“We start with a really fine mesh, and you actually build a cap in the shape of the head mold you take of the person,” Allen explains. “Then we use what’s called a ventilating needle, which is a tiny, tiny hook—almost like hooking a rug, but on a really small scale. Then you pull four or five hairs through and tie it in a little, tiny knot, working up to the front, where you then pull it through, single hair by single hair, and tie it in a knot onto the netting.”

And after all that labor? “I’ve been doing this for 20 years now,” Allen says. “Still, when you go for the final fitting, there’s that little bit of panic. ‘What if I’ve totally messed this up, and spent 35 hours doing it, and it doesn’t fit?’ I think that never goes away.”

Allen recalls one ballet’s particularly memorable wig malfunction. “There were a bunch of skeleton witches dancing, and they had wired coils coming out of their hair. Two of them got really close together and got their wigs tangled,” he says. “We had them attached really, really well, and they couldn’t get their heads apart.” Eventually, one pulled off the other’s wig, leaving her bare in a wig cap. “But they danced around with their heads attached for quite a while!”

The wigs are made from human hair, which Allen prefers because it’s natural-looking and easy to work with. He admits, however, that he was a bit squeamish early in his career. “It was a little creepy,” he laughs. “Now I’m just so used to it, and I work with it so much, that I’m picking human hair off myself all the time. I shave my head. I’m bald! So it’s funny that I always have hair on me.”

Amanda Ostrow, Wardrobe Supervisor

SpeakEasy Stage Company’s The Whale
Through April 5 at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion

Ostrow works by day as assistant box office manager at Emerson’s theaters, but by night she’s busy getting casts costumed. Arriving two hours before the actors and there at least an hour later, she also ensures those costumes are clean and pressed for every show. Since first getting a taste of stage and costume management while working with the Actors’ Shakespeare Project in 2006, she’s done everything from getting an actor into roller skates—blindly tying his laces from backstage through a hole cut into a prop phone booth while he continued singing onstage—to shouldering some weighty responsibilities in The Whale, including helping lead actor John Kuntz with his costume. To play Charlie, a couch-bound, 600-pound recluse hoping to make amends with his estranged daughter, he has to don a remarkably realistic fat suit, weighing nearly 30 pounds.

“It takes two people to get him into it,” she laughs. “We’re going to have big muscles by the time we’re done with this show!”

Along with wrangling Kuntz into his cumbersome suit, Ostrow handles his prosthetic chin, a piece of synthetic skin that affixes just below his jawline. Ostrow uses cosmetic paint to achieve the right hue and secures the loose flap of fake flesh, taking care to ensure it won’t detach midshow.

Needless to say, it gets quite hot inside a 30-pound suit under stage lights, so Ostrow is also tasked with odor control—a challenge requiring some ingenuity. “It’s been a crazy research process,” she says. “We use a mixture of vodka and water to spray it. It removes odor from anything, but doesn’t give off that flowery smell of Febreze.”

While Ostrow admits her job isn’t always glamorous, she couldn’t be more grateful for the creative opportunities it has afforded her. “No matter who you are in this process, the directors want to hear your ideas,” she says. “I’m the wardrobe supervisor. Who am I to say, ‘I don’t think he should be walking that way. It looks weird’? But you say it, and it’s like, ‘No, you’re right. We should look into this.’”

Teller, Magic Designer

American Repertory Theater’s The Tempest
May 10-June 15 at the Loeb Drama Center

You’re probably familiar with Teller from his widely popular magic shows as one-half of legendary duo Penn & Teller. But the master illusionist has a lengthy resume that also includes directing and creating magic for the theater. This staging of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy has Teller designing illusions to create the title storm, which washes a ship full of aristocrats upon the shores of a magical island inhabited by revenge-seeking sorcerer Prospero.

For Teller, both magic and live theater are about reinvention. “I can imagine some particularly academic critic coming to our Tempest and saying, ‘Well, this has not been done in Shakespeare before,’ ” Teller says. “And I say to them, ‘Pooh-pooh.’ ”

In fact, Teller feels The Tempest is ideally suited for the tricks of his trade. “I’m surprised that more people don’t do it, because the play is about using your ability to create illusions as a weapon,” he says. “The way Prospero fights is not by hurting people, but by creating illusions that act on them psychologically.”

Besides, the Bard would likely approve. “The chances are very good that there were some magic tricks even in Shakespeare’s [original] production because he describes, in one of the surviving stage directions from the original text, that ‘the feast vanishes by a quaint device.’ I’d say ‘quaint device’ means some kind of trick.”

One of his own tricks is employed to “make clear from the very start was that Prospero was causing the storm,” Teller says. “We’ve created a magic trick in which Prospero does a sort of sympathetic magic thing, in which he takes a page of his book and forms the ship, places it in a big bowl of water and enchants it. And we watch that enchantment as the storm is taking place.”

Melinda Lopez, Playwright

Huntington Theatre Company’s Becoming Cuba
March 28-May 3 at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion

A longtime fixture on Boston’s theater scene as both actress and playwright, Lopez was one of just 14 writers from across the country chosen for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s inaugural initiative funding three-year playwright residencies. For her debut as Huntington’s first resident playwright, Lopez chose to present her latest work, one close to her heart, about a half-Spanish, half-Cuban widow struggling with conflicting loyalties—to family and to country, as well as her long held idea of herself—on the eve of the Spanish-American War.

“I’m of Cuban descent, so it’s something that’s interesting to me,” she says. “It was around the time that the Arab Spring was happening [when she started writing the play], and there was a lot of movement among people to have self-determination. I just got a vision of this woman who reminded me of women I know, who are really smart and a little cynical. I had this sense that she starts the play really tightly coiled, and at the end of the play she understands that sometimes you have to burn your life down in order to start over again.”

Lopez says that the process of writing is often one of self-discovery, not unlike that of her protagonist. “When you start digging into your own history, you realize all the things that make up who you are. You put that together into a new identity. I’m drawn to history because I think it always reflects on the time that we’re living in now.”

“And now, it’s seeing the protests in Egypt and the protests in Libya, and now in Syria,” she continues. “Seeing the people who are really fighting to determine who they are. To say, ‘I am this new thing.’ It’s incredibly inspiring and scary and moving. But I’m a sucker for that stuff. I grew up near the Concord Bridge. And every time I go there I cry. Because I’m like, ‘It started here! We’re free because of those people that fought here!’”

David Reiffel, Sound Designer

Actors’ Shakespeare Project’s As You Like It
April 17-May 18 at Springstep

A sound designer and composer, Reiffel will provide the sound effects and score for this faithful retelling of one of Shakespeare’s most popular pastoral comedies, in which the daughter of a banished duke, her cousin and the court fool flee the kingdom and discover a utopian community in the Forest of Arden.

For Reiffel, the venue often plays as large a role in his design as the text. In this case, the play is being staged at Springstep, a modern dance studio in Medford. When the venue was announced, Reiffel’s vision immediately changed. “The conception up until then had been much more about Victorian times, and it actually sort of cracked open the play and allowed me more freedom,” he says. “There would be no expectation of being literally Victorian, because the whole design concept of the sets and everything is changing to something that is more metaphorical.”

The idea of metaphor in design—in sound, as well as in costumes and sets—is something that Reiffel finds elemental to Shakespearean theater.

“There is a lot of leeway in doing a Shakespeare play to be creative, in terms of period and atmosphere,” he says. “There are a lot of different ways you can go. I’ve done other As You Like It [productions] in the past. One of them was very modern and jazzy, because they wanted a really playful but sophisticated approach to it. And then the next production I did, the director had a much darker idea, where the Forest of Arden was actually this threatening place, where there were lions and snakes, as opposed to this happy, bucolic thing. For this one, we’re concentrating on a sort of constriction in the court scenes and then a big sense of relaxation when we get to the Forest of Arden. So those are very different moods that I’m trying to establish in essentially the same text.”

Adina Tal, Director

ArtsEmerson’s Not By Bread Alone
April 1-6 at the Paramount Mainstage

Tal directs 11 deaf-blind actors from the Tel Aviv-based Nalaga’at Theater Deaf-Blind Acting Ensemble in this unique play, which allows the audience a taste of life without sight or sound. Through movement, spoken word and surtitled sign language, the actors relay their hopes, dreams and experiences—some as seemingly unremarkable as a trip to the salon, but colored by their unique perspectives. All the while, they will bake bread, which audience members will be invited to sample, creating a shared multisensory experience.

“It’s a very big challenge, but a very big privilege, to do something that nobody has ever done before,” Tal says of directing a cast of actors who can neither see nor hear one another, which meant that traditional stage cues had to be thrown out in favor of inventive new ones—in this case, the beat of a drum.

“At the beginning they were very angry. They said, ‘What do you want from us? We don’t hear; we don’t see the hands that go to the drum,’” Tal recalls. “But, after six months, all of them started to feel the vibration…. It’s a really special experience for the actors, just like opening a window to the outside world.”

Adding working ovens to the stage posed further challenges, but Tal says the bread they produce is vital to the play’s message. “At the end of the show, the bread comes out of the oven, the whole theater is full of the smell of freshly baked bread, and the audience is invited to come up on stage and taste the bread and communicate with the actors. To see the effect the show has on other people is incredible.”

Spiro Veloudos, Artistic Director

Lyric Stage Company’s Into the Woods
May 9-June 7 at the Lyric Stage Company

Veloudos is on a mission to encourage diversity and inclusiveness in Boston’s theater scene, starting with the Lyric Stage. Closing out the company’s 40th anniversary season is Sondheim’s oft-staged send-up of classic Grimm fairy tales, from “Little Red Riding Hood” to “Rapunzel,” which finds new life in Veloudos’ staging.

A moment that drove home the importance of that mission came last year, when Lyric Stage put on a production of Chinglish. “I spoke with an Asian actress, and I asked her, ‘Why have I never seen you before?’ And she said, ‘Because you didn’t have anything for me, at least that’s what I thought.’ And I thought, well that’s probably not a good thing. So I started thinking about how we could open up our doors so that people feel comfortable about coming to audition for us.”

Part of facilitating what he calls, for lack of a better term, “non-traditional casting,” he says, is not waiting for an “Asian play” to invite Asian actors to audition. It’s an initiative he’s taking very seriously, and it’s reflected in Into the Woods, which includes an African-American Little Red and an Asian-American Prince, among other diverse cast members. “I looked at this as a fairy tale land or storytelling land where it doesn’t necessarily matter what someone’s race is,” he says.

Veloudos wants to see “more diverse casts on our stage as the city of Boston becomes a majority of minorities. I lived in Boston in the 1970s, when the city of Boston was not a nice place to ethnic minorities. That has changed, and I think that it makes the city more interesting. I embrace that kind of diversity, and I want to make sure what we are doing at the Lyric is going to be reflective of that.”

Veloudos also hopes that this new sense of diversity will extend beyond the stage. “I’m hoping that it will bleed into the audience, as well,” he says. “Because people will come to a play if they see themselves onstage.… I think that that is really important to the life of this particular theater, in this particular city, at this time.”

Christine Power, Actress

Zeitgeist Stage Company’s Good Television
April 25-May 17 at the BCA’s Black Box Theater

In this comedic drama, Power plays Connie, a producer and intervention counselor for a reality TV show that documents the struggles of people dealing with addiction. (Think: A&E’s powerful documentary series Intervention.) But Connie’s own demons are conjured when the crew tackles a particularly volatile episode concerning a young meth addict.

While her graduate education involved studies in documentary film, Power admits that she hadn’t watched much reality TV before scoring this role. She’s found it interesting “to see what the nuances there are, and the difference between scripting and letting things happen naturally,” she explains. “But then, the script really goes into how you’re still controlling the story, even if you’re letting things evolve as they would naturally evolve.”

Reality TV is a medium that, for better or worse, has gained a large influence in society. “It’s very topical content, and I think it’s a good take on it,” Power says. “A lot of people do watch reality TV, and there is a sense of, ‘Why would these people do this? What do they think going in? What happens to them afterward?’ These are real people, and they have to go on and live their life after the TV show is gone and the cameras are gone. How do they deal with it all after?”

Her character is as affected as any of the subjects. “The script really focuses on her journey,” she says. “Each character has their own arc, but her story is her own story and is also the larger story, so it’s kind of the linchpin of how everything turns. I’m interested to pull it apart and to see where the other characters’ stories intersect, and how she influences them, and how that then influences the entire overarching plot.”