Photo by Dan Norman
As the March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—share their stories nightly in the Guthrie Theater’s current production of “Little Women,” the magic isn’t just in the script; it is in the sawdust, the stitches, and the sheer technical brilliance of the artisans behind the scenes. To get the real story, you must go into the studios spread across the Guthrie. There, a team of drapers, stitchers, painters, wigmakers, and many other craftspeople work year-round to build the houses, landscapes, and worlds we see on stage.
The Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust Stage has long been a vessel for the epic and the intimate, but rarely do those forces collide with the intensity found in Lauren M. Gunderson’s new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel “Little Women.” This is not the dusted-off, porcelain version of the March sisters that lives in the amber of 19th-century nostalgia. Instead, this production, co-commissioned by City Theatre Co., Northlight Theatre, People’s Light, and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, treats Alcott’s text as living literature.
In this iteration, Alcott herself is the primary engine. Gunderson places the author at the forefront, using lines from the novel to capture the complexity and charm of characters we only thought we knew. But to bring this literary DNA to life, the Guthrie’s creative team looks beyond the page and into the fibers of the era. The result is a visual and tactile translation where the setting is built from the ground up, merging 1860s Massachusetts with the “maker” culture of the Guthrie’s costume and scene shops.
Photo by Ackerman + Gruber
The Timeline of a World Built by Hand
Building a world of this magnitude is a marathon of craftsmanship. The journey for this production began in the waning months of 2025, when the first design concept meeting took place on Nov. 14 last fall. For months, the concepts lived in sketches, swatches, and scale models. The physical construction began in earnest on Feb. 23, when the “build” officially started. Since then, the scene shops and costume ateliers have been humming with the sound of saws and the rhythmic click of sewing machines, all leading to opening night in late April.
At the center of this whirlwind is director Jackson Gay, who views the process as a collaborative evolution. “Directing, at its core, is a world-building exercise,” Gay says. “That happens over time in the rehearsal room in a reciprocal exchange among the team. The text is the foundation. Then, with the actors, we add layers of interpretation, movement, pace, and musicality. All of that is influenced by [and also informs] the designers’ work on the set—costumes, props, sound, and lights. Together, we find ways to really inhabit the world, whether it’s textured, cluttered, or spare.”
Photo by Ackerman + Gruber
The Written Word as Architecture
The setting of “Little Women” is more than just Orchard House, the Marches’ home; it is a sanctuary built on grit, love, and a very specific kind of 19th-century reality. The challenge for the design team was bridging the gap between Alcott’s era and a 2026 audience. How do you make the 1860s feel relevant without stripping away the era’s historical truth?
The answer lies in the pivot between the biographical reality of Alcott and the fictional world of the Marches. Set designer Georgia Stephens created a space where the boundaries between indoors and outdoors are blurred. Jackson Gay explains how this helps the audience navigate the transitions. “Georgia’s set places the March family’s domestic life directly in nature,” Gay says, “creating a visual metaphor for the autobiographical self-consciousness of Alcott’s novel and grounding Lauren’s approach to dramatizing that layering: Jo is Louisa, and Louisa is Jo.”
Photo by Ackerman + Gruber
Gay goes on to say, “The inside is outdoors, and the nature is interior. So, the set really gives the audience immediate permission to enter the playful world of this adaptation.” This “nature as interior” concept allows the Guthrie’s stage to breathe.
It reflects the wild, expansive imagination of second-eldest sister Jo March, the story’s protagonist, while rooting her in the physical constraints of her home.
The Weight of the Wardrobe
In a play where the physical environment needs to seem lived in, the costumes do the heavy lifting. These are not pristine, couture garments; they are distressed and hand stitched, and they carry the patina of a family surviving on limited means. For the actors, these clothes are the first point of contact with the truth of the 1860s.
When asked about the wardrobe and how the specific weight or constraint of 19th-century garments informs the way the actors inhabit Orchard House, Isabella Star LaBlanc, who plays Jo March, shares a reflection on the relationship between an actor and their costume. “A corset gives me something to push against,” LaBlanc says. “When you’re cinched in and layered in fabric, you don’t have to imagine what it feels to be told to contain yourself; you are contained. I’ve loved discovering the ways Jo makes the clothes work for her—the quietly radical acts of hiking up a skirt or yanking a bodice. Taking off that corset every day, I imagine Jo doing the same. How wonderful it is to have a little more freedom.”
Photo by Dan Norman
This physical containment serves as a psychological “anchor.” Every chair, book, and hat on the stage is a detail meticulously remembered and described by Alcott, serving as a love letter to her family and home. For the actors, these objects are not just props; they are the emotional anchors that ground their performance in authenticity.
Engineering Domestic Intimacy
The technical demands of Gunderson’s script provided a unique puzzle for the Guthrie’s shops. The play flows seamlessly from scene to scene and season to season, often without the sisters ever leaving the stage.
Amy Schmidt, the Guthrie’s costume director, highlights the clever engineering required to make these transitions feel like magic. “One of the big challenges with this script is that it flows from scene to scene, situation to situation, and season to season without the sisters leaving the stage for long, if at all,” Schmidt says. “Because costume designer Jessica Ford wanted the sisters’ looks to evolve, she designed costumes that could transform very quickly on stage or in seconds off stage. This required some clever engineering by the shop, as well as close coordination with the rehearsal process. During the rehearsal process, it was discovered that a number of props needed to appear somewhat magically, and we have provided a lot of pockets for those props.”
Photo by Ackerman + Gruber
This magic extends to the hair and makeup department, where the passage of time is rendered through subtle physical shifts. Jess Rau, one of the Guthrie’s head wig, hair, and makeup artists, revels in these moments. “I love an impossible moment or roadblock,” Rau says. “Those things make the work so much fun, because the puzzles are a joy to figure out. That being said, Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’ is a straightforward show for us, with the [caveat] that quite a bit of time passes in the story, and the actors rarely leave the stage.”
Because of the minimal transitions, the artisans behind the scenes had to figure out how to change each character’s look—quickly—right on stage. Youngest March sister Amy grows up in front of the audience’s eyes; she’s a 12-year-old child at the beginning of the play and an adult by the end. “Audiences might notice that Amy’s hair gets a bit darker and has a more mature hairstyle as she ages,” Rau says.
Perhaps the most visceral challenge for Rau’s team was the iconic moment when Jo shears her hair to help support the family. “We also had to create the shock of the moment when Jo cuts her hair to make sure it looked realistic, and not like a different short wig plopped on her head,” Rau explains. “We built three identical wigs and cut one, as if she actually cut her hair herself.”
Photo by Ackerman + Gruber
The Texture of Truth
What sets the Guthrie’s “Little Women” apart is the obsession with authenticity. It is found in the frayed hem of a skirt, the way light hits a weathered tree, and a haunting piano tune dancing through the air. These are the details that build a world that holds both the humor of the March sisters and the heartbreak of their growth.
By centering Louisa May Alcott’s own voice and marrying it with the high-level craftsmanship of the Guthrie’s creative team, this production moves beyond the page. It becomes a sensory experience that asks the audience to feel the weight of the past while seeing it through the clear, sharp lens of the present. For this production, the Guthrie’s Wurtele Thrust transforms into a place where texture, time, and truth converge, proving that, while the world of the March sisters was written in the 1860s, its heart still beats vividly in 2026.
