Scheie is a naturally broad comic actor, but he found that when the wig was placed on his head, it was best to be as small and still as possible. "That almost always works in comedy," he says. Scheie imagined his character being "almost paralyzed with greed and desire." Of course, wigs (and costumes) don't make the actor, but they can certainly lead to interesting acting choices and surprises.

The three members of the Los Angeles-based comic ensemble Culture Clash often wear wigs, and those that member Ric Salinas wore in Zorro in Hell, which I saw last season at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, allowed him to create a multitude of characters, each one funnier than the last. As Whiskey Pete, Salinas wore a long blond 'do. "I'm Latino, but boy, with that wig and fake mustache...I transform into a white cowboy," he emailed me. "The wig actually bounces when I walk, and I get to shake my head, like Cher, to move the wig from my face."

As Friar Felipe, Salinas wore a monk's tonsure of a wig. "I don't have to work as hard to be funny, because I look funny with that thing," he says. At one point the wig is thrown to the floor; Salinas swears he once saw it crawl like a tarantula. In Culture Clash in AmeriCCa, he was having a hard time nailing the character Brother Blue, an actual street poet from Boston. When topped off with a headpiece of dreads that were cut, shaped, and peppered with gray, Salinas worked out in front of the mirror — and found what he needed for the character. "The wig connected me to him," he says.

He adds that wearing a woman's wig, as he does to play a Cuban from Miami — a short, black bob — is "life-altering." "When I twist my finger around the curl, in a very flirting manner, I definitely connect to my inner woman," Salinas says. When he nods, the curls bounce, eliciting audience laughter, so he has to time it to avoid stepping on a joke line.

Mane Event

The 1930s-style wig she wore to play Laura in The Glass Menagerie at Berkeley Rep had a profound effect on New York actor Emily Donahoe, whose feistiness as the nervous daughter was revelatory. Donahoe's real hair is dark brown and below the shoulders. The wig was a curled, slightly auburn bob, thicker than the actor's own tresses.

Donahoe played opposite Rita Moreno, who is Puerto Rican (and was a fabulous Amanda). "Rita and I don't look much alike," Donahoe points out; their only really noticeable similarity is that both are brown-eyed. "I'm Irish!... The wigs were a way into feeling like members of the same family. It was amazing. Feeling I looked like [Moreno], I felt like I belonged to her."

Donahoe often wears wigs to perform. As Puck in Ken Ludwig's Shakespeare in Hollywood at Arena Stage in 2003, she wore a short, spiky, blond wig that made her unrecognizable. "Wigs instantly identify characters' time period, personality, health, mental health, who they're related to," she says.

Not that wig wearing is necessarily a cinch. As Laura, Donahoe's wig would start to unravel as she became increasingly harried, so in tech rehearsals she had to learn how to deal with it not like some foreign object, but like her real hair. Since wigs are usually anchored securely to a cap pinned to the scalp — and glued so that only spirit gum or alcohol will remove them — there's little fear of dislodgement, although it's been known to happen.

But wigs usually don't materialize until tech week, so actors have to quickly adjust to the weight and style. In most cases, they'll know in advance what to expect. This season, Oregon Shakespeare Festival company member Judith-Marie Bergan wears, among other wigs in other shows, an eccentric coif for her role as Mistress Quickly in The Merry Wives of Windsor. This was one of the rare times that Bergan wasn't consulted at the wig-planning stage, although she saw the renderings. Initially she was disturbed by the fiery, bright-red wig that climbs up into the air to a point: "I thought, How do I fill this wig?" She went through several character choices during rehearsal and ended up with what she describes as a sort of "bungling fairy...a combination of femininity and a strong mannish quality." It was the wig and costume that led her there.

When she appeared in The Royal Family, Bergan was so used to rehearsing with her own long red hair that when she first got the short, curly, 1930s-style red wig for her role of Julie Cavendish, it took her a while to come to terms with it, but she finally did. For ocasta in Frank Galati's Oedipus Complex, Bergan had a high, elegant Grecian bun. "That affected me as soon as I put it on," she says. "A lot of times you put on a wig and it will automatically give you a feeling of perkiness, aliveness, stillness, or all-over-the-place-ness. In Oedipus I had to be very still. That hairdo, with not a hair out of place, helped create that effect for me."

She's already thinking about next season's The Cherry Orchard, in which she'll play Mme. Ranevskaya. "Wouldn't it be interesting if she were blonde instead of brunette?" Bergan muses. "It's an organic feeling I have about her. And it should be wispy and feminine, tight but escaping curls, so that there's a sense of wistfulness in the wig, which I think is very much a part of her personality." Whenever she has a strong initial take on a character, Bergan likes to have wig-design input.

Wig Bigwig

For her part, American Conservatory Theater wig master Jeanna Hurd says her first concern is always that wigs be comfortable, like second nature. She works so hard at it that actors have been known to absent-mindedly start to leave the building with their wigs on.

Women especially often initially prefer to use their own hair, Hurd says, but soon discover that it's too much trouble to style: "When you have half-hour call, styling your hair is usually the last thing you want to do." A wig, on the other hand, requires only the five minutes it takes to put your hair in pin curls. Sometimes it's the director who requests a wig. In any case, Hurd tries to keep actors in the wig discussion loop, although ultimately it's the director's call.

Hurd also observes that sometimes the 11th-hour addition of a wig (and wigs are often last-minute choices) will throw an actor off kilter. For example, say a decision is made to change an actor's hair from blond to red to better match the color of the set. Rather than having the actor get a dye job, it's wig time. Suddenly, blondie not only has artificial locks but has to reconceive the character as a redhead — and maybe a redhead is perceived differently in the world.

In the end, though, actors usually love faux hair. For Culture Clash, wigs are essential for quick character transformation. Wigs can even disguise you to yourself, says Donahoe, "which is awesome!" Scheie, like Foppington, adores them, too. The character's smug comment in Restoration Comedy, after he's bewigged and has examined himself thoroughly in the mirror: "Now I am perfection.... I would not change a thing about me for the salvation of mankind."