Susan Tsu's hands never stop working as she speaks.

She has just begun to knit a scarf to be used on stage two days hence for City Theatre's "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde."

The production's costume designer says she couldn't find a scarf or a shawl (she's made one of those, too) that was right for the pseudo-Victorian setting. "But that's all right," she says. "I'm a fast knitter."

As a designer who has worked on theater, opera and screen projects, she has to be part artist, part historian and part psychologist, and she has to be a good collaborator, too.

Tsu's first thought when she saw that a red door played a key role throughout Jeffrey Hatcher's script?

"It tells me I'm in competition with a red door," she says, laughing and knitting away.

"I'm really working in contrast to it. I'm staying really dark in most places. It is a play that feels right for a red dress, but I don't have a red dress in it."

Instead, Tsu visited several years and eras, from 1830 to 1900, that don't all jibe with the Victorian aesthetic but fit the mood of a play in which good and evil are made manifest by the characters' appearances as well as their actions.

"It's all mixed in, with some modern stuff, even a touch of steampunk goth," she says.

Some of her designs take particular inspiration from edgy images by photographer Viona.

"She's really quite inventive in her staging of people and there were a number of photographs that she took of men in long coats and top hats, so that's an image that I really took off with," Tsu says. "I don't know that the goth aspect of it will seem so strong to the audience, but that was the inception."

She says she and director Tracy Brigden -- "who has an amazing visual eye and sense of art history" -- were in agreement that the costuming not overwhelm the actors, who sometimes transform personas in front of the audience.

Sitting in a City Theatre rehearsal room on a dreary, rainy weekday, Tsu delves into the psychology and historical references that have informed her choices.

"I think [the era] actually has a lot of parallels to today because people were at a kind of crossroads between the past and the future with the Industrial Revolution, religion, thoughts about the origin of the species, and everything was sort of boiling around at that time. So I think it's fascinating when people's fears about their identity come into play," Tsu says.

"So ... I was really excited because it's one of my favorite times to explore. You can find the correlation with the kinds of fears we ourselves have about the future, of technology in our lives, whether that takes away or enhances our identity as human beings."

Tsu's adventures in costuming have included the musical "Godspell" and "The Joy Luck Club." Locally, her work has been seen in "Amadeus" and "Metamorphoses" for the Pittsburgh Public and "Cymbeline" for Quantum Theatre. The Carnegie Mellon teacher is also busy as artistic director of the Prague Quadrennial 2011, which she describes as the Vienna Biennale of theater design.

For the moment, though, Tsu is occupied with dressing the cast of "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde." And for that, she has a scarf to finish.

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