In the last week of March, the costume department at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley should have been concentrating on finishing touches for “Ragtime,” which was to feature 100 costumes with early-1900s aesthetics. Opera San Jose should have been well into costume builds for “The Magic Flute,” which calls for a bird-catcher dressed as a bird, among other gaudy designs.

But with both productions canceled amid coronavirus concerns, these costume departments — and other stitchers, drapers, cutters and costume personnel around the region — are looking to put their skills to alternative use by making cloth masks to help prevent the spread of the disease.

TheatreWorks Costume Director Jill Bowers projected her team of stitchers could make 150 masks in one week. Opera San Jose Costume Director Alyssa Oania made 70 in the same span.

They join other grassroots efforts from local arts organizations. Ace Monster Toys, a community maker space in Oakland, is conscripting its laser cutter to the cause, helping to make visors for protective face shields, said Colm McNally, who runs the facility’s wood shop. To date it has made 200 visors, in partnership with Neal’s CNC, a cutting and fabrication service in Hayward.

At first, Bowers at TheatreWorks was wary of getting involved “because I was concerned that people understand that those fabric masks are not a substitute for medical-grade masks,” she said from her Sunnyvale home sewing room.

Guidelines about masks are changing frequently, with government leaders and health officials at times issuing conflicting recommendations about how helpful handmade cloth masks are and whether the general public should use them. As yet, no studies have been conducted to show how effective they are in combating the spread of coronavirus. Social distancing and handwashing remain the most effective ways to combat the spread of disease, but cloth masks “could provide some additional protection against COVID-19,” according to Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of California’s Health and Human Services. Some experts say they might be especially helpful in preventing spread among asymptomatic people. On Friday, April 3, the Centers for Disease Control began recommending that Americans wear cloth masks when they have to go out in public.

Bowers found that Valley Medical Center Foundation in San Jose was accepting donations of reusable, hand-sewn masks for “non-patient care staff,” according to its website. The nonprofit supports Santa Clara Valley Medical Center hospitals and clinics.

“As I was looking ahead and seeing that my stitchers were going to run out of work, and also some of us on staff — not all of us had the ability to do our jobs at home — I’m like, ‘What could we do to fill the gap?’ ” Bowers said.

South Berkeley resident Elaine Magree had a similar idea but hoped to muster a troop of mask stitchers beyond the constraints of a single company. She’s both a palliative care nurse and a solo performer, with shows produced by TheatreFirst, the Marsh and the San Francisco Fringe Festival. Magree and her partner recently received some money from a friend who died, and they decided to use that fund to pay unemployed theater workers to make masks.

Plans are still nascent, but Magree is working with Lesley Currier of Marin Shakespeare Company and local theater services nonprofit Theatre Bay Area to figure out a way to coordinate that effort. A possible lead, during a Wednesday, April 1, Zoom virtual meeting, came from Make Me PPE Bay Area, a resource created by actor Ashley Chiu, which allows medical facilities to make requests for personal protective equipment. Anyone can sign up to fulfill all or part of a request.

Chiu, who has performed with Hillbarn Theatre and Broadway by the Bay, was cast as Sleeping Beauty in “Once Upon a One More Time,” the Britney Spears jukebox musical scheduled to begin a pre-Broadway run in Chicago this month. She returned to her family’s home in San Mateo when the outbreak hit and her show was canceled.

“I’m one of the unemployed theater folks, just like all the others here in the Bay Area and all over the country,” she told The Chronicle by phone. She figured, “Why not take the love and the passion and the care that we have for our community and turn it into something that’s productive and helpful at this time?”

When the family heard about PPE shortages, Chiu’s mother thought of her own resources. She has an industrial sewing machine, left over from her own mother’s business, Mae Lin Sewing Shop, in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chiu thought, “I’m not the one who can sew, and we only have one machine, so why don’t I just start all the logistical coordinating?”

She’s now fielding hundreds of emails per day from volunteers. Chiu started with the local group Dames Don’t Care Motorcycle Collective to coordinate delivery of masks for facilities ranging from nursing homes to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

She’s gotten a dozen requests, but they frequently ask for thousands of masks, while individual volunteers can make batches of only 30 or 40.”They’re just like, ‘Please, we have nothing left,’ ” Chiu said.

These efforts all come from good intentions, evoking World War II-era scrap and rubber drives and victory gardens. But they also betray a lack of central leadership and coordination by the area’s highest officials, as well as a flimsy safety net for workers. When private individual citizens like Magree, who hopes to pay mask makers, try to plug the gap, they find themselves in the awkward position of making ethical decisions that affect others’ lives.

“There’s a balance between maximizing the number of masks and also trying to support people who are unemployed and probably chronically underpaid,” Magree said. “I just don’t know. It feels like a lot to figure out on my own.”

As a nurse, she has strong feelings about which masks volunteers should make. Some of the designs that organizations are requesting “aren’t well fitted,” Magree says. “I’m reluctant to be involved with those masks, even if some place is asking for them.”

For now, Bowers and her staff have scoured their private stashes as well as the TheatreWorks costume shop, looking for shows whose pieces used a lot of cotton, a preferred fabric for masks. They found leftover supplies from “Little Women,” “Rags,” “Triangle” and “Crimes of the Heart.”

At Opera San Jose, Oania drew on fabrics left over from “Pearl Fishers,” “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Elixir of Love” for that company’s own donation to Valley Medical Center Foundation.

Between the two South Bay company’s efforts, nonpatient care staff at several hospitals and clinics in Santa Clara County might be using masks made out of the same fabric that made it into costumes onstage.

Oania and Michelle Earney Roque, a stitcher for TheatreWorks, both report that they can make an individual mask in 12 to 15 minutes, though they have learned that it’s faster to work in bulk — “cutting them all out first, pleating each of them second, then finally sewing and finishing,” as Earney Roque put it.

“It gives me a sense of satisfaction,” Oania said, “knowing I’m doing a small thing to help our community.”

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