"BEST FRIEND IN THE DRESSING ROOM: Costumer David Zinn inserts a slew of punctuation marks into his eccentric period designs. In his work for Target Margin Theater (The Sandman, 5 Hysterical Girls Theorem, Mamba's Daughters), this brave little tailor offers mix-and-match deconstructions of suits and gowns. Multiple layerings, unusual materials, insouciant details and striking color combinations show Zinn rewriting the manual of style."
-- Time Out New York, May 30 - June 6, 2002
On Una Cosa Rara
"With eye-popping lime greens and magentas, OTSL's sets (by David Zinn) and costumes (by Clint Ramos) wittily mixed up the 18th century with Magritte surrealism and modern kitsch (pink flamingos, anyone?)"

-- Dallas Morning News
On The Sound and the Fury
"David Zinn's set is a ravishingly detailed, photo-realist evocation of what an early 20th-century parlor of a once prosperous Southern home might have looked like. (It is spiced from time to time with surrealistic accents, like a sideboard that turns into a blazing fireplace, or projected text from the book.)"

-- New York Times
On Taming of the Shrew
"This Taming of the Shrew bristles with eye-popping visual ideas and inventive physical humor. Roguish set designer David Zinn gives us a contemporary Italy out of a fun-house Fellini."

-- Dallas Morning News
On The Cunning Little Vixen
"[The Cunning Little Vixen] entered Lyric Opera of Chicago's repertory on November 17, in a stunning production, sung in the original Czech, directed by Chas Rader-Shieber with sets and costumes by David Zinn, all lit with gentle grace by Lenore Doxsee. Lyric's creative team skillfully captured Vixen's profound melding of human and animal worlds by illuminating the piece with all the affection it deserves, while pushing the conceptual envelope just enough to keep us on our toes. The opera was set in an attic space with a suggestion of twinkling stars in the ceiling beams, a place where antique trunks, gramophones, and children's toys have been lovingly preserved just a step away from the world of adults. An effect of aching nostalgia was achieved, along with a slight blurring of reality, as mobile walls of cheerful sunflowers glided across this interior space..."

-- Opera News

"Zinn's clever, eye-filling designs, framed by giant sunflowers and revolving antique furniture, find glimmers of unspoiled nature in the childhood memories adult tuck away in their mental attics. Tilted miniature houses and antique furniture spin on a turntable . . . hens wearing outrageous red wigs and long white dresses cluck around a 1950s kitchen."

-- The Chicago Tribune
On Tamerlano
"In Handel's rarely mounted Tamerlano, the defeated Bajazet...wore traditional sultan's robes, while his corporate conquerors, barking orders and gleefully dividing the spoils, sported snazzy business suits. Mixing sexual and power politics, the libretto is nearly incomprehensible, but its centre--Bajazet losing his culture, his dignity and his daughter--is tragically clear. David Zinn's cunning set was littered with ancient books and other looted treasures at the front of the stage, and endless, empty bookshelves at the rear."

-- Jack Sullivan, Opera Magazine
On Orlando
"Handel was an insightful psychologist. Those strings of da capo arias poignantly reveal the inner torments of his characters, something Mr. Rader-Shieber and his set and costume designer, David Zinn, make palpably clear. They also know how to put on a good show. So the enchanted forest, depicted just through leafy painted flats, is a place where rural and courtly worlds meet; pathways in the woods are marked by marble archways and candelabras mingle with the trees. In Act I the maiden Dorinda tends to travelers in the forest who sleep in hospital beds, having been pierced through the heart by the arrows of Amor (a puckish, barefooted boy played by the actor Julian Gialanela). The costumes are colorfully surreal riffs on 18th-century courtly dress. When Zoroastro intervenes, he pops out of hidden doors in the forest through which we briefly glimpse the glaring white radiance of his secret world."

-- Anthony Tommasini, New York Times
On Flavio
"Mr. Rader-Shieber's deft dollops of visual slapstick -- a renegade daisy in a tulip bed fleeing offstage when the king tries to pick it -- were backed up by David Zinn's simple sets, creating a varying range of spaces with walls of box hedge or a pentagonal house that opens like a jewel box to reveal a patterned interior where lovers bill and coo amid stacks of wedding gifts."

-- Anne Midgette, New York Times
On La Clemenza di Tito
"Zinn’s clever set is a white room in classical style with a sliding back panel that can be opened to reveal outside scenes. The room worked because the opera is an 18th-century drawing-room drama, dealing with ethical and moral concerns of the Age of Enlightenment, despite being set in Ancient Rome. Thus, the four young people are in severe black 18th-century dress in the first act, and after the rebellion against Tito, appear in negative image — tattered white costumes of the same design, a metaphor for their faltering fortunes."

-- Paula Citron, Toronto Globe and Mail
On He Hunts
"ChrisBarecca (set), David Zinn (costumes), and Anne Militelo (lighting) are the true stars of this show, their work amazingly detailed . . . [Valerie] Pettiford gets to wear two of the most gorgeous stage dresses ever, while Foster isn't so much clothed as blanketed in an over-the-top plaid-on-plaid ensemble. The pants that play a role in the paint-by-numbers plot are wonderfully silly, and the climax of the show arrives with [Carol] Kane and a yacht-sized hat."

-- Variety