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`Electricidad’ gets under cast’s skin

These days Charin Alvarez is careful to wear a sweater when picking up her 4-year-old daughter from school. She keeps her arms covered when she knows she’ll be downtown too. “In my neighborhood, which is very artsy, it’s not a big deal,” she said. “Here [in the Loop] it’s a big deal. I get followed by security guards. I don’t go to Marshall Field’s without a sweater.”

It’s because of the tattoos.

Alvarez has a “13” and a butterfly on her right arm, a rose on her chest, an abstract tribal design on her left ankle. But the worst from a social point of view is the naked woman on her left forearm. Not what you want to be flashing the other parents in the carpool queue.

Ironically, the tattoos aren’t really even hers. They belong to Ifigenia, the character Alvarez plays in the Goodman Theatre production of “Electricidad.”

Written by Luis Alfaro, “Electricidad” takes the ancient, gruesome story of the house of Atreus — told in tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, among others — and relocates it to the American Southwest, where Chicano gang members stand in for the ill-fated Greek royals. As Alfaro styles it, Ifigenia is the born-again ex-convict product of a spectacularly broken home. The tattoos are part of her identity as a chola, or gang member.

She’s not the only one. Practically everybody else onstage is festooned with tattoos. Cecilia Suarez, who plays the title character, sports only three — but one involves big gothic letters. Eddie Torres’ Nino bears seven. Ivonne Coll’s chola matriarch, Abuela, has them done up in the old-school manner: skulls, crosses and daggers seemingly scribbled on the skin.

But it’s Maximino Arciniega Jr.’s Orestes who displays the ultimate in skin art: a full-color image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, covering 160 square inches of his back — which is to say, practically the whole thing.

The tattoos are so important and ubiquitous (30 of them, distributed among six cast members) that they constitute a wardrobe in themselves, and pose some significant logistical challenges. The costume design team, led by Christopher Acebo, had to figure out how to create meaningful, convincing images that could be maintained through 40 performances without harming the actors, breaking the production budget or consuming huge blocs of man hours in application.

“If we handpainted every tattoo,” said makeup consultant Nan Zabriskie, “you’d have to have five makeup artists a night.”

Part of the solution came from Hollywood. Faced with the prospect of painting cuts, burns and bruises on scores of extras for the film Pearl Harbor, makeup artist Christian Tinsley drew up a variety of vivid lacerations and turned them into plastic transfers that can be applied directly to the skin.

This breakthrough led to the founding of Tinsley Transfers, which has decorated flesh in productions from “The Passion of the Christ” to “Dawn of the Dead.”

The Virgin of Guadalupe is a Tinsley Transfer. Simpler tattoos employ other methods. Dresser Brandy Karlsen and wardrobe supervisor Jenee Garretson do the work of reapplying images when they wear out after two or three days, guided by grids that plot the topography of each actor’s skin, with moles and nipples for landmarks. They’re also charged with warding off rashes.

“It’s summer, and this guy [Arciniega] has a huge percentage of his back that’s not getting any air,” said Zabriskie. “Jenee’s been babying his back.”

But the actors are on their own when it comes to carrying their stage tattoos around with them, 24/7. Asked whether he thought his scared people, Arciniega replied, “I don’t know if they’re scared, but they glance. They look at the tattoos and they kind of look at you a little bit different. And I’m younger, so they think I’m some kind of thug or something. . . .

“For me that’s the process. The more looks that I get it adds to the process of understanding the character and what it’s like to be in his skin.”

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“Electricidad” continues at the Goodman Theatre through Sunday.