“Devastating and, for white people, or at any rate for me, painful. And why shouldn’t they be? The best plays aren’t just about empathizing with the oppressed; they’re also about accepting our connection to the oppressors. With asperity but also love, “Slave Play” lets us all see ourselves in the muddle that is race in America now. There’s even a giant mirrored wall in Clint Ramos’s set to make sure we do. Such reflections are no longer common on Broadway. If “Slave Play” can bring them to a bigger audience — even an audience that is shocked or offended — it will be a happy surprise indeed. Shock and offense may be just the ticket now.

- Jesse Green / THE NEW YORK TIMES

“And, of course, “Slave Play,” whose set reflected our faces back at us, insisting that we recognize our involvement in its trauma. (That design, by Clint Ramos, got one of the show’s record-breaking 12 nominations for the yet-to-be-held 2020 Tony Awards.)”

- Laura Collins Hughes / THE NEW YORK TIMES

“If Slave Play has a muse, it’s probably Rihanna. Her song “Work” not only pops up throughout the piece (it belongs specifically to Kaneisha and represents both psychological torment and physical release for her) but is also quoted in neon above the mirrored back wall of Clint Ramos’s set — in which we can see reflected a large banner, hung behind us and showing a sunny Virginia plantation, and we can see ourselves. “Nuh body touch me you nuh righteous” the looming letters atop the wall read. Soon enough, we’ll learn that Rihanna isn’t as anachronistic as we might think, and that the whole play is an exegesis on the link — here, the specifically racialized interplay — between sex and work that she’s singing about. It’s also a play about how we’re seen: how we see ourselves, how we want our partners and the world to see us, and the scary, unavoidable — though often, to ourselves, invisible — lenses history has clapped over our eyes..”

- Sarah Holdren / New York MAGAZINE VULTURE

“The opening image of her distractedly sweeping the stage with a birch broom, wearing the full-skirted dress and head-wrap of an antebellum slave woman, looks like a Kara Walker silhouette come to life. But the period allusion cracks as Kaneisha starts furiously twerking to Rihanna's "Work." A lyric from that hit, "Nuh body touch me you nuh righteous," is emblazoned across the top of Clint Ramos' set, a mirrored wall in which the audience can see itself throughout, along with the panoramic view of a grand Southern plantation house.”

- David Rooney / THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“In an age where debates about race and sex seem to be taking a turn for the worse, Slave Play relentlessly jerks its audience back to the reality of racial discrimination with shocking scenes and flawless acting. The actors themselves are fearless in their depiction of strikingly provocative scenes. Coupled with incredible set design by Clint Ramos and music by Lindsay Jones, Slave Play pulls out all the stops and presents a thought-provoking picture of discrimination and cultural identity.”

- HEAD OUT

“The spiritual rulers of their domain are Erzulie (Lea Salonga), benevolent goddess of love; Agwe (Quentin Earl Darrington), powerful god of water; Asaka (Alex Newell), mother of the earth; and Papa Ge (Merle Dandridge), the badass demon of death. The scrappy, hand-made quality of the production is lovely, with costumer Clint Ramos fashioning marvelous outfits for the deities out of found materials. Erzulie, clad in white, wears an imposing headdress of tangled wires that evokes religious iconography; Agwe smears his muscles with green and blue paint; Papa Ge, nontraditionally cast as a woman, has a wild mane of dreads and a harness with the razor-back of a dragon, her fins made out of Coke cans; and Asaka is a fabulous transgender diva in a ratty football jersey and floral-tablecloth skirt, throwing epic shade with a red fan.”

- David Rooney / THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“But maybe the director, Michael Arden, intended this revival to be more about the feeling of the island than about the plot of the story. The aesthetic was clear and incredibly well curated by the designers: costumes by Clint Ramos, set by Dane Laffrey, lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, found instruments by John Bertles and Bash the Trash. The visual and sonic textures of the piece have an added emotional and maybe even political resonance in our current moment where Caribbean has been ravished by hurricanes.”

- Christian Lewis / HUFFINGTON POST

“But it is hard to imagine a better account of the show than the one that Arden and his team—including choreographer Camille A. Brown and the brilliant costumer Clint Ramos—have assembled. It sings, dances and conjures up a storm.”

- Adam Feldman/TIME OUT NEW YORK

“This little island may be the “Jewel of the Antilles,” as its inhabitants claim in the lively musical prologue, but the forces of nature are so fickle that people must take care not to offend the temperamental gods. Gorgeously decked out in Clint Ramos’s flamboyant costumes (and Cookie Jordan’s artistic application of body paint), the most powerful of these gods are Asaka, Mother of the Earth (Alex Newell, who has an amazing vocal range); Agwe, God of Water (Quentin Earl Darrington, rippling with sparkling blue muscles); and Erzulie, the beautiful Goddess of Love, whose angelic voice belongs to the beautiful Lea Salonga (“Miss Saigon,” “Allegiance”).”

- Marilyn Stasio / VARIETY

“No matter where you look, the theater seems busy with active life, as the evocative set design of Dane Laffrey and the humorously jumbled (and humbly mismatched) costumes of Clint Ramos help draw a vibrant portrait of life on an island…”

- Charles Isherwood / BROADWAY NEWS

“Set on an island in the French Antilles (atmospherically evoked by set designer Dane Laffrey), with inventive costuming by Clint Ramos (who designed the Imelda Marcos romp Here Lies Love), the show is peopled by bewitching storytellers, among them Lea Salonga as Erzulie, a deliciously imposing Alex Newell as Asaka, and Quentin Earl Darrington as Agwe.”

- Hamish Bowles / VOGUE

"The experience of Once on This Island is both gorgeously sensual — you can almost feel the humidity in the theater — and evocative of something all too real, common, and devastating. Arden, Laffrey, and costume designer Clint Ramos have created a hurricane-racked world, a community of survivors, subsisting and rebuilding in the face of repeated ruthless natural disasters. New Orleans, Houston, Florida, Puerto Rico — they’re all present in the tone and texture of this revival, and the acknowledgement feels not only responsible but fitting…..With each appearance of the four actors who play Once on This Island’s volatile pantheon, Ramos adds to their costumes, using elements of the scrappy, storm-strewn world to create clothes fit for the gods. Early on, the utterly fabulous Alex Newell — in a gender-fluid turn as Asaka — grabs a flowery plastic tablecloth and wraps it around himself to take on his role as the earth goddess. When we see him next, Ramos has constructed an actual voluminous skirt for him out of the same material. Agwe, the powerful Quentin Earl Darrington, begins as the man who was fishing in the pool. Add a necklace of plastic flotsam and a streak of blue face paint, and there’s the God of Water. And that woman with the live goat on the leash? The black knife on her thigh was a good hint. Merle Dandridge gives a chilling, full-throated turn as Papa Ge, the god of death, and Ramos adds layer upon layer of fantastical, creature-like elements to her original costume of leather straps and dark rags. (Poor goat. Having Papa Ge as its keeper probably has something to do with its implied fate in the show.) As Erzulie, the goddess of love, Lea Salonga is serene and charming, though she’s got to deliver one of the musical’s soppiest numbers (“The Human Heart”) and model an ensemble that’s less compelling than those of her divine comrades. Unlike with Newell, Darrington, and Dandridge, Ramos all but abandons Salonga’s original look in creating Erzulie’s final form. Her diaphanous white dress and Project Runway-esque headdress seem only tenuously connected to the world of sand and storm debris.

- Sarah Holdren / NY MAGAZINE. VULTURE

“Arden, who has worked magic before on revelatory revivals of Spring Awakening and Big River that paired hearing and deaf actors, is abetted by choreographer Camille A. Brown; together they give the show a seamless wave of action as our eyes are filled with the earthy-dreamy characters in a Mardi Gras of costumes from Clint Ramos.”

- Jeremy Gerard / DEADLINE

“Other effects are incremental: The gods, who begin, like everyone else in the show, as workaday members of the island community, only slowly take on their lordly affect and spectacular regalia. (Asaka’s tablecloth skirt and a trash tiara for Erzulie are among the many small delights of Clint Ramos’s often hilarious costume design.)”

- Jesse Green / THE NEW YORK TIMES

"The set designer, Clint Ramos . . . has created coffins that the actors unfold into closets and cars and park benches, and that ingenuity, in itself, is worth the price of admission."
Wild With Happy
-The New Yorker

"Clint Ramos has provided [Imelda Marcos] with a vast and fabulous array of instant costume changes that signal the waning of the years and the waxing of her ego. The effect is like flipping through the pages of a celebrity magazine."
Here Lies Love
-The New York Times, Ben Brantley

"Remarkable set design . . . so gorgeous, moving and carefully realized that by itself it would be worthy of a gallery or museum showing . . . [S]o haunting that even before the start of the play, one might be moved to tears . . . . The items and the context evoke the passage of time, a great fall from grace, a sense of beauty lost and happiness sacrificed."
Hamlet.
-San Francisco Examiner, Charles Kruger

"Clint Ramos's ramshackle set effortlessly suggests the claustrophobic existence of Ms. Nottage's beleaguered characters"
Ruined
- Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout

"Costume designer Clint Ramos [is] uniformly brilliant."
Good Person of Szechwan
-The New Yorker, Hilton Als

"[T]he cast members . . . inhabit . . . sociologically exact costumes."
Hurt Village
-The New York Times, Ben Brantley

"The set by Clint Ramos is precise in all its details."
How the World Began
-The New York Times, Charles Isherwood

"[T]he Cinderella suite of a hotel at Disney World [was] lavishly recreated by the set designer Clint Ramos, whose inventiveness also includes funeral home coffins springing open like pop-up books to transform into car interiors and park benches." Wild With Happy
-The New York Times, Charles Isherwood

"In 'The Temperamentals,' Jon Marans’s docudrama about being gay in 1950s America, all the men are in sober suits and at first appear more or less interchangeable. But then you start to notice little details that set them apart from one another, particularly the accessories and especially those telltale neckties. Seeing how the designer Clint Ramos had dressed the actors here, I thought of that ostensibly respectable aristocrat the Baron de Charlus, in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” whose wardrobe always warrants a second glance because it betrays a lurid other life."
-New York Times, Ben Brantley

"There's style to burn, as seen to by costume designer Clint Ramos."
Women Beware Women.
-New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz

"Yet Michael Donald Edwards's staging, which fields a budget-busting cast of 24, is not a bare-bones antispectacle but a masterpiece of unified design.My travels, as usual, brought me much pleasure, including . . . the best-designed show I've seen in ages, Michael Donald Edwards's modern-dress production of Bertolt Brecht's "Life of Galileo" at Asolo Rep in Sarasota, Fla. (sets and costumes by Clint Ramos...)
Galileo
-Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

"With its catchy mix of emotional ballads and disco ditties, Here Lies Love offers a percolating beat, tremendous flow and visual beauties led by Clint Ramos’s costumes. The floral dresses alone could inspire a collection . . . ."
Here Lies Love
-Financial Times, Brendan Lemon

"[T]he insanely good-looking cast . . . poured into Clint Ramos's stylish, witty period costumes."
Here Lies Love
-Vogue, Adam Green

"[The] brazen comedy of alienation moves like a carousel (the brilliant revolving set is by Clint Ramos, as are the candy-bright costumes) and feels like a roller coaster -- or, given its splashy, raunchy spirit, a log flume."
Bootycandy
-The New Yorker

"It would be easy to get lost in the surface dazzle of Jesse Berger’s whip-smart production . . . especially Clint Ramos’s astonishingly luxurious costumes, the most beautifully conceived and executed of any I have seen this year."
Women Beware Women
-Time Out New York, Adam Feldman

"[C]ostume/scenic designer Clint Ramos pulled out all the stops -- this is a play staged with the colorful verve of a musical."
Wild With Happy
-The New York Post, Elizabeth Vincentelli

"[T]oxicity leaches naturally out of the rotting walls and piles of junk arranged on Clint Ramos’s smashing, Southern Gothic horror show of a set."
Appropriate
-Washington Post, Peter Marks

"Visual delights come from Clint Ramos’s character-defining contemporary costumes, especially Kathryn Meisle’s Lady Capulet as a leopard-print–adorned Real Housewife of Verona."
Romeo & Juliet
-Time Out New York, Diane Snyder

"Clint Ramos designed the colorful costumes and sets, notably the crazily clever, multi-functional coffins."
Wild With Happy
-Associated Press

"Kristen Johnston is a marvel, her Amazonian frame sheathed in designer Clint Ramos’s splendid gowns and furs."
So Help Me God!
-Time Out New York

"The . . . colorful costumes and sets by Clint Ramos" are "smart and imaginative."
Wild With Happy
-New York Daily News, Joe Dziemianowicz

"Clint Ramos's ingenious sets and costumes add to the hilarity."
Bootycandy
-Time Out New York, Adam Feldman

"Eventually, Ma arrives at the studio, regal in a velvet dress and a dazzling black coat with a kind of plumage fanning out from the neck (by costume designer Clint Ramos . . .)"
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
-Boston Globe, Don Aucoin

"Clint Ramos [designed] gloriously florid costumes."
Women Beware Women
-New York Post

"The production [was] designed with bright-hued flair and turntable glee by Clint Ramos."
Bootycandy.
-Financial Times, Brendan Lemon