Christina Beam
Costume Designer — THE LILY’S REVENGE
Christina is a freelance costume designer and technician. Her recent design credits include Queer and Now: Sync or Swim (NYPOP), She Loves Me (UConn Opera), Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge: A Flowergory Manifold (UMass), Runaways by Elizabeth Swados (UMass), The Happiest Song Plays Last by Quiara Alegría Hudes (UMass), and Moliere’s The Misanthrope, adapted by Constance Congdon (UMass).
Christina is originally from South Windsor, CT, and recently received her MFA in Costume Design from University Massachusetts at Amherst, and is now based in New York City and New England.
THE LILY’S REVENGE was directed by Jen Onopa for UMASS Amherst in April 2018.
We wanted the play to be a celebration of the individual, of community, of the present moment. It needed to be big, bold, dynamic. Like so much of queer theater, this play takes convention and turns it on its head, it disrupts, it challenges expectations, it confronts. Taylor Mac uses multiple theatrical forms, building each act as a world of its own, in order to examine and disrupt heteronormative traditions and the exclusionary nature of our society, particularly regarding happiness and marriage. The play calls the audience to consider living in the here and now, and to be present with their choices rather than clinging to past narratives that for so long have controlled our lives. The play invites us to consider that there are more options, that there is more than one way to live and be happy, and that each of us deserves to pursue whichever path we find fulfilling. In the end the worlds and mechanisms of the previous acts come together in what we wanted to be a literal explosion, resulting in a celebration of and call for radical acts of universal love.
