This written portion of my thesis documents my process as a director in staging Taylor Mac’s play The Lily’s Revenge in collaboration with a creative team of designers, dramaturgs, and performers. I share with the reader my processes toward fostering cohesion and collaboration among a team while working on a complex play that departs from many theatrical conventions. I discuss significant learnings from several areas of dramaturgical and performance research that dovetail within the play: queer performance practice, Theater of the Ridiculous, and Noh theater, and how I used this research to support the communication with my design collaborators to design a show crossing several theatrical genres. I invite readers into the challenges and discoveries of a rehearsal process that required heightened performances from actors and creative solutions for sustaining audience engagement. This thesis includes dramaturgical research, documentation of the rehearsal process, and documentation of audience and performer experiences.

A reflection on the costume design process for the theatrical production of Taylor Mac’s The Lily's Revenge: A Flowergory Manifold, with book and lyrics by Taylor Mac and music by Rachelle Garniez. The production was directed by Jen Onopa. Performed at the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst, April 20th to April 29th, 2018. The Lily’s Revenge is a piece of queer durational theater that tells the story of a Lily who falls in love with a bride and goes on a journey to become a man, so she can marry her. Along the way she faces challenges that force her to evaluate who she is and what love is. Taylor Mac uses multiple theatrical structures, establishing expectations and disrupting them while simultaneously disrupting heteronormative societal expectations. The audience is challenged to consider alternative possibilities for what constitutes happiness in our society, to open their minds to different possibilities of love. At once epic and intimate, ridiculous and real, this is a play rife with contradiction and possibility. I reflect on the challenges posed by this production, from the ethical considerations of representing the LGBTQ community on stage as a heterosexual cis-gendered woman, to the logistical challenges that accompany a four-hour long piece of theater with five acts set in unique settings and theatrical modes. I walk through the design process from the early research phase to the final design decisions. I examine the collaboration between myself and my team, how their input helped shape the designs. I explore the production process and my experience in guiding this massive show through the costume shop. I reflect on how I have grown through this experience—my work on this production has been exemplary of my time at UMass in that I have grown both as an artist and as a person. Art is a way of exploring the world and our relationship to it, of thinking about and questioning who we are as people, how we relate to other people, how we can make change in both regards. There is always something to learn about yourself through each production.

This master’s thesis documents the dramaturgical exploration of the spring 2018 University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater’s production of gender non-conforming performance artist Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge. The thesis is separated into two parts. The first half focuses on my dramaturgical analysis of Mac’s play and its exploration of queer temporality and queer embodiment, asserting the importance of queer aesthetics in American drama and its vital role in shaping the future of LGBTQIA+ politics in the United States. The second half includes reflections on rehearsal processes and performances, giving readers and fellow artists examples of the potential of queer dramaturgical practices that are products of LGBTQIA+ theater and politics in the United States. These reflections show the application of research to rehearsal processes into theatrical performances as directed, designed, and performed by graduate and undergraduate students at UMass Amherst Department of Theater, located in Amherst, Massachusetts, thus giving a trajectory of how the queer and feminist theories written into the play are manifested into a full production through collaborative design, movement, staging, and performance. Drawn from my discoveries while working on The Lily’s Revenge as production dramaturg, I have shaped my own style of collaborative “queer dramaturgy” with the director and designers, hopefully, opening new entry points of future explorations for queer dramaturgs to synthesize theory and practice onto the stage with collaborators from all disciplines and identities.