Costume Design

KIN - BATHSHEBA DORAN

The Chain Theater, 2024 - Producers: Making Our Space Theater Co.; Director: Spencer Whale; Scenic Designer: Michael Lewis; Costume Lighting Designer: Yichen Zhou

Set against the backdrop of the early 2000s, Anna, an Ivy-League poet scholar, and Sean, an Irish personal trainer, fall in love. Audiences will come to know Anna and Sean’s love through their secondary relationships: Anna’s eccentric best friend, Sean’s agoraphobic mother, Anna’s distant father, and more. Friend and family ties stretch across Ireland and New York, revealing the complexities of connection and community.

Cuck, Cuck, Bull - Spencer Whale

Columbia University, 2023 - Director: Spencer Whale; Scenic Designer: Britton Mauk; Lighting Designer: Celia Krefter

Bushwick gays, Danny and Ike, are getting married! But they’re running out of time to decide what that means. When a confident third introduces them to fresh sexual dynamics, their growing secrets threaten to tear them apart. This outrageous exploration of a modern queer subculture explores the dark side of mainstream acceptance and to what lengths couples will go to maintain a sense of the taboo.

Vile Isle - Justin Halle

Columbia University, 2023 - Director: Spencer Whale; Scenic Designer: Michael Lewis; Costume Designer: Marianne CD Needell; Lighting Designer: Celia Krefter

A group of friends who call themselves 'queer family' is on the verge of spiritual breakdown or breakthrough, depending on who you ask. A dead-of-winter trip to Fire Island is threatened by an Old Testament-style flood. And Gnocchi the Cat is being Bat Mitzvah’d, God willing. Vile Isle is a passionate and provocative dark comedy about the ways we fail and forgive one another, and what faith is worth when our limits are existentially tested.

Far Away - Caryl Churchill

Columbia University, 2024 - Director: Samuel Gibbs; Scenic Designer: Josh Oberlander; Costume Designer: Marianne CD Needell; Lighting Designer: Elizabeth Schweitzer; Projection Designer: Claire Talbott

Far Away is an absurdist thriller about the end of the world and the dark deeds that bring it about. We watch three scenes from the life of a young woman named Joan–in the first, she’s questioning her aunt in the middle of the night about witnessing a disturbing scene in the garden shed. By the third, the whole world is at war, with ants fighting crocodiles fighting Latvian dentists.

Illusions - Ivan Viripaev (transl Cazimir Liske)

Columbia University, 2023 - Director: Andrew Freeburg; Scenic Designer: Thomas Jenkeleit; Costume Designer: Marianne CD Needell; Lighting Designer: Christina Tang

Illusions is an exercise in collective storytelling about people you’ve never met. Two men and two women untangle the lives of two couples based on the traces they’ve left behind: a pile of broken lamps, tattered chairs, and overturned refrigerators, all left to rot and rust on a sidewalk. Except…who left them? Who were these couples? What have they left behind? And who have they left it for?