Theatre History Commons^™

The Pavilion, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2005 Summer Theatre

Hailed by critics as an "an Our Town for our time," this play is by turns poetic and comic, romantic and philosophical. Peter returns to his twenty-year high-school reunion with dreams of winning back Kari, the girl he left behind after an unexpected pregnancy ended their relationship. Standing in Peter's way is Kari's bitter-as-ever resentment, her husband and the fact that Peter still hasn't grown up. As the night progresses, both Peter and Kari are led, through their interactions with a host of characters all played by a virtuosic Narrator, to face the consequences of choices made long ago and …

Crimes Of The Heart, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2005 Summer Theatre

The three MaGrath sisters are back together in their hometown of Hazelhurst, Mississippi for the first time in a decade. Lenny, the eldest, never left Hazelhurst -- she is the caretaker of the sisters’ cantankerous Old Granddaddy. Meg, the middle sister, left home to pursue stardom as a singer in Los Angeles, but has, so far, only found happiness at the bottom of a bottle. And Babe, the youngest, has just been arrested for the murder of her abusive husband, Zackery Bottrelle. Under the scorching heat of the Mississippi sun, past resentments bubble to the surface and each sister must …

Rounding Third, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2005 Summer Theatre

Don is a coach who believes that winning is what is most important in baseball, and he is all about the game. Michael is his assistant coach, a businessman who believes that kids should have fun when they play baseball. These conflicting personalities instantly clash. Don's kid is the star pitcher of the team, and Michael's kid can barely remember to keep his shoelaces tied. In addition, there are extramarital affairs going on (though the truth of them is well-hidden), and Michael's job is not all that it seems.

https://stageagent.com/shows/play/1899/rounding-third

The Taming Of The Shrew, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

1985-1986 Season

A ribald, raucous, rowdy look at the eternal “battle of the sexes.” The beautiful Catherine has acquired a reputation as “Kate the Curst” because she apparently does not like the kind of potential suitors encouraged by her father. Enter the swashbuckling but roguish adventurer, Petruchio, who wants both Catherine and her dowry. The father happily agrees to the match and the resulting “battle” ends up as one of Shakespeare's most famous love matches.

Snoopy!, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2018 Summer Theatre

The musical sequel to YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN – deserves each of its three exclamation points. Based on the beloved Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz, the show sparkles with wit and warmth as it depicts life as seen through the eyes of Schulz’s unforgettable characters.

The Old Versus The New Equestrian Circus: Demonstrating And Promoting Equine Welfare, Veronica Painter

Theses and Dissertations

Circus is an art form that was originally considered as a humanitarian art, promoting equine welfare by shedding a new light on the horse and human relationship. During a time where horses were used for war, work, and transportation; fancy riding and liberty stood as the framework for a new togetherness between man and beast. The animal activist revolution centered on exotic animals in circus, yet the effects of these demanding pressures caused a major blow to the equestrian circus. This comparative study examines possible improvements to the industry in order to keep this art alive. Keeping up with eclectic …

Should Theatre Disappear Like Soap Bubbles?, Erin Lee

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I recently read an excerpt from a 2004 interview with Peter Hall where he claims that he was happy for his materials to disappear "like soap bubbles" (Reason, 2006). One of the fundamentally difficult things about archiving theatre, aside from its ephemeral nature, is the approach that creatives take to their work. Not only do we need to battle the format of live performance but we also need to convince many creatives, not all I must add, that their work can and should remain in the Archive for use in the future. There are glimmers of potential in the area …

The Walking Dramaturg: An Autoethnographic Methodology For Performance Documentation, Giselle G. Garcia

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Technology usually implies the distancing of the human experience, but I argue what technology has enabled can teach us something about the role of multiplicity and the rhizomatic nature of history and storytelling. By looking at the subject position of the practicing performance researcher in terms of the walking dramaturg, the autoethnographic catalogue of such experience becomes a form of documentation in the archive of theatre histories. Taking the time to explore a nuanced understanding of the documeter’s subject position acknowledges the multifarious subject positions that contribute to the archive of theatre histories.

Beyond creating a record of evidence, I …

Filming The Stage: Reflections On The Historical And The Aesthetic Perspectives Of An Essential Archive Of The Future, André Deridder

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Since the appearance and growth of cinema, a close but sometimes ambiguous relationship has been forged between the “Seventh Art” and the performing arts. Although cinema evolved quickly to become an art form in its own right, the stage and the productions produced for this space remain an object of attention for film directors. The relationship between the audio-visual sector and the presentational arts torments historians, creators and aestheticians alike. Experimented with and made use of by some, with varying degrees of success, fully rejected by others, the filming of the stage always raises many practical questions as well as …

Women Of The Future: The Performative Personhood Of Elizabeth Robins, Djuna Barnes, And The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Michelle Feda

Theses and Dissertations

The New Woman is the term used to describe the changing social norms around women's involvement in public life during the fin-de-siècle. New Women were bold and brash, educated and independent, and, importantly young; the term encapsulated any particular woman who stepped outside of her mother's Victorian social norms. The New Woman was as much a construct of the time as it was a description. The playwright and suffragette Elizabeth Robins performs "new womanhood" on the stage, and her play Votes for Women! enacts this struggle between New Women and the older generation. Djuna Barnes started her career as a …

Voices Of Notators: Approaches To Writing A Score--Special Issue, Teresa L. Heiland

Journal of Movement Arts Literacy Archive (2013-2019)

In this special issue of Voices of Notators: Approaches to Writing a Score, eight authors share their unique process of creating and implementing their approach to notating movement, and they describe how that process transforms them as researchers, analysts, dancers, choreographers, communicators, and teachers. These researchers discuss the need to capture, to form, to generate, and to communicate ideas using a written form of dance notation so that some past, present, or future experience can be better understood, directed, informed, and shared. They are organized roughly into themes motivated by relationships between them and their methodological similarities and differences. …

Oklahoma!, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

2018 Summer Theatre

Rodgers & Hammerstein's first collaboration remains, in many ways, their most innovative, having set the standards and established the rules of musical theatre still being followed today. Set in a Western Indian territory just after the turn of the century, the high-spirited rivalry between the local farmers and cowboys provides the colorful background against which Curly, a handsome cowboy, and Laurey, a winsome farm girl, play out their love story. Although the road to true love never runs smooth, with these two headstrong romantics holding the reins, love's journey is as bumpy as a surrey ride down a country road. …

The Fantasticks, Otterbein University Theatre And Dance Department

1974 Summer Theatre

The Fantasticks is a 1960 musical with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones. It tells an allegorical story, loosely based on the play The Romancers by Edmond Rostand, concerning two neighboring fathers who trick their children, Luisa and Matt, into falling in love by pretending to feud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fantasticks

Illuminating The Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance Through Education, Bethany Csomay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Actress studies has become “a truly interdisciplinary field” that “intersect[s] with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion” (Engel 752). While much scholarship has been conducted on the actress’ life, interaction with material culture, public spectacle, authority, femininity, and writings, the role of an actress’ education in her success has yet to be explored adequately or examined beyond biography. My project seeks to examine the educational beginnings of actresses and I assert there are three modes that eighteenth-century actresses often undertook to cultivate their celebrity and success: inheritance, discovery, and trial and error. This project examines the …

Anna Larpent And Shakespeare, Fiona Ritchie

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Anna Larpent (1758-1832) is a crucial figure in theater history and the reception of Shakespeare since drama was a central part of her life. Larpent was a meticulous diarist: the Huntington Library holds seventeen volumes of her journal covering the period 1773-1830. These diaries shed significant light on the part Shakespeare played in her life and contain her detailed opinions of his works as she experienced them both on the page and on the stage in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. Larpent experienced Shakespeare’s works in a variety of forms: she sees Shakespeare’s plays performed, both professionally and by …

The Broadway Of War: How Theater Remembers The American Revolution, Campbell Loeber

Of Life and History

No abstract provided.

Of Life And History, Vol. 1 (May 2018)

Of Life and History

No abstract provided.

Otand Alumni Network Newsletter, Otterbein University Theatre & Dance Department

OTAND Alumni Newsletter

OTAND (Otterbein Theatre & Dance Alumni Network) brings together graduates of the Department of Theatre and Dance as well as alumni who participated in theatre and dance activities before we became an official department, to provide networking support for each other, mentoring of current students, assistance with recruiting, and fundraising for the department.

Turn Of The Century British Musical Comedy In An American Performance Library, Victoria Peters

Theses and Dissertations

The genre label 'musical comedy' gained its stride in the 1920s, but the term emerged as early as the 1870s. These early musical comedies are often overlooked in the historical discussion of musical theater, due to a lack of integration between the storyline and musical numbers. With the help of the Tams-Witmark collection, housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Mills Music Library, this paper examines how two of these early musical comedies, composed by England’s Ivan Caryll and Sidney Jones, were exported and used by touring theater companies in The United States. These flexible musical comedies complicate the kinds of …

The Work Of Living Art, Empathy, And The Creation Of An Aesthetics Of Perception In The Early Twentieth Century, Sarah Peil Winstead

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), theorist and pioneering voice of the New Stagecraft Movement in twentieth century theatre, was a transformative influence on the history of scenic design. This paper looks at the links between Appia’s theories in theatre scenic design and contemporaneous German aesthetic theory. At the time German theorists like Adolf Hildebrand and August Schmarsow developed an aesthetic theory, Einfülung or empathy theory, based on the connection between the human body and perception. I will argue this theory influenced not only Appia and his contemporaries it also shaped the landscape of mid-century theatre design. Appia’s own theories revolved around three …