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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
In Defense Of Grass Grows: A Play About Mental Illness, Amanda Grace Hughes
In Defense Of Grass Grows: A Play About Mental Illness, Amanda Grace Hughes
Honors Program Theses
My mission as a mentally ill theatre artist is to challenge the commonly-perpetuated fictions that restrict public perception of mentally ill persons [MIPs]. A meta-analysis of plays from the Greek, Medieval, Victorian, Melodramatic, Naturalist, and Post- Naturalist eras reflected just how little progress has been made at exposing and eliminating popular myths about mental illness. While the theatrical canon offers evidence for the inadequacy of current representations of MIPs, the psychological literature offers steps forward for the artists telling these stories. Efforts to improve artist sensitivity to the complex realities of mental illness fail to educate with fact alone (Dale, …
The Curse Of The V: Contemporary Feminist Movements And Performative Dichotomies In The Plays Of Caryl Churchill, Meredith A. Connelly
The Curse Of The V: Contemporary Feminist Movements And Performative Dichotomies In The Plays Of Caryl Churchill, Meredith A. Connelly
Honors Program Theses
Caryl Churchill mixes historical setting with shallowly defined characters and dissociative references to the contemporary within her vast body of work. She seeks to deny her audience the opportunity to blindly accept the entertainment of narrative theater, forcing them instead into a realm of discomfort where they must identify the unsavory elements of history with their own lived experience. This research began with the questioning of previous critical models which examine characters as autonomous beings rather than as personified themes, and asks how Churchill responds radically with theater as a medium to events pervading her own experience as a woman …