Playwriting Commons^™

Stopping For Death: Plays, Poetry, And Prose, Sally Johnson

Honors Theses

Thesis consists of plays and poetry composed by Sally Johnson.

A Person Of Interest, Jesse Lepre

Master's Theses, Dissertations, Graduate Research and Major Papers Overview

Presents a drama-based screenplay which explores the stereotyping of the modern Italian-American male in contemporary American society.

American Standard & The Princess Of Rome, Ohio: Two Plays, Jonathan Joy

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

From the back roads of Eastern Kentucky to the front porch of a southern Ohio home comes this collection of full length comedic plays by Jonathan Joy. Join two rural State Senate candidates (one Republican and one Democrat) forced to travel the campaign trail together in the political farce American Standard. Or see the world of dysfunctional family politics through the eyes of a fourteen year old girl in The Princess of Rome, Ohio. Also, trace the development of both works, from inception to production, in commentary that focuses on the process of writing for the stage.

Ngatish, Dale T. Mosley

Masters Theses

Ngatish is a tragedy involving the lives of Othello's African family. My purpose in writing this play is to explore the shifts in roles between women and men in powerful and subservient positions. Therefore, I have created an historical 16th-century African setting for the play while the story-line explores the lives of Othello, his African family, and his first wife, Ngatish.

Through Ngatish, I want to answer some to the unknowns in Othello: how was such a notorious general so easily and readily duped by an obviously envious man as Iago: what were his secrets; his …

Caged Gorillas, Sandra Dee Holcombe

Institute for the Humanities Theses

I wrote a full-length comedy/drama for the stage. My purpose in writing this play was to show how people deal with life in their quest for freedom. The play is set in the present, the morning of Christmas Eve, in Norfolk, Virginia. The characters are mildly to extremely eccentric, and the major story line deals with a woman who traps her husband in his mall candy shop. Subplots include the mother waiting for her kidnapped Baby Jesus to return, finding a dead mouse, and freeing a caged mall zoo gorilla.

Eldorado: The Poes In Norfolk, Myreen Moore Nicholson

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best known Americans in the world, as a great poet, literary critic and essayist, and innovator of the analytic detective story. Yet he basically remains his own best mystery. Major cities have monuments to him. This creative work's object is to show that Norfolk, Virginia, was central in his life and art. In fact, the theatre company with which his actress mother, Eliza Arnold Poe (and her friends, the Sullys), was longest affiliated, was headquartered there. Edgar's sister Rosalie was born in a house on Brewer Street. Times and the circumstances of Poe …

The Falcon: A Play, Harold W. Mckinney Ii

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The Falcon is a historical drama set in medieval France during the reign of Philip the Fair, a tumultuous period of history marked by the fall of the Holy Land to Islam after more than 200 years of struggle by Christian forces to reclaim it, and followed by the gradual exile of the Popes from Rome to Avignon on the outskirts of France.

The play itself focuses on King Philip's repeated clashes with the Papacy, as well as his ruthless attack on the Order of the Knights Templar, whose own fate was interwoven with the fortunes of both Crown and …

Letters To Mother: A One-Act Play, Susan R. Brock

Masters Theses

Few graduate students in English elect to write a creative thesis to complete their degrees, their tendency perhaps to believe that a thesis based on research seems a more scholarly endeavor. I do not think one could successfully argue the superiority of one type over the other, simply because the two are quite different. While a research thesis can require the reading and analysis of another author's work, a creative thesis requires the writing, reading, and analysis of one's own work. For that reason, the main body of this thesis consists of an introductory essay in addition to the creative …

Playdance, Gary Ryan Brown

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Playdance is a play in three acts which studies the relationships between parents and their children. The development of the script and the intended production was spurred by the pain that so many families experience as children grow away from their parents control. This look at the Denton household was an attempt to help understand the suffering and the feeling of solitude that so often accompanies this familial trauma. It was my intention to write a script that would be an exciting and insightful evening of theatre, but one that would remain accessible to a single and perhaps novice reader. …

Destination Zero: A Play In One Act, Deborah L. Muller

Masters Theses

While there have been a few creative theses written in the English department, those written up till now have consisted of collections of short stories and poetry. This is the first play to have been conceived and written for a Master's Thesis at Eastern Illinois University. The Thesis is comprised of two major parts: an introduction and the play, itself.

The introduction deals with what the goals of writing the Thesis were, what research went into reaching these goals, what the characters in the play were attempting to communicate to the reader/audience, and whether the resulting play deviated from the …

"What's A Few Secrets Among Friends", William M. Nichols

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the School of Humanities at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by William M. Nichols on April 1, 1986.