Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Generations Apart: Exploring The Generation Gap In Theatre, Jesus Briones

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

This thesis attempts to find relationships among three different ethnic groups (Jewish, Chinese, and Italian) presented in the following plays. First, there is an explanation of four different types of generation gaps that are discovered throughout the first play of examination, Fiddler on the Roof. There is a technology gap, a cultural gap, a religion gap, and an assimilation gap. Each of these gaps is present within Fiddler on the Roof and is varied throughout the remaining plays examined (Flower Drum Song and Over the River and Through the Woods). Each “gap” will be given an explanation and how it …

Confused Spaces: Theatricality As A Device For Defining Different Types Of Public Space, Danton Christopher Spina

Master's Theses

Confused Spaces has come to the conclusion that theatricality can be a device for defining different types of public space. This book aims to define theatricality in architectural terms by taking principles from the disciplines of theater and urban design. It limits the scope of the definition to a specific set of elements of theatricality that include spectacle, transition, flexibility, and compactability. After attempting to define why these elements of theatricality are valid architectural concepts, the text then pushes to understand the experience that these elements can create. Through the use of historical and contemporary references, an argument for theatricality …

Ayacucho, Goodbye And The Portrayal Of A Nation's Contradictions, Oswaldo Gavidia Cannon

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Peru lived difficult times with the escalation of terrorism. People living in the Andean rural areas were caught between two fires- the terrorists and the military sent to control the latter- and many innocent people were killed or disappeared. Based on these events, Julio Ortega wrote the novella Ayacucho, Goodbye. In this narrative, the dead body of an indigenous peasant leaves his grave in Ayacucho and begins a journey to Lima, the capital of Peru, looking for the parts of his body that were not buried with him, which is really a quest …

Directing Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years In An Educational Theatre Environment, Philip J. Gill

Theses

This thesis explores the process of directing Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years in an educational theatre setting. The author, Philip J. Gill, documents his approach to staging this complex, two-character show, which presents a unique narrative structure—one character moves forward in time while the other moves backward. Gill discusses his directorial vision, emphasizing the importance of time, musical transitions, and abstract staging to enhance the storytelling. He details the audition and casting process, highlighting challenges such as selecting actors who could meet the vocal and emotional demands of the roles.

The thesis also examines the collaboration with …

Playing The Prince Of Cats: A Retrospective On The Process Of Being Tybalt In Romeo And Juliet, Andrew J. Weber

Theses

Acting as the major antagonist for the first half of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt Capulet provides a unique challenge for an actor. The character's rage easily threatens to be static unless the actor can find appropriate justifications for his actions. Facing difficulty with limited textual background information, a performer undertaking the role must develop Tybalt's sense of self by drawing not only from Shakespeare's work, but also from the setting chosen by the director. This thesis examines how the character of Tybalt was developed to fit an adaptation of the play set during the Hatfield and McCoy feud …

Franco-Maghrebi Rap And Benyoucef's Le Nom Du Père, Keith Moser

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Franco-Maghrebi Rap and Benyoucef's Le Nom du père" Keith Moser discusses Messaoud Benyoucef's controversial play Le Nom du père and rap as a hybrid art form that has been (re)-appropriated by disenfranchised minorities from all corners of the planet. Exploited and ignored by those at the top of the social ladder, rappers express their anxiety concerning the present situation of inequality in contemporary consumer society. The rending melodies or portraits of human anguish created by rappers give testament to the fact that the interconnected processes of urbanization and globalization have not benefited everyone. In Le Nom …

Transnational Women's Writing: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Fu And Parker And Young, Karen Ferreira-Meyers

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Intertextuality In Kurosawa's Film Adaptation Of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Saera Yoon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Intertextuality in Kurosawa's Film Adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot" Saera Yoon analyzes the role intertextuality plays in the adjustments Akira Kurosawa made when he translated the classic novel by Dostoevsky onto screen. Kurosawa's 白痴 (Hakuchi), a film adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, has been the subject of mixed reviews. While some consider the film a successful adaptation that captures the spirit of the original, others criticize Hakuchi for its overly faithful rendition of the novel. What has been missing is an investigation of Kurosawa's filmic strategy. Yoon examines the transposition of a chronotope …

Male Same-Sex Desire In The Romances Of De Troyes, Basil A. Clark

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Male Same-Sex Desire in the Romances of de Troyes" Basil A. Clark extends René Girard's theory of mimetic desire to explore a homocentric subtext in Chrétien de Troyes's Erec and Enide, Lancelot or The Knight of the Cart, The Knight with the Lion or Yvain, and The Story of the Grail or Perceval. While male same-sex desire in these narratives is consistently latent, an argument for its presence is made through Girard's hermeneutic, which postulates that someone (the subject) desires someone or something (the object) not only for its own sake but because …

Rewriting Canonical Love Stories From The Peripheries, Karen Ya-Chu Yang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Rewriting Canonical Love Stories from the Peripheries" Karen Ya-Chu Yang compares postcolonial and postmodern intertextuality in Taiwanese and the Caribbean texts. Hsien-Yung Pai's "Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream" (1966) and Tien-Hsin Chu's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1997) are two short stories which depict identity crises of first generation and second generation 外省人 (waishen gren, mainland immigrants). In these two texts disillusionment towards the center's romantic prospects is the lived reality for those compelled to accept their currently marginalized status and adopt hybrid flexibility as a practical survival strategy. In comparison, Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso …

Wilde And The Model Of Homosexuality In Mann's Tod In Venedig, James P. Wilper

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Wilde and the Model of Homosexuality in Mann's Der Tod in Venedig" James P. Wilper examines the influence of Oscar Wilde and the effeminate homosexual identity which cohered as a result of Wilde's trials for act of "gross indecency" in 1895, in Mann's classic homoerotic short novel. Drawing on Alan Sinfield's The Wilde Century (1994) and recent scholarship into the impact of Wilde on German-language writers, as well as German homosexual communities of the early twentieth century, Wilper explores Mann's ambivalent response to Wilde's homosexual legacy. Later in his career, Mann writes of Wilde with Nietzsche …

Gendered Hate Speech And Political Discourse In Recent U.S. Elections And In Postsocialist Hungary, Louise O. Vasvári

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Gendered Hate Speech and Political Discourse in Recent U.S. Elections and in Postsocialist Hungary" Louise O. Vasvári illustrates gendered political discourse in the U.S. through a case study of the 2008 presidential campaign. While the campaign turned into a plebiscite on gender and sexual politics with Hillary Clinton and other female political figures depicted in the most traditionally misogynist terms, Barack Obama has in some leftist circles been seen as an empathetic figure who transcends both race and gender, although from the political right he has been attacked with racist and feminizing stereotyped invectives. In turn, in …

About Cultural Production: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Crowther And Grigorian, Baldwin, And Rigaud-Drayton, Kathleen Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Reese Witherspoon: A True Role Model, Vanessa Hemmen

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

A profile of Reese Witherspoon.

Fire On The Prisoners: An Autoethnographic Study Of Ethics In Historical Storytelling, A. Trae Mcmaken

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During field experience as a storyteller constructing a performance based on the Battle of Kings Mountain on behalf of the Overmountain Victory Trail Association and the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail, I encountered ethical and philosophical dilemmas. This challenge centered on ethical and spiritual convictions that put me in potential conflict with the task of creating a performance about war. This experience forms the basis of an autoethnographic approach to the art form, revealing the critical role played by personal ethics and a functioning engagement with historiography and narrative theory in producing effective performance stories. Historical performance storytelling has little …

Hearing The Cry In Black Diasporic And Latina/O Poetics, Rachel E. Ellis Neyra

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Hearing the Cry in Black Diasporic and Latina/o Poetics" Rachel Ellis Neyra expands upon Edouard Glissant's notion of "the cry of the Plantation" and shows how to listen for it in literary arrangement of Derek Walcott, Piri Thomas, Pedro Pietri, Ralph Ellison, Miguel Algarín, and James Baldwin. Ellis Neyra also reads musical lyrics by Oscar D'León and Billie Holiday and the melodic nuances of salsa, jazz, the blues, and bomba for how they sound out what she calls the New World Cry, a mnemonic figure of the Plantation of the Americas and a metaphor for how estrangement …

Social Science Journals In Interwar Romania And The U.S. Model Of Sociology, Valentina Pricopie

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Social Science Journals in Interwar Romania and the U.S. Model of Sociology" Valentina Pricopie analyzes the US-American presence in two journals of the Bucharest School of Sociology between the two world wars, as well as the information provided by US articles with regard to the US-American sociological model and its developments. Pricopie's analysis suggests strong academic connections, cooperation, and consistent exchange of academic knowledge between the two schools of thought. The analysis is based a quantitative study of the archives including the frequency of occurrence of items in thirty-one issues of Arhiva pentru Ştiinţa şi Reforma Socială …

The Birth Of A Playwright Through The Evolution Of The One-Act Play Stripped, Bear; The Film Stripped, Bear; And The Full-Length Play American Bear, Larry Michael Mitchell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Birth of a Playwright through the Evolution of the One-act Play Stripped, Bear; the film Stripped, Bear; and the Full-Length Play American Bear follows the inception, birth, and evolution of a ten-minute, one-act, film, and full-length play: three major iterations of the same source material. Through this exploration, the reader will not only see how the work was changed through outside forces such as form and function but internal struggles within a young playwright as he struggles to find a final form for his first major work while attempting to establish himself as a playwright both within the field …

Josep M. Benet I Jornet I L'Herència De «Desig», Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Corria l'any 1988. El muntatge d'Ai carai! de Josep M. Benet i Jomet acabava de fer temporada amb èxit al Teatre Uiure. Domènec Reixach havia assumit el càrrec de director artístic del Centre Dramàtic de la Generalitat de Catalunya i, des de la seva històrica seu al Teatre Romea, va crear un programa d'ajuts amb la intenció d'estimular i impulsar les naves dramatúrgies catalanes. No va sobtar, doncs, que Reixach convidés Benet i Jornet a participar-hi. Les circumstàncies, però, van agafar un caire una mica sorprenent quan Reixach va demanar al ja consolidat dramaturg català que seleccionés un director perquè …

Writing The Wrongs: How Gay And Lesbian Playwrights Use The Paranormal In Autobiographical Writing, George William Zorn

Dissertations

Playwrights have been using ghost and spirit-characters in stage works since the classical era. From their beginnings as speechless, vengeful catalysts and informational narrators, the ghost-character has evolved to something that would not be recognizable to Greek playwrights. This is no more evident than in the works of contemporary gay and lesbian dramatists. Examining the selected works of playwrights Claudia Allen, Larry Kramer and Victor Bumbalo will illuminate the use of ghosts and the paranormal by these playwrights as a way to overcome personal trauma by either creating closure with autobiographical scenes or by using the absence of these characters …