Playwriting Commons^™

A New Exit: The Impact Of Historical Play Adaptations On Modern Audiences, Karli Jean Lonnquist

SURF Posters and Papers

Contemporary theatrical adaptation involves deconstructing, reimagining, and rewriting historical plays for modern audiences. Adaptation appropriates theatrical conventions, changes the lens through which the audience may view the play, and offers new entry points into thinking and practice. Adaptation asks, “why this source as theatre now?” and proposes that history provides tools for engagement with contemporary issues. By employing a Practice as Research (PaR) methodology, I will investigate the art of historical adaptation and adapt No Exit, a 1945 existentialist play by Jean-Paul Sartre, through the lenses of constructivism and performance studies. I will develop my script through collaborative workshops, stage …

Class Act

DePaul Magazine

As The Theatre School at DePaul University turns 100, past and present administrators and faculty and illustrious alumni comment on the school's enduring legacy of hands-on learning, collaboration and critical dialogue.

Singing Our Story: Composing And Writing An Original Musical, Gianna C. Daiuto

Music Summer Fellows

How can we use music to deepen the emotions of the stories we tell? What is the effect of combining song and speech? Through an extensive independent project, I have composed several pieces of original music alongside a script to create an original musical. While it is still in its infancy, this project is the first full draft of this story, and will hopefully be fleshed out to be staged and performed one day in its entirety.

A Study Into The Psychology Of Emotions, Dark Comedy, And Theatre Of The Absurd: Ghosted An Original Script, Courtney Bronson

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

Imagine a world without emotions. Ghosted is an eleven-part dark comedy script inspired by The Giver, Clue, Knives Out: Glass Onion, and Inside Out. The script explores the consequences of a dystopian, government-controlled society that has eradicated emotions in the name of order. The script blends dark comedy with elements of Theatre of the Absurd to highlight the farcical nature and danger of emotional suppression. Drawing on research in emotional psychology and emotional dysregulation, Ghosted presents emotions as incorporeal “Emotion Ghosts” that possess five volunteers and unleash unpredictable chaos. When one volunteer ends up dead, the remaining members begin to …

"You Know The Rules": A Dramatic Experiment In Aromantic Literary Theory, April Chronowski

English

This paper proposes a new literary theory framework based on the zine "an aromantic manifesto" by yingchen and yingtong, as well as the work of Erving Goffman, using theater as a device to examine romantic relationships. Blending English and sociology, I focus each chapter on a different literary period and examine two plays each: early modern (Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing), modern (Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Djuna Barnes' "To The Dogs"), and contemporary (Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 and Margaret Edson's W;t). In tandem with analysis of formal elements---like …

Ignite, Morgan A. Mcguire

Theses and Dissertations

Ana, a perfect, popular star student and cheerleader, starts questioning the essence of her life. She finds a glitter-covered apparition, a Christian Youth Group, and a murky new friendship. Set against the omnipresent patriarchy of the early Oughts, Ignite explores the harsh realities of girlhood and growing up.

Raised Spirits The Visceral Journey Of Black Generational Female Trauma And The Transcendent Healing Power Of Spiritual Dance, Wendy Ann Powell

Theses and Dissertations

Black female bodies have endured sustained trauma globally since the transatlantic slave trade, and it continues into 2025. The collective consciousness has carried the generational burden and mobilized it within the womb. Powell uses this intergenerational knowledge to frame the basis for spiritual dance practices as a healing praxis.

Jawad, Mohammed A. Alani

Theses and Dissertations

In a luxurious suburban glass house in Toledo, Ohio, tensions simmer within a fractured family on the brink of unraveling. Jawad, a 17-year-old Pakistani American, struggles with his identity and rejects the traditional path to college, much to the frustration of his father, Kamal, a businessman trying to juggle a demanding career and a complex family life. Kamal’s new wife, Ishraq, is caught in her own struggles with body image and the overwhelming pressures of her roles as a new mother and stepmother. Beneath the surface, an unsettling attraction brews between Jawad and Ishraq, further complicating the already strained dynamics. …

Horse Boy, Madeline Dennis-Yates

Theses and Dissertations

Have you seen the new boy at the barn? Why does he get to ride Gemini? More importantly, why don’t Sarah and Ava get to? A bittersweet comedy about gender, class, and who’s jumping highest that asks: Who will love the horse girls if they lose each other?

Edges, Brandon Bogle

Theses and Dissertations

Edges is an adaptation of Three Sisters set at the twilight of the Harlem Renaissance, a once-influential black family faces the looming shadow of the Great Depression, throwing into question all of their dreams. With inspiration from Purpose by Branden Jacob-Jenkins and Is God Is by Aleshea Harris, this play explores family, desire and the depths to which people struggle to define themselves and survive.

House Meeting - A Play With Music, Levi J. Shrader

Theses and Dissertations

‘House Meeting’ Synopsis & Related Works

Levi J. Shrader

House Meeting

Brother Preacher’s been away on his mission to find a way to heal Little Brother’s deadfoot so he can walk again and live for the Lord. Family and neighbors gather for a Holiness house meeting to offer their thanks to God. When the cure seems to be deadlier than the affliction, Sister tries to remind them that, although this life is a suffering one, it isn’t worth destroying for a power God never intended for them.

Plays I believe House Meeting is in conversation with:

Beggars In the House …

Encanto The Musical: An Exploration Of Translating Media From Film To Stage, Isabel Perez-Flores

Whittier Scholars Program

I’m going to be honest: I did not go into this project with the intent of radically changing Encanto. I had some points I wanted to expand upon, some improvements and edits that I felt the film could have utilized, but overall, I was satisfied with the way the story was told. The real change, I’ve come to realize, lies not in the story and the script itself, but in the way the story is told. The obvious change is that this version of Encanto, in an ideal world, would be performed in front of a live audience, in a …

Kansas City, Kansas, Vida Davidović

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

KANSAS CITY, KANSAS is a thesis that operates in the tradition of expressionist dramaturgy and playwriting, taking up themes of abuse, imperialism, war, trauma, womanhood, Balkan identities, history of the Balkans, as well as the discourses of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory. The use of different theoretical frameworks related to both international and personal politics, which are shown to be intertwined, suggests a strong relationship between political processes in the Second World Countries that had experienced many occupations throughout their history and the way women in those countries relate to the questions of body, authority, feminity, and interpersonal relationships. The play …

Guys & Dolls: A Musical Fable Of Broadway, Damon Runyon, Jo Swerling, Abe Burrows

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University's performance of Guys & Dolls: A Musical Fable of Broadway based on a story amd characters of Damon Runyan and a book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser.

Performed April 25, 2025 at 8:00pm, April 26 & May 2-3, 2025 at 7:30pm and April 27 & May 4, 2025 at 2:00pm in the Mitchell Theatre at Taylor University.

Set in the colorful, fictional world of Damon Runyon's New York City, Guys and Dolls is a musical comedy that intertwines two distinct love stories among the city's gamblers and …

The Space Defines The Phrase: An Analysis Of How Performance Venues Helped Shape Classic Play Texts, Carl Sage

SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Within the world of scenography there is an axiom that states:

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with the playwright.” That is to say that designers need to derive their worlds from what the authors present. Scenographers do, of course, engage in research, segments of which include such questions as: What was occurring in the world at the time the piece was written? What stories might the author have been exposed to as inspiration? How have other scenographers interpreted this particular text? Such dramaturgical questions – and others – have a reasonable scenographic utility. However, no …

A Very Important Nato Meeting, Elizabeth Johnson

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

A Very Important NATO Meeting is a slapstick farce about the futility of war. Fed up with the United States’ insatiable addiction to proxy conflicts, the rest of NATO calls an intervention to (hopefully) bring about world peace. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work.

Film Study, Zachary T. Scrima

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

What appears to be a normal film study class is a deep delve into the 2000's song Stacy's Mom. From there, things appear less and less like what they seem. A play that observes the cyclical nature of social politics within a classroom structure.

The Distance Between Us, Morgan Allen

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

The Distance Between Us examines the long-distance relationship between Grace and Henry through voicemails between the two while they are away at school. This short play, inspired by The Last Five Years, tells this couple's story on opposite timelines. The only time their calls connect is in the middle, when brutal honesty and the reality of their situation forces them to ask themselves: is the distance proving to be too much?

Flor, Sofia Pelaez

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

A young and beautiful kantuta flower has lived on top of a very high mountain for her entire life. She yearns to become a human but is unable to due to her mother, The Sun, prohibiting this rebellion. Her once empty life soon changes though once she encounters a bright and carefree star.

The Mystery Of Lauren Lansky, Maya Nucci

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

Two hotshot detectives yearning to rise above their station take on the case of “Lauren Lansky;” a mysterious girl with a mysterious secret. Through twists and turns in this seemingly 1940s noir world, we follow our detectives as they work to solve this mystery, finding clues and seeking help along the way. When it comes down to the wire, we find ourselves dying to figure out “what is the mystery of Lauren Lansky?” and at the end, we just might.