Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Staging Retro-Perspectives: Performing Age, Memory/Loss, And Queer Desire In The Later Works Of Split Britches (2009–2020), Benjamin Gillespie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates the later works of the celebrated New York–based lesbian-feminist performance troupe Split Britches made up of founding members Peggy Shaw (b. 1944) and Lois Weaver (b. 1949). Revealing how the duo consciously interlaces aspects of aging and age-based identity into the very fabric of their later performances in both form and content, this project analyzes how Shaw and Weaver integrate an explicitly anti-ageist and overtly queer representation of aging on the experimental stage. Their later performances serve to challenge narratives of decline and debilitation that come with (hetero)normative representations of old age and the life course in …

Dramaturgies Of Intellectual Property Law In Read-Write Theatre, Andrew Kircher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Digital and networked technologies have intensified our relationship to knowledge: all the world’s information and creativity are so immediately and personally accessible that they become embodied. Into this moment, a new theatrical practice has emerged, what I identify as Read-Write Theatre (after Lawrence Lessig). In Read-Write cultural production, artists sample and speak through the full spectrum of disembodied data that is the internet—text, video, audio, and images. The artists I include in this critical category are marked by their posthuman relationship to knowledge and, most importantly, the ways that their theatrical work confounds contemporary intellectual property law.

In this dissertation, …

Reframing The Family Portrait: The Surrogate Mother In U.S. Theatre And Film 1939–1963, Alison Walls

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reframing the Family Portrait: The Surrogate Mother in U.S. Theatre and Film, 1939–1963 investigates the U.S. plays, films, and musicals of this period that abound with heroines who mother children to whom they are not genetically tied. This dissertation asks why such a figure was so resonant in this era between the beginning of World War II and the emergence of more radical 1960s politics. Newly in the spotlight as a romantic protagonist, the “surrogate mother,” as I have chosen to call her, re-envisions the archetypal mother through a contemporizing lens, distinctive in her mother/not-mother status. Critical analysis of Penny …

In And Out Of Character: Socratic Mimēsis, Mateo Duque

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the Republic, Plato has Socrates attack poetry’s use of mimēsis, often translated as ‘imitation’ or ‘representation.’ Various scholars (e.g. Blondell 2002; Frank 2018; Halliwell 2009; K. Morgan 2004) have noticed the tension between Socrates’ theory critical of mimēsis and Plato’s literary practice of speaking through various characters in his dialogues. However, none of these scholars have addressed that it is not only Plato the writer who uses mimēsis but also his own character, Socrates. At crucial moments in several dialogues, Socrates takes on a role and speaks as someone else. I call these moments “Socratic mimēsis.” …

Staging English Affairs In Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the creation and dissemination of alternative versions of English history through the means of dramatic fiction, and contextualizes them in the panorama of the intellectual debates of seventeenth-century Italy. Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy studies the ways in which the reinvention of Tudor and Stuart affairs in dramatic literature mirrored the ambitions, fears, and fantasies of a century in disquieting transformation. This research documents how news and information from England entered the Italian states, how they were perceived, and what their repurposing can reveal about the potentialities of intercultural exchange. Anglo-inspired drama became a …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I claim the collective emotional connections and historical explorations characteristic of musical theatre constitute a nostalgic impulse dramaturgically inherent in the form. In my intervention in the link between nostalgia and musical theatre, I look to an area underrepresented in musical theatre scholarship: social dance. Through case studies that focus specifically on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, I ask what social dance is doing in musical theatre and how the dancing body functions as a catalyst for nostalgic thinking for …

Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de …

“Are They Supposed To Be Heugin?": Negotiating Race, Nation, And Representation In Korean Musical Theatre, Ji Hyon Yuh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines contemporary Korean musical theatre as a form of popular culture that has served an important role in reflecting and establishing personal and national identity in Korea, especially as it intersects with the global and local manifestations of race and racial ideologies. I argue that musical theatre has served an important political and economic role, since its beginning as a cultural weapon in the height of the Cold War to more contemporary examples in which Korean musicals serve as a tool to brand Korea as an advanced nation in the world. To make a case for this relationship …

The Other At War: Performing The Spanish-Cuban-American War On U.S. And Cuban Stages, Juan R. Recondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish-Cuban-American War, declared by the United States on April 25, 1898, marks a colonial shift in the history of the Caribbean and solidified the expansionist thrust of the United States outside national borders. Theatres in turn-of-the-century New York, which at this point was one of the theatrical centers of the nation, debated for audiences the imperialist character of the U.S. The Cuban struggle and the resulting Spanish-Cuban-American War permeated U.S. drama, thereby portraying a Caribbean in need of salvation by the military intervention of the United States. New York stages of the time became locations where various cultural representations …

The Lines Between The Lines: Stage Directions As Fluid, Affective Collaborations Between Theatre Texts And Theatre Makers, Sarah Bess Rowen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contends that certain kinds of stage directions can affectively engage the bodies of actors, and the imaginations of directors and designers, resulting in a collaboratively created performance of a given theatre text. As opposed to more literary treatments of stage directions, this project contends that theories of embodiment, especially affect theory, is a useful lens through which to explore the range of potential performances present in various stage directions. By analyzing the ways in which stage directions allow for more agency than has traditionally been considered in theatre scholarship, I seek to encourage theatre makers and scholars alike …

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …

Twenty-First-Century Transnational Theatre Development In The Cases Of Théâtre Du Soleil/Aftaab And Sundance Institute East Africa: Cultural Politics, Performance Aesthetics, And Global Circulation, Julia Goldstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines two case studies of twenty-first-century transnational theatre development programs in which arts organizations from wealthy countries in the Global North extend resources and support for the professional development of theatre artists in regions in the Global South. The first case study takes up the French theatre company Théâtre du Soleil’s work in Afghanistan, starting in 2005, leading to the formation of the Afghan theatre company Aftaab and the next ten years of Soleil’s support of and collaboration with Aftaab, transpiring both in Kabul and Paris. The second case study examines the Sundance Institute East Africa Theatre Lab …

Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …

Theatres Of Reality, Fiction, And Temporality: Vegard Vinge And Ida Müller’S Ibsen-Saga (2006 - 2015), Andrew L. Friedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the influence of modernist aesthetics and ideologies on contemporary, European and U.S. experimental theatre. I argue that modernist and contemporary experimental theatres offer competing notions of reality, fiction, and temporality, which I interrogate through Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen-Saga. I illuminate this tension by reading current modes of performance against the Saga’s productions and work practices, as well as their aesthetic and ideological foundation in three modernist sources: the artificiality of Ibsen’s realism, the utopianism and totality of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, and the temporal provocations of the historical avant-gardes. I contend that the …

Autobiographical Poetry To Plays: Taking Memoir To A Theatrical Level, Ryan P. Tofil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pulitzer prize winning playwright John Patrick Shanley wrote, “Theatre is a safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done.” For my Capstone Project, I have compiled my autobiographical poetry, prose, and performance monologues into a theatrical manuscript to be used as the basis for a play. The final Capstone Project is a manuscript of an anticipated theatrical production based on the grieving process surrounding my brother's suicide, as well as an exploration of my sexuality and the relationships I developed during the years surrounding his death.

The Capstone Project’s theatrical manuscript is also accompanied by a …

Unshap'd Monsters: Political Farce On The London Stage, 1717-1737, Melissa Ann Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation reexamines the role of John Gay's and Henry Fielding's anti-government satirical farces during the politically contentious 1720s and 1730s in London. Although their plays were and still are considered, variously, burlesques, entertainments, farces, and satires, I call them satirical farce for two reasons. First, contemporaries used the term farce as much to signify political and social stances as dramatic type or function. Those political and social stances are the central focus of this dissertation. Second, I see in this collection of plays—Gay's Three Hours After Marriage (1717) and The Beggar's Opera (1728), Fielding's The Author's Farce (1730), The …

The Changing Face Of Fortune In Six English Versions Of The Tragedy Of Antony And Cleopatra, Mary Aileen Mallery

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study traces the development and changes in the depiction of the goddess Fortune in a selected group of dramas written between 1592 and 1678: the six English versions of the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. The concepts surrounding the goddess Fortune and her place in any culture change with the idea of the individual's ability to shape his own destiny. In the seventeenth century in particular Fortune becomes increasingly connected to questions of personal identity and what Stephen Greenblatt has called "self-fashioning," so that by 1678 the subject of John Dryden's All for Love is not the quest for …

Feminist Theory And Postwar American Drama, Gayle Austin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is concerned with developing feminism as a critical tool, to be applied to drama. Feminist theory from anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, and film theory is summarized and one theorist from each field is selected to serve as an example of how feminism in that field can illuminate drama written by both women and men.

I begin by outlining the three chronological stages of feminist criticism: (1) Images of women; (2) Women writers; and (3) The questioning of an entire field. The various political divisions of feminism (liberal, radical, and socialist) also need to be kept in mind, and …