Acting Commons^™

A+: A Film By Asexuals For Asexuals, Gabi Benintendi

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

No abstract provided.

A Performance Of: "The Madness Of Lady Bright", Holly Mcdowell

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright first premiered in 1964 at the Caffe Cino, and is widely regarded as among the first works of the gay theater movement. Over the course of this one-act play, an aging drag queen slowly loses her mind in her New York apartment.

This production examined the themes of Wilson’s play through the lens of transgender identity, and an updated setting in the 1980s. This time period shapes the idea of the loneliness of not passing as a woman in a world where being visibly transgender meant rejection and danger.

Tokoyo: A Story Of Cultural Movement, Chelsea Rolfes

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Tokoyo: A Story of Cultural Movement is an exploration of Japanese culture through performance. The piece incorporates stylized, ritualistic, and contemporary movement. The device used to portray our research was a folk tale told solely through physical expression. Music by Japanese composers and projections of the country supported the movement and helped to tell the story of the culture.

We were deep into our research when we embarked on our trip to Japan to observe the specificity of the culture in everyday life and performance. Everything that we read, watched, and took part in manifested itself in the final presentation. …

Port St. Johns Theater Project, Arielle Lever

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

For my Capstone Project, I chose to teach drama in Port St. Johns, a rural village in South Africa. My original intent was to develop a drama curriculum to implement at the Sisonke School, a local primary school and the Eluxoweni Boys Home, a nearby orphanage for boys. I spent the summer researching Augosto Boal’s work and ultimately developed the curriculum based on my research, past teaching experience, and material I had learned as a student here in the drama department. My original goal was to have some sort of final production, to give the children the empowering tool of …

Inspiring Creativity And Self-Confidence: The Power Of Theatre In A Child’S Life, Laura Borgwardt

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The main concept of this project was the transference of what I’ve learned at Syracuse University about drama and about myself to a group of young theatre students, for some of whom this was their first encounter with the theatrical process of putting on a play. Drama has played such an influential role in my life, giving me more confidence, a direction to head towards, and goals towards which I strive. I wanted to instill that same sense of self-worth in each of the students I worked with, giving them the tools necessary to explore a piece of theatre and …

Theatre For A New Theater: A Play On Architecture, Alexander Coulombe

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Not Included

Bj: A Musical Romp, Eric Jarboe

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Through a series of rather unpredictable events, I was asked to write a piano and vocal score for an original musical. After over two years of working on the project, I am very pleased with the size and scope of the finished product, but more importantly, I feel that I actually understand the job of a musical composer. It was my misconception that a composer only writes melodies that are catchy and sound fun to sing. After researching the process of other musical composers, it became evident that my task was to simply tell a story, but through a different …

Jeanne D’Arc, Megan Dobbertin

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Jeanne d’Arc is a one-woman theatrical work, written, produced, and performed as Megan Dobbertin’s Capstone Project. Its intention is to explore religious conflict. How does something like organized religion, which was created to be a force of peace and order in a chaotic world, get twisted into violence and discord? All major organized religions profess to be founded on a basis of peace, tolerance, unity, and love. How then do we have notions such as the crusade or the jihad? This piece seeks to explore the causes behind so-called ‘holy’ wars.

It is the story of Joan of Arc, heroine …

The Belle Of Amherst: A Reflection Of Life In Art, Evelyn Gaynor

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The goal and purpose of this thesis was the cohesive performance and production of The Belle of Amherst by William Luce. The play is a fictionalized account of the life of the poetess Emily Dickinson, taking place in a day late in her life where she reminisces on all her experiences from childhood to the present. Emily is the only character physically on stage, and all the rest are created through her descriptions and representations of them for the audience. The play is also an insight into her poetry, using the actual poetic text throughout the script. The audience never …