Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Rainbow Road To Prismatic Playwriting: Black Women's Dramatic Praxis In Practice, Taren Wilson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the lived experiences of Black women in academia, uplifting those interested in non-traditional or creative scholarship. Underrepresentation and attrition due to exclusionary academic practices is a systemic problem. What can Black feminist playwriting as research do for Black women in academia hoping to resist and connect to themselves and their community? What can playwriting as a Black woman doctoral student elucidate about the utility of playwriting as research, culturally informed epistemologies, and African American women's drama? By merging African American women's drama, Black feminist epistemologies, Practice as Research, and playwriting as research, I developed an onto-epistemological method …

Time, Place, & Purpose: The Performance Of Creole Identity In Louisiana, Rachel N. Aker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Though much of the early development of Louisiana Creole culture can be found in New Orleans, the culture spread and continued to grow throughout the rest of South Louisiana in both similar and different ways. Expanding beyond Joseph Roach’s treatment of Creole cultural performances in New Orleans in Cities of the Dead (1996) and journeying across land and water, this project identifies more Creole cultural performance as they emerge across place and time. I present Louisiana and the Gulf South as a kind of inland archipelago, with the currents of culture-creation moving in and around distinct community enclaves. The flow …

Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, And Metaphor In Early Modern Literature And Culture, Jeremy Cornelius

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in …

Asexual Dramaturgies: Reading For Asexuality In The Western Theatrical Canon, Anna Maria Ruffino Broussard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Asexuality has recently gained recognition and visibility as a legitimate sexual orientation and identity standpoint that is usually defined as lacking sexual desire for any gender. Popular culture and the academy have both seen the emergence of a robust conversation about the definition and import of asexuality, recognizing the term as an umbrella concept covering an ever-diversifying array of identities. Within the nascent critical discourse on asexuality, theorists have sought to identify asexuality as a sexual orientation, to rethink our society’s sexual normativity, and to question compulsory sexuality, or the assumption that sexual desire is intrinsic to all people, thus …

The Orlando International Fringe Festival: An Historical And Administrative Overview, Brook Akya Hanemann

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation marks the first historical and administrative overview of the Orlando International Fringe Festival. The Orlando International Fringe Festival (OIFF) is America's oldest still-operating fringe theatre festival. This two-week performing arts and immersive cultural event features uncensored, unjuried, accessible, and inclusive performances on indoor and outdoor stages. The Festival subverts traditional commercial theatre models by giving 100% of ticket proceeds back to its artists. Originally held in Downtown Orlando, it now resides at the Loch Haven Cultural Complex of Orlando where it overcame struggles common to arts organizations such as the beer truck scenario, a sustainability issue linking an …

Mini-Actors, Mega-Stages: Examining The Use Of Theatre Among Children And Youth In U.S. Evangelical Megachurches, Carla Elisha Lahey

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

How do children and youth first encounter the performing arts? While schools may stand out as an obvious answer, a recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education shows that the percentage of public schools offering theatre classes dropped at both the primary and secondary level from 2000-2010 (Brenchley). Yet, even as arts offerings experience a decline in some public schools, many students are being introduced to performance through another venue – the evangelical megachurch.

Since the birth of the church growth movement in the 1970s, megachurches (defined as Protestant congregations that average at least 2,000 weekly attendees) have …

Precarious Democracy: "It Can't Happen Here" As The Federal Theatre's Site Of Mass Resistance, Macy Donyce Jones

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The scholarly consensus of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) is that it was a massive undertaking set to employ theatre professionals during the Great Depression. That undertaking resulted in vibrant, relevant theatre that helped to build a theatre audience across the nation. Outside of the overview-style scholarship, specialized studies have delved into the FTP as a community-building enterprise, a site of racial/ethnic study, and an essential new play creator.

My scholarship fills a hole that previous FTP scholarship has left open. The FTP was a political machine engaged in producing pro-American propaganda. That aspect of production has been largely left …