Playwriting Commons^™

Revolutionary Every Day: A Dramatic Exploration Of Women And Their Agency In The Black Panther Party., Kristen Michelle Walker

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

This capstone project is centered around Black Panther women and explores what it means to be a revolutionary black woman dealing with politics surrounding gender in both private and public spaces during the late 1960’s and beyond. In addition, the project includes an original fictional play based on the experiences of Panther women around the world. In addressing the social conditions that impacted female Panther activism and agency, together the capstone project and play operate as a commentary on power, gender relations, and society in and around the Black Panther Party.

Behind Valencia: A Contemporary Play, Emily Charbonneau

Honors Projects in English and Cultural Studies

SYNOPSIS The purpose of this play is to highlight the length that modern females go to in order to maintain a desired appearance, especially across social media. These desired appearances are influenced by the glamorous and unrealistic looks and physiques that are prevalent in the media. Essentially, the primary goal of these characters is to attract the attention of their male counterparts because of the gender roles society promotes. This shallow lifestyle can be completely consuming for impressionable, young females.

Sibling Affection And Domestic Heterosexuality In Lodovick Carlell’S The Deserving Favorite, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favorite (1629) deploys the ideological strategy of using erotic “likeness” to validate marital unions as consensual and erotically compatible. In an era before the normalization of heterosexuality, the play suggests that sexually passionate marital relations earn legitimacy to the degree that they emulate the affectionate relations between women and between siblings. Although eroticized female friendship approaches the ideal of a consensual and sensual partnership, intimate relations between women seem best to thrive in a separatist environment removed from courtly social and economic exchanges, including the marital negotiations crucial to cementing dynastic and political alliances. Brothers …

Devising Performance & Queer Futurity, Brendan F. Leonard

Honors Theses

This project argues that devising performance is an inherently queer and utopian form. In response to recent political movements, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, which seek to stage dissatisfaction with the systems of late capitalism, I turn to devising performance as a site. Informed by the queer and performance theories of Jose Esteban Munoz, Lee Edelman, and Jill Dolan, I argue that devised theater allows us to process disillusionment, rehearse collectivity, and stage futurity. In conversation with Munoz, I define futurity as an imaginative site that considers what will follow what some scholars suggest will be …

The Rape Of Blanche: An Examination Of Critical Analysis & Sexist Overtones, Audrey Thayer

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The first people to ever listen to the words of A Streetcar Named Desire were two women, Margo Jones and Joanna Albus. Tennessee Williams read them an uncompleted first draft of the play. Margo Jones was “supportive of the play but urged him to rewrite it and to soften Blanche's hysteria. He listened, and ignored her” (Rader 199). The very first people who were privy to the violent, sensual, chaotic world of Blanche and Stanley were two women who found fault in Stella's character. They saw her hysteria, no doubt an unbecoming trait, as “far out,” or perhaps unbelievable. Much …

On Technically Love: Discovering My Voice, Defining A World, Delving In, Nathan L. Eckstein

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This Honors Project is a two-part exploration of the playwriting process though application. The script itself, Technically Love; an Exploration of Love, Technology and Same-Sex Marriage, tells the story of Max and Danny, a same-sex couple living in Minnesota in 2013. The play follows their yearlong journey of posting YouTube videos about their wedding planning process that coincides with Minnesota’s fight for marriage equality. The second part of the project is my paper On Technically Love: Discovering my voice, defining a world, delving in. The paper explains the process that I went through to write the play and gives an …

Opening Remarks To Outing Lorraine At The Schomburg Center, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This article is an edit of the opening remarks for the event held on May 22nd, 2014 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as part of the In The Life Series supplying Black LGBT programming coordinated by Steven Fullwood. Outing Lorraine included panelists: Alexis DeVeaux, Joi Gresham, and Steven Fullwood and was moderated by Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz. Opening remarks provide a biographical description of Lorraine Hansberry's life, prepare the audience for a conversation on the implications for "outing" a black iconic figure, details the purpose for use of primary and secondary sources when, and provides a bibliography for …

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 …

Hole In The Head: A Play, Accompanied By A Conspectus Of Knowledge, Both Repressed And Researched, That Directly Influenced The Playwright In Her Development Of A New Work, Margaret Hunter Cook

Honors Scholar Theses

"Hole in the Head" is a play about a woman who wakes up. Maude wakes up in the first act, and in every subsequent scene she undergoes some form of physical or emotional awakening as characters walk in and out of her front door."Hole in the Head" is accompanied by an introduction that attempts to understand the interplay between creativity and academia through an analysis of theatre, feminist and queer theory, and science.

Contemporary African American Women Playwrights: A Casebook Edited By Philip C. Kolin (Review), Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

Buckner provides a review of Kolin's "Contemporary African American Women Playwrights."

Sexual Slander And Working Women In "The Roaring Girl", Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Though scholarship of the early modern era focuses on the character of Moll Frith when considering the gender ideology contained in Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker's "The Roaring Girl," the play's other female characters are also of interest. The "citizen wives" of the play are women who, though married, work outside the home. Their special status in the emerging capitalist marketplace of the early modern era gave rise to unique anxieties about their economic power and sexual availability. These anxieties in turn made these women especially susceptible to slander against their sexual reputation and thus respectability in the community. An …

Asses And Wits: The Homoerotics Of Mastery In Satiric Comedy, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher. Whereas "sodomy" always signifies social disorder, "homoerotic" useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become "sodomitical" only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of "sodomy" is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the "unnatural" Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against …

In Common: Voices Of The Common Woman, Zoanne Allen

Masters Theses

This is an original compiled script of selected materials relating to the common experiences of women. The intention was to present a work that would touch all women by describing experiences that are shared among us generally. The script utilized materials from a variety of sources: prose, diaries, poems and plays. The tone of the pieces selected were both serious and humorous. Through the assembling of these pieces, a complete script was created. The final goal of the work was to create a sense of bonding among the women in the audience. Secondarily, the male members of the audience should …

Gay Side Story Original Poster, Audacity Theater

Gay Side Story

Poster for original production of GAY SIDE STORY as presented in conjunction with Symposium X at the University of Southern Maine, 1983.

Gay Side Story Original Script, Diane Elze

Gay Side Story

Original script for Gay Side Story

WRITTEN BY

Avis

Diane Elze

Rico Estabrook

John Frank

Dale McCormick

Tony Norton

Cheryl Ring

Chris Thurston

Gay Side Story Scrapbook, Gay Side Story Collection

Gay Side Story

Scrapbook containing photographs and ephemera from original 1983 production of Gay Side Story.

The full playbill can be seen here.

Gay Side Story Playbill, Gay Side Story Collection

Gay Side Story

1983 Playbill for Gay Side Story with forward by John Frank

WRITTEN BY

Avis

Diane Elze

Rico Estabrook

John Frank

Dale McCormick

Tony Norton

Cheryl Ring

Chris Thurston

WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO

Leonard Bernstein

Arthur Lawrence

Stephen Sondheim

Phil Spector

A Comparison Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Century Criticism Of Shakespeare's Heroines, Grace Mcleod Gartman

University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

The nineteenth century critics appraised Shakespeare's heroines by standards different from those of the twentieth; consequently the two ages reached different conclusions. The purpose of this paper is to point out just what these differences are.

A paper of this scope had to be narrowed in some ways. Otherwise a formidable array of heroines would have been enumerated, but little depth of research could have been shown. In the general conclusion the result would have been the same, as I have discovered through wide reading. To limit the subject only the most famous heroines could be included. The process of …