Playwriting Commons^™

"Possessed": The Phenomenology Of Immersive Theatre, Shannon M. Flynn

Theatre & Dance ETDs

Using phenomenology as a lens of analysis, I investigate how immersive theatre engages audiences in a more direct and sensory way than traditional theatre. In a proscenium theatre the action is seen from the same angle. The theatre itself becomes a phenomenon in audience’s minds, each performance subtly influencing how the audience perceives the next. I investigate how relationships between audience and performers are altered in immersive experiences with no delineation between the space audience and actors occupy. The phenomenological idea of frontality places immersed audiences in positions where they are able to explore a constantly changing perspective of the …

A Tough Nut Never Boils: Thoughts And Ruminations On Language And Playmaking, Lauren Ferebee

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

After an unorthodox journey through higher education ending during the coronavirus pandemic, which has made the typical theatrical thesis production and subsequent typical final year impossible, the author reflects on the body of work she has created at the University of Arkansas as an M.F.A. candidate in playwriting at the Department of Theatre, how she has reached both deeper into her own discipline and outside of it to widen her understanding of liveness, performance, and textual creation. She interrogates her own unexpected experiences, from figuring out how to make theatre without theatres, to teaching students who have never seen a …

Ataka, Anthony H. Chambers

Mime Journal

No abstract provided.

Introducing Genzai Nō: Categorization And Conventions, With A Focus On Ataka And Mochizuki, Diego Pellecchia

Mime Journal

No abstract provided.

Mochizuki: History And Context, Michael Watson

Mime Journal

No abstract provided.

From Ataka To Kanjinchō: Adaptation Of Text And Performance In A Nineteenth-Century Nō-Derived Kabuki Play, Katherine Saltzman-Li

Mime Journal

Nō techniques and play borrowings provided important infusions into kabuki throughout its history, but in the nineteenth century, a genre of kabuki plays in close imitation of nō or kyōgen wasadded to the kabuki repertoire. The genre came to be called matsubamemono, meaning “[nō/kyōgen-derived kabuki] plays [performed] on a stage with a pine painted on the back wall” or “pine-boardplays.”1 These plays are the focus of this article, in which I first introduce the genre and its place in kabuki history, and then discuss its most famous example, the play Kanjinchō (Hattori 17–40; Meisakukabuki zenshū 181–197; Brandon, The Subscription List …

Paragons Of Loyalty On The Japanese Stage, J. Thomas Rimer

Mime Journal

No abstract provided.

Emmie And The Enchanted Orchid: Portraying Positive Disability Representation In Children's Media, Adrianna Waters

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Disability representation in media and storytelling is often negative or inaccurate, with disability narratives equating disability to evil or lesser than abled bodies. The harmful representation is especially prevalent and dangerous in children’s media as the depiction of characters with disabilities may be children’s first introduction to disability, and thus the portrayal is likely to stay with them, especially as stories for adults continue to perpetuate the inaccurate representation of disabilities. “Emmie and the Enchanted Orchid”: Portraying Positive Disability Representation in Children’s Media seeks to examine the harmful portrayal of disabilities in children’s media while also recognizing how disability can …

Cut Song Cabaret: Performing The Replaced, Rewritten, And Recycled Songs Of Musical Theatre, Claire Wilson

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In musical theatre, “cut songs” are the pieces of music that are removed from a show, whether the cut occur in the early creative stages, a pre-Broadway run, minutes before opening night, or even for a major revival years after its initial debut. These songs easily go unnoticed, as some are never made public while some are sneakily recycled for other musicals. Cut songs, though greatly varying in quality, are still works of art that at one time fulfilled their sacred duty of entertaining an audience and required just as much artistic effort to produce as the songs that survived …

Direction Of The Play: Another One, Chris Hansen

All Graduate Projects

Another One

Written and Directed by Chris Hansen, Spokane Falls Community College Theatre Department

Produced November 2020

This project encompasses the selection, research, casting, production, and post-production process of the play, Another One, for Spokane Falls Community College Theatre Arts Department. Documentation includes: analysis of the play for our program, research, script analysis, scenic and technical challenges of our time, a record of the production period and a post-production evaluation.

New Play Collaborations, Kathleen Potts

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a New Play Collaborations course, which explores the creative, collaborative process of creating a new play. It is comprised of sets of actors, directors, and playwrights, who will team up to create a number of original works for the stage.

Group Playwriting Project, Thomas L. Rothacker

Open Educational Resources

This assignment is designed for any lecture based course that does not inherently have collaborative work or assignments as part of the curriculum. For any student taking a theatre arts course, understanding how it is to work with others and create something is one of the biggest lessons that can be learned. To take the pressure off the idea of "performance", this playwriting assignment starts with the role of the Playwright and how to create from the ground up.

Making A Musical: The Art Of Adapting A Film Or A Book For The Stage, David Wohl

Winthrop Faculty and Staff Publications

Over the past 100 years, stage musicals have been made from original works as varied as straight plays, novels, magazine articles, movies, short stories, poems, and biographies. This article explores two original works (a film and a novel) created separately by two faculty members at a historically black university in West Virginia and which were turned into staged musicals produced by professional theatre companies in 2019. The article includes information and advice on the adaptation process from composers, playwrights, and other collaborators.

Selections From & The Process Of Creating "My Blue Scarf: The Story Of Ruth, A New Play", Abigail Jane Ayulo

Honors Projects

My Blue Scarf: The Story of Ruth, A New Play, provides an adaptation of the Hebrew Book of Ruth that is focused on minority and female voices and experiences. It employs Hebrew poetic verse forms to pay homage to the story’s origins. This style contributes to diversity of voices in English-speaking theatre outside of Western poetics. My Blue Scarf shares a well- known and multicultural story to contribute to the diversity of contemporary American theatre and promote conversation about cross-cultural relationships in a time of division and prejudice. This project consists of eight selected scenes from the larger play and …

The Green Poem: An Original Play In Two Acts, Emily Arancio

College Honors Program

An original play in poetic dialogue based on the philosophy of Lucretius.

Limboland: A One-Act Play About Death, For Kids, Megan Huggins

Honors Scholars Collaborative Projects

LimboLand: A One-Act Play about Death, for kids

Megan Huggins

Thesis Director: James Al-Shamma, Ph.D

Thesis Committee: Shawn Knight, Jessica Mueller

A loose adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem Inferno, LimboLand uses Alighieri’s model of the nine circles of Hell to illustrate the five stages of grief. In a script designed for theatre for young audiences, Dante, a young child, travels through different rooms as he attempts to cope with and understand his sister’s death. Dante follows Virgil, an older child, who knows a lot about the afterlife system without understanding any of it. The play includes an appendix …

Sarah Kane's Post-Christian Spirituality In Cleansed, Elba Sanchez

All Master's Theses

The existing scholarship on the work of British playwright Sarah Kane mostly focuses on exploring the use of extreme acts of violence in her plays. However, few scholars like Dr. Graham Saunders and Anabelle Singer can trace it back to the rejection of her Christian beliefs during her adolescence. This thesis explores how Kane used violence and images of impalement, dismemberment, and cross-dressing in her third play, Cleansed as a vehicle to examine and validate her notions of gender and sexuality as well as her developing post-Christian spirituality. Through the critical textual analysis of Cleansed in conjunction with scholarly literature …

My Hall. A Stage Play And My Hall: Excavating, Shaping And Sharing The Memory Of Hale School’S Memorial Hall Through A Site-Specific, Staged Performance. An Exegesis, Julia Jarel

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis provides a case study which investigates the notion that a building which is historically and architecturally significant to a community holds that community’s memories within its walls. It argues that, in collaboration with the members of that community, these memories can be excavated, revealed and woven together to form a piece of site-specific theatre which can then be performed by and for those community members. It proposes that this intergenerational, creative collaboration may enhance the community members’ understanding and appreciation of the significance of the building, its place in the community and their place within it.

The site …

Have A Good One: A Writer’S Search For Place, Rafael Gallegos

Theatre & Dance ETDs

In this personal essay I will summarize my creative journey as a writer throughout my time in the Dramatic Writing program at the University of New Mexico. I will explore how the notion of home has shaped me and my work, focusing on my childhood in Lubbock, Texas, my theatrical coming of age in New York City, and my return to Albuquerque in search of my personal voice. I will present two works that illustrate my maturation as a dramatist and my focus on community and place as thematic throughlines. Have a Good One is a play set in a …

Rewriting Greek Tragedies As Immigrant Stories, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this piece originally published in the New York Times, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner writes about Mojada, Luis Alfaro's adaptation of the Greek tragedy, Medea. Mojada is part of a trilogy from Alfaro that attempts to bring his Latino community into modern theater by writing them into classical plays.

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Identi-Tea Podcast: An Original Play, Karsyn Wilson

Calvert Undergraduate Research Awards

Creative Works Winner for 2019:

Identi-Tea Podcast is an original play based on the word-for-word interviews of three LGBTQ+ students of color from UNLV who explore all the various facets of their identities formatted in the style of a podcast. In various moments during the play, audience members are prompted by the actors to critically engage with the ideas presented.

The Mixed Reception Of The Hamilton Premiere In Puerto Rico, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In this article originally published in The Atlantic, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner wonders about the challenges of premiering the famed Broadway musical, Hamilton, during a time of political discord in the aftermath of 2017's Hurricane Maria, in Puerto Rico.

Theatre And The Overwhelming Question: Why Make Theatre In These Times?, Mónica Valeria Sánchez

Theatre & Dance ETDs

The following essay communicates my journey as a longtime theatre artist as I have navigated my way through the discipline, and towards the craft of playwriting. My intention to study in the program was soon escalated by an existential turning point subsequent to the neoliberal agenda that gained momentum pre, post, and during the election of 2016. This thesis is in response to the question, "Why make theatre now?" I approach this query through the themes and the characters in my plays; through a socio-cultural-historic lens, and via an examination of the creative process as it relates to the metaphysics …

#Parlezvousfemme - A One-Woman Show, Victoria G. Lindbergh

Oglethorpe Journal of Undergraduate Research

#parlezvousfemme is a one-woman show set in 2018 that reimagines the lives of several infamous French women. Each character approaches modern life differently based on her given circumstances and reveals several universal truths about being a woman in today’s society. The famous military leader Joan of Arc is a 19-year-old youtuber criticizing the far-right for using her as their symbol, while revolutionary Olympe de Gouges is a modern-day women’s rights activist. Marie Antoinette is a housewife being interviewed by Vogue and scientist Marie Curie hosts a PBS telethon and addresses the lack of women in science. Designer Coco Chanel is …

Holding On/Letting Go: Situating Trauma And Memory In Theatrical Spaces, Caroline T. Graham

Theatre & Dance ETDs

In this essay, I review my development as a playwright in the MFA Dramatic Writing program and examine the shifting, overlapping goals of playwright-as-educator and playwright-as-entertainer. In Part One, I position my academic exploration of trauma in relation to ethics in journalism, embodied knowledge, and intersectional feminism and outline my creative experiments in staging trauma through the process of witnessing, retelling, and abstraction. In Part Two, I detail the artistic and personal roots of my dissertation play, The Great Maverick Adventure of 2007, and the structural and dramaturgical tools I employed to rebuild a sense of play and theatricality …

Paul Ibell: Tennessee Williams, Verna Foster

Department of Fine & Performing Arts: Faculty Publications and Other Works

A review of Paul Ibell's Tennessee Williams, written by Verna Foster.

Thinking Before You Act: A Constructive Logic Approach To Crafting Performance-For- Development Narrative, Angela Duggins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The intent of this thesis was to test the feasibility of constructing performance-for-development narrative using a constructive logic approach. I created an equation which expressed the sum of non-human-elements as the sum of a narrative with each element serving as a variable. I used a review of persuasion literature to provide insight into the selection and manipulation of each variable. I provided my family as a hypothetical example and used my knowledge of their preferences and communication styles in conjunction with the literature and the equation to craft a narrative which might increase pro-school attitudes in other families like my …

Night Launch, Cavan Hallman

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

From Playwriting To Production, Lauren Wade

Senior Honors Projects

Theater has been a beloved art form for centuries, originating in Ancient Greek times and evolving into what we know today. For as long as I can remember I have been involved in theater, performing in my own school plays starting in elementary school and, upon entering high school, assisting the middle school next door in their productions. While I have been studying acting here at the University of Rhode Island, I have also had the opportunity to expand my knowledge in many aspects of stagecraft including stage management, costume and set design, set construction and scenic painting, and more …