Alumni + Careers: Dissertations

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2007

Juntunen, Jacob M.

Profitable Dissents: the Theatre of Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner as a Negotiating Force Between Emergent and Dominant Ideologies

By combining cultural theory with empirical data, this dissertation asserts that late-twentieth-century mainstream theatre had the potential to support emergent ideologies in the U.S. context. The study finds fault with those who dismiss mainstream theatre based on its commercialism and shows how a production’s mainstream status may position its emergent ideology as conventional rather than radical. Much of this work is done through the media’s reception of productions, and this dissertation employs the media theory espoused by James Carey to suggest that newspapers do not transmit information as much as they report news with rhetorical strategies that confirm the ideologies of their readers. Ideology, here, is defined by the writings of Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams and is understood to be an unconscious “frame” through which one sees the world. On the rare occasions that a periodical does transmit new information, readers tend to shift their ideologies accordingly. Using Ric Knowles’ materialist semiotics, this study analyzes three productions and their cultural surroundings—particularly newspaper reviews—to illustrate how they contributed to and changed the ideologies of spectators and readers. In so doing, it reveals that while mainstream theatre may be part of the socializing force of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s culture industry, one must nevertheless contextualize that socialization and ask whether it supports the dominant or an emergent ideology.

The analysis of this dissertation’s first case study, the 2001 New York Theatre Workshop production of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, shows that historical context and media reception are of equal importance to textual content when evaluating a production’s ideological work. In the second case study, the 1985 Public Theatre production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, the emergent ideology was explicitly argued in the script and quickly incorporated into the mainstream media, helping to make these ideas part of the dominant ideology. The final case study, the 1993 Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, presented an emergent ideology, but because the production was framed as mainstream by its location on Broadway and as high art by its prizes and critical reception, it implicitly posited that its emergent ideology was conventional. Taken together, these case studies provide a robust picture of how mainstream theatre and its media reception could support emergent ideologies in the late-twentieth-century U.S. context.

Pulju, Ann

Theatrical Discourse and National Development in Ireland, 1919-1932

This dissertation argues that theatre was a vital element of postcolonial culture in Ireland in the years 1919-1932, the period in which the Irish nation emerged from revolutionary war to become a stable postcolonial state. Although critics have bemoaned the rising dominance of conservative, anti-modernist playwriting and production in Irelands post-independence period (drawing unfavorable contrast with the early years of the Abbey Theatre), a more productive approach is to ask why such styles were popular in these particular historical moments. Examining a range of theatrical productions throughout Ireland in the period, I contend that postcoloniality was the crucial influence upon Irish theatrical discourses during these years, resulting in theatrical formations centered upon realism, escapism, domesticity, and nostalgia for a particular vision of a safe, rural life. Through these formations, Irish theatre of the 1920s reflected, circulated, and helped to create cultural discourses that contributed to the stabilization of the new Irish state. Thus, 1920s theatre functioned as a potent element of nationalist culture, and should not be dismissed.

Plays like P.J. Bourke’s melodrama Kathleen Mavourneen and George Shiels’s comedy Paul Twyning exemplify the mainstream theatres contributions to the stabilizing cultural discourses of the Irish Free State. Theatre was also involved with political issues like the revival of the Irish language (in the founding of Galway’s state-supported An Taibhdhearc theatre) and censorship (manifested in unofficial but intriguing ways in regard to works like Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and The Silver Tassie). Because postcoloniality, with its driving impulse toward unity, was the dominant cultural influence, modernism could have little role in the Irish theatre. Productions like W.B. Yeats’s The Player Queen, the work of the Dublin Drama League, and three early productions of the Dublin Gate Theatre -- Peer Gynt, Diarmuid and Grainne, and The Old Lady Says No! -- demonstrate the ways in which modernism was sequestered as (at best) a niche element in Irish theatre. Drawing upon theories from the fields of historiography and literary and performance studies, this dissertation analyzes theatrical productions as case studies of the ways in which culture and the state interact in postcolonial societies.

Robinson, Karima

Stages of Liberation: Ritual, Nationalism and Women’s Cultural Production in Jamaica's Pre-independence Era

This dissertation, “Stages of Liberation: Ritual, Nationalism and Women’s Cultural Production in Jamaica's Pre-independence Era,” examines the development of Jamaican national identity through the lens of staged performance in the decades leading up to Jamaica’s independence from Britain. My project focuses on women artists and their contribution to the deployment of ritual performance as a marker of Jamaican national identity. I analyze Una Marson’s play Pocomania, Enid Chevannes’ plays Superstition and The Vision, and Ivy Baxter’s dance-theatre piece Pocomania in order to argue that these women defined how ritual performance and spirit possession could be performed on national stages to embody the rhetoric of nationalism.

In this dissertation I demonstrate how artists in Jamaica during the nationalist period (1938-1962) used folk forms, specifically sacred ritual, to support the process of decolonization by de-westernizing Jamaican middle-class theatre going audiences. I argue that these practices had a serious effect upon Jamaican people as they prepared for nationhood as they were mobilized by middle class artists to communicate nationalist ideologies. These folk forms and their translation to the previously Eurocentric space of the theatre supported the notion that the Caribbean was capable of producing its own forms of high art and culture. In the political realm this cultural assertion fueled the struggle for independence and supported claims of cultural and political maturity and readiness for self-governance.

I introduce the concepts of myalisation and myal-theatre to explain how staged ritual and spirit possession in the context of theatrical performance maintains a transformative power for both the performers and audience members. I argue that spirit possession that takes place within the theatre inculcates middle-class theatre goers, who usually are not ritual participants, into an Afro-centric belief system at a time when the colony was breaking away from Britain politically and culturally. Through these ritualized theatre performances, the Jamaican middle-class’ affection for British culture is, over time, supplanted by an acceptance of and appreciation for African culture in Jamaica and an Afro-Jamaican world view.

White, Ann Folino

Paradox of Want Amid Plenty: Aesthetics of New Deal Food Rights Performances

What can the theatrical use of food accomplish in performances which assert cultural, legal, or moral rights to food production and consumption in a food insecure society? Case studies comprising the USDA’s 1933-34 World’s Fair exhibits, the May 1933 Wisconsin Cooperative Milk Pool protest, the 1936 Federal Theatre Project living newspaper Triple-A Plowed Under, and the 1939 Missouri Bootheel sharecroppers’ demonstration illustrate foods’ potency in disparate performance genres and the experiential difference of real or mimetic hunger, food destruction, and plenty for spectators. The “paradox of want amid plenty,” a Great Depression-era colloquialism that referred to US citizens’ perception of a contradiction between the country’s visible food supply and pervasive hunger, is both the context and rhetoric framing these performances and their responses to the Agricultural Adjustment Acts as an economic program with moral implications. This dissertation theorizes that food use and its marked absence in food rights performances can stimulate spectators’ sense of physical investment in moral, economic, and political debates.

The national debate about US citizens’ mutual obligations and the federal government’s responsibility to all citizens restructures studies of New Deal-era culture, theatre, and politics. Through composite descriptions of the performances, this study shows how performative elements of non-theatrical events (protests and exhibition) and mimetic representation of such incidents (living newspaper drama) revealed the politics of food rights to spectators. Tracy C. Davis’s method of historical sign restoration is applied to the case studies in combination with anthropological theories regarding culturally constructed meanings of food and phenomenologically-based theories of food as a communication medium. This approach generates hypotheses about reception and spectatorship, demonstrating the ways in which performances prompted spectators’ visceral engagement. Food served as these performances’ touchstone; spectators’ first-hand, commonsense, bodily knowledge about the foods used (or the absence of necessary foods) made the ultimate effects of socio-economic exclusion undeniable and brought consumer-producer-government interdependence to the fore. Exploring dysfunction in the US food system during the New Deal era pinpoints the perceived conflicts between government obligations, citizens’ cultural rights, and capitalist imperatives toward the fundamental human right to eat.