Alumni + Careers: Dissertations
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Prior to 2005
2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1995 | 1994 | 1993 | 1992 | 1991 | 1990
2004
Colborn-Roxworthy, Emily
Home Front Spectacles: The Theatrical Strategies of Japanese American Evacuation
This dissertation uses the methods and theories of theatre historians to highlight the underexamined evacuation period preceding the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Scholars from numerous disciplines including political science, sociology, and anthropology have investigated each main component of this study-the unconstitutional disenfranchisement of Japanese Americans after the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor and the theatricalization of everyday life caused by political spectacles-but never before for the combined purpose of examining the spectacles staged by the United States government and mass media about the "Japanese problem" on the wartime home front. Drawing upon these disciplines, I conducted a historical ethnography of first six months of the war in order to answer these questions: Why did the American public experience a profound disengagement from the injustice enacted against ethnic Japanese? Why did the public accept its role as passive spectators to the historic events of forcefully evacuating 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes? I conclude that the spectacular raids conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Japanese American communities and the dramatically biased reporting deployed to cover (up) the plight of ethnic Japanese colluded with widespread uncertainty about Japan to produce a feeling of alienation characteristic of the theatre.
My first chapter argues that United States Office of War Information (OWl) contractor Ruth Benedict's broadly circulated ethnography of the defeated Japanese, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), epitomized the prewar American perception of Japanese people as dangerously aesthetic and inherently deceptive. The remaining chapters explore the theatrical treatments that emanated from this theatricalizing discourse about "the Japanese." I demonstrate that the antitheatrical evacuation spectacles of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI attempted to reign in a public empowered by the participatory anti-crime rituals of the 1930s, by demoting them to a position as passive spectators of tightly choreographed raids against Japanese Americans. Finally, I analyze media magnate William Randolph Hearst's appropriation of affective strategies from melodrama and play in juxtaposing patriotic stories and the serious business of war against the purported disloyalty and inconsequentiality of Japanese Americans.
McConnell, Lauren
Gray Zones and Black Holes: The Effects of Normalization Censorship on Czech Playwriting
After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the subsequent 21 years of strict Communist rule known as "the normalization" (1968-1989), dissident Czech playwrights received considerable international attention. Throughout the world, people were inspired by the perseverance of banned playwrights such as Va\clav Havel, who continued writing even though his plays could not be performed or published in his own country.
While acknowledging the accomplishments of a handful of banned playwrights, this dissertation argues that normalization censorship was far more devastating to Czech playwriting and the Czech theatrical community than is commonly recognized. Using a combination of methods commonly used in sociology and theatre studies (including statistical analysis, case studies and historiography), Gray Zones and Black Holes documents the decline of playwriting and original Czech play production in Czechoslovakia during the normalization, while also exploring the complex responses individual playwrights had to the difficult and often isolating work conditions brought about by normalization censorship.
Czech playwriting was exceptionally vibrant in the 1960s, and witnessed the premieres of outstanding plays by Va\clav Havel, Milan Kundera, Pavel Kohout, Ivan Klma and Josef Topol. This exciting period of liberality encouraged a high level of theatrical innovation and artistry which culminated in the "Prague Spring" in 1968 when censorship was abolished entirely. By the 1980s, however, after more than a decade of normalization censorship, comparatively few new Czech plays were produced and few playwrights (including regime-approved, "gray zone" and banned playwrights) continued actively writing for the stage. Only a handful of younger generation playwrights such as Daniela Fischerov\ and Karel Steigerwald succeeded in writing and getting their plays produced. The mentoring structures within theatres that were so successful in encouraging the writing and production of new Czech plays in the 1960s were effectively dismantled during the two decades of the normalization, and the loss of these mentoring structures continues to negatively affect playwriting in the post-Communist era.
2003
Anderson, Aaron
Reading the Fights: Gestures Toward a Semiotics of Staged Combat
Delmenico, Lesley
Dramas in Darwin: Postcolonial Performances in Austral-Asian Border Territory
2002
Kraut, Anthea
Framing the Vernacular: The Dance Praxis of Zora Neale Hurston
Focusing on the revues that Zora Neale Hurston produced throughout the 1930s, this dissertation restores the record of Hurston's contributions to the field of American dance history and uses her stagings of Bahamian folk dances to reconsider the relationship between Hurston and the vernacular itself. Whereas the recent canonization of Hurston celebrates her ability to adapt non-literate folk traditions to literary forms, I complicate the existing scholarship, positing that while the transformation of the vernacular lay at the very core of Hurston's artistic work, this operation was by no means a straightforward or unidirectional one. Not only are vernacular expressive forms themselves always already engaged in a myriad of negotiations, undergoing and resisting commodification by the mainstream, but Hurston too was forced to negotiate the often conflicting demands of ownership, authorship, and authenticity. By attending to the manifold ways in which Hurston worked to shape the meaning of the dance forms she staged, this dissertation foregrounds her re-framing of the vernacular the process by which she fashioned non-commodified, communal folk forms into a theatrical, commercial product.
Taking up this more nuanced approach to representations of the vernacular, the dissertation interrogates the conditions of production leading up to and governing the New York premiere of Hurston's folk concert, revealing how she struggled to maintain artistic control over her program amidst the regulations and impositions of her wealthy white patron. I then attend to the narrative structure and performance conventions of the revue itself, which depicted a day in the life of a railroad work camp, from the waking of the camp at dawn to the rousing West Indian Fire Dance at midnight. Beneath the surface claims of authenticity, Hurston's concerts were actually complex stagings of the tensions between Afrocentric roots and diasporic routes. Turning finally to the re-surfacing of the Fire Dance on the American dance landscape in the 1930s in subsequent productions by Hurston and by the troupe of Bahamian dancers whom she trained this dissertation uncovers the consequential yet convoluted role that the black vernacular played in the formation of multiple dance traditions in the early twentieth century.
Paredez, Deborah
Crossing Over the Latina Body: The Selena Phenomenon and the Production of Latinidad
This dissertation explores the constitutive relationship between the Latina body and the body politic in the United States. The project is a critical response to the conspicuous celebration of Latinas during the 1990s, a decade marked by numerous legislative and discursive attacks against Latinos and by renewed assertions of Latina/o identity, or latinidad. I deploy theories of identity formation with ethnographic methods, archival work and production analyses in a case study of the popular Latina performer, Selena Quintanilla Perez, to investigate how the performing Latina body functioned as a site of cultural and political struggle during the 1990s. Building on theories of performance, cultural memory, racialized sexuality and border culture, I argue that Selena, as both a performer and as a posthumous icon, enabled the production and negotiation of gendered, socio-political and national imaginaries.
As a corrective to recent critical trends that render the geopolitical space of the border into metaphor, I begin my analysis by situating Selena and her posthumous iconization within the political economic struggles of the Texas-Mexico border region from which Selena emerged and ultimately took part in re-imagining. In chapter one, my close analysis of Selena's final concert in Houston, Texas reveals how her dynamic and deeply hybrid performances productively disrupt prevailing assimilationist crossover narratives that frame her career. In chapter two, I argue that within the contested south Texas region, the maintenance of Selena's memory makes visible class-based battles over claims to civic citizenship. I broaden this frame to locate Selena within the (trans)national context of latinidad in chapter three, revealing how the Selena phenomenon played a significant role in the formation, commodification and policing of latinidad during a time of increased nativist attacks against Latina/os. Grounded in Latina feminist theories, the project culminates with an examination of the relationship between representational circulations of Latinas and their political economic lived realities by investigating how Latinas memorialize Selena as a means of reclaiming and asserting a historically maligned, racialized sexuality. Thus, my project contributes to and reveals the productive linkages among the fields of popular performance, Latina/o, American, women's and cultural studies.
2001
Edwards, Geoffrey
Grand Et Vrai: Portrayals of Victor Hugo's Dramatic Characters in the 19th Century Italian Opera
Goddard, Leslie
Something to vote for: Theatricalism in the United States Women's Suffrage Movement
From pro suffrage skits to spectacular mass parades, the thousands of theatricals staged on behalf of the U.S. women's suffrage movement in the 1910s have been largely overlooked, even though theatricals were a characteristic form of activism in these years. Why suffragists adopted theatricals so enthusiastically, and what this explosion tells us about the political and cultural uses of theater, are the focus of this dissertation. This study argues that during an era of unprecedented social and cultural transformations, theatricals helped legitimize new suffragist conceptions of womanhood and create solidarity among people with vastly different aims. Given its central preoccupation with how meaning is constructed, this study draws primarily on the methods of theatrical semiotics, exploring how meaning was produced in suffrage theatricals through the manipulation of signs such as costumes, settings, props, and actors.
The study is divided into four major chapters, each focusing on a distinct genre. The first chapter argues that through plays suffragists claimed for themselves revered signs of middle class, white, domestic femininity while undermining the association of those traits with anti suffragists. Chapter two looks at how suffrage tableaux and pageants linked, upper class beliefs about womanhood with demands for women's votes, while also shoring up affluent women's social status. The third chapter examines how defiant suffrage picketers appropriated powerful signs of American nationhood, sparking wartime tensions that often exploded in gendered terms. The fourth chapter investigates how the signs used in suffrage parades from uniform costumes to yellow flowers produced bonds of solidarity without requiring shared political beliefs, permitting diverse constituencies to stand together. Looking at suffrage theatricals as cultural performances helps us see their role in the complex process of constructing new definitions of womanhood, harmonizing social differences, and bridging contradictions. Theatricals not only played off the instabilities in the signs deployed, but permitted people from vastly different backgrounds to see coincidences between their own interests and votes for women. In their ability to expand conventional notions of womanhood, contain ambiguities, and validate different, even contradictory, beliefs, lies the power of suffrage theatricals.
2000
Classon, Hsiu-Chin Lin
A Different Kind of Asian American: Negotiating and Redefining Asian/American in Theater Mu
Dixon, Kimberly
Taking Place as we Speak: The Construction, Expression and Interpretation of Black Female Identity in the Careers of Regina Taylor, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan Lori Parks
This project offers case studies of three African American women playwrights who between 1990 and 2000 achieved significant prominence in mainstream American regional theatre. Operating under the premise that a playwright's prominence is the product of a combination of individual talent and social dynamics, this project traces how social beliefs and practices surrounding Black womanhood, race and gender shape these playwrights' presence in the mainstream, a context historically dominated by White men. This project helps to illuminate the ways individual talent and social dynamics intersect in the careers of all African American women artists in mainstream culture, and thereby provides an important barometer of the progress made, and the challenges to further progress, in race and gender relations in both American arts and society as a whole. Furthermore, because race and gender discourses are key sites of American society's construction of identity and difference, this project implies some of the patterns to the construction, interpretation and expression of identity and difference in effect in this country at the end of the millennium.
This project's three central chapters pair textual analysis of each playwright's plays with close readings of her public images as an African American woman theater artist in order to investigate how the playwright and others construct her prominence in the mainstream. Each of these chapters also analyzes how patterns in plays and public image commentary speak to the circumstances of both the given playwright's own existence and that of other "minorities" in an American sociocultural mainstream. The project's outer chapters contextualize the playwrights' existence. Besides detailing the study's discursive and theoretical parameters, chapter one introduces the playwrights and begins to describe their professional and sociocultural environment. Chapter two considers this environment's climate of embracing yet resisting difference and deploys the concept of theatricality as a metaphor for the dynamics surrounding the playwrights' representation of difference in theater's mainstream. The project's final chapter delineates late twentieth century American theater's definition of success and the application of those ideas in the playwrights' careers, considering how America's race/gender relations and concepts of Black womanhood affect both.
Effinger, Marta J.
Staging migrations toward an American West: From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones
My dissertation examines how black women from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century stage migrations toward an American West. It is a study of their cultural production seen through the paradigm of theatre and performance. Here, migration is defined, in the broadest terms, as physical movement from one geographical locale to another and a series of metaphoric, internal journeys. Migration is used to analyze how black women through traditional theatrical and everyday performances have imagined and reconfigured the West as a space of possibilities for social, economic, and political freedom. Archival and ethnographic research, theatre and performance theories, black feminist theories, and migration histories are included in this project to analyze how black women have produced knowledge for and about themselves.
Chapter One chronicles Ida B. Wells's early activism and newspaper work in Memphis, Tennessee. Through the writing and speaking of lynch victim Thomas Moss's words, "tell my people to go West -- there is no justice for them here" as well as her own access to and interpretation of public spaces, Wells was best equipped to stage migrations westward.
Chapter Two details Black Patti's Troubadours tour to Denver, Colorado. By focusing on Sissieretta "Black Patti" Jones's journey with her troupe in a private train car as well as their performances on and off stage, I determine that they negotiated intersections of race and gender through the power of mimetic representation during the early Jim Crow era.
Chapter Three traces the migration process of six black women who relocated to California for the purpose of laboring in the Bay Area's shipbuilding industry during World War II. I reveal that once these migrants were transplanted in California, they constructed performances around race, gender and class issues that assisted them in critiquing and, at times, transforming the West.
Chapter Four examines how contemporary performance artist Rhodessa Jones's creative process seeks to enable San Francisco inmates and ex offenders in the Medea Project: Theatre for Incarcerated Women to make metaphoric journeys in which they (re)evaluate their lives. This chapter disrupts contemporary notions of mobility and progress by revealing that although these young, black women are inheritors of an earlier generation's imagination of an American West, they are ironically the most closely policed and most reliant on metaphoric migrations.
McKinniE, Michael R.T.
Worksites: Theatre Work and its Urban Environment in Toronto Since 1967
Winner of the Distinguished Dissertation Award for 1999-2001 from the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States.
This project is a materialist history of the relationship between theatre practice and its urban environment in Toronto, Canada, since 1967. It argues that, over approximately the last three decades, theatre in Toronto has increasingly engaged its urban environment. This urban engagement occurs both consciously and unconsciously, and this project offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how Toronto theatre practice intersects with issues like urban political economy, built form, and civic ideology.
The project contains five case studies. The first case study considers the St. Lawrence Centre for the Performing Arts (1970) and the Ford Centre for the Performing Arts (1993), and asks how the urban development of civic theatre buildings illustrates changing conceptions of the "civic" and "downtown" as Toronto's economy was transforming. The second case study questions how Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto's paradigmatic "alternative" theatre company of the 1970s, accommodated post Fordist suburbanization and property value inflation as both administrative and performance concerns through its building at 16 Ryerson Avenue. The third case study focuses on Toronto Workshop Productions, which, unlike Theatre Passe Muraille, tried and failed to anticipate changes in Toronto's urban political economy during the 1980s. The fourth case study considers Necessary Angel Theatre, and asks how the theatre space, and the work performed within it, attempt to interpellate a gentrified spectator. Finally, the fifth case study examines how Toronto's Entertainment District remakes spectatorship as a form of urban and service consumption at the time of writing.
1999
Feder-Kane, Abigail M.
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better: Transgressive Gender Role Performance in Musical Theater and Film, 1930-1950
Friedman-Romell, Beth H.
Producing the Nation: Nationalism in Gender in the Theatre of Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Joanna Baillie
Mayor, Loren A.
Broadway at the Crossroads: Urban Planning and Theatrical Production in New York in the 1950's
1998
Applebaum, Susan R.
Mother as Mentor/Mentor as Mother: The Changing Representation of Intergenerational Female Relationships in 20th Century American Theatre and Dance
George-Graves, Nadine A.
The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: the Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender and Class in African American Theater
The Whitman Sisters were the highest paid act on the Negro Vaudeville circuit, Theater Owners Booking Association (Toby), and one of the longest surviving touring companies (1899-1942). The group was considered the greatest incubator of dancing talent for Negro shows on or off Toby, and significantly contributed to American theater and dance history.
In this dissertation, I provide a historical narrative of their achievements and use black feminist theories, feminist theories of performance, and theories of class and popular culture to analyze the many layers of performance in which the Whitman Sisters participated, on and off stage.
I show that these four black women manipulated their race, gender and class to resist hegemonic forces while achieving success. By maintaining a high-class image, they were able to challenge fictions of racial and gender identity.
In "Setting The Stage: The Whitman Sisters' Beginnings, Influences and a Performance Reconstruction," I detail the Whitman Sisters' early years, explaining theatrical influences and historically situating their entrance into the theatrical industry. I show that they drew from not only Euro-American traditions and the short history of African Americans on stage, but also from the long tradition of African American performance. I also reconstruct a possible show based on personal accounts and reviews.
In "Race, Gender and Class: The Whitman Sisters and The politics of Performance and Management," I show that in their repertory and off-stage business dealings, the Whitman Sisters destabilized race and gender norms by the upholding certain standards about class, respectability and uplift in order to resist hegemonic forces. I conclude this chapter by examining the management practices that led to the company's success.
In "Toby, The Depression and Beyond: The Whitman Sisters' Later Years, " I resume the historical narrative and examine the later years of the Whitman Sisters' careers. I show how in these years, on the Toby circuit and during the Depression, the Whitman Sisters continued to uphold the values discussed in the previous chapter despite the decline of the company.
Maillet, Monica M.
Gender and Performative Language in Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Shakespeare's Macbeth
1997
McAllister, Marvin E.
White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen (of Color)
Montgomery, Elizabeth J.
Talkshow Performance Practices and the Display of Identity
Moore, Nancy G.
Valentine de St.-Point: "La Femme Integrale" and Her Quest for a Modern Tragic Theatre in L'Agonie de Messaline (1907) and La Metachorie (1913)
1996
Cole, Catherine M.
Ghanaian Popular Theatre: A Historical Ethnography of the Ghanaian Concert Party, 1865 to 1965
Schlossman, David A.
Politics and Performance in the Contemporary United States: The Cases of Activist-Produced Performance, the NEA Four, and Miss Saigon
Trotter, Mary K.
Ireland's National Theatres: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement
1995
Senkbeil, Peter L.
Faith in Theatre: Run by Christians in the United States and Canada and Their Strategies for Faith-Art Integration
1994
Blood, Melanie N.
The Neighborhood Playhuse 1915-27: A History and Analysis
Campbell, Stephen F.
Feminist Performances of Discourse in the Age of Eloquence: Caussin, Corneille, and Jeanne Des Anges
Farfan, Penelope
Performing and Writing Feminist Subjectivity in th Careers of Elizabeth Robins, Isadora Duncan and Virginia Woolf, 1891-1941
Kent, Assunta B.
Maria Irene Fornes and Her Critics: A Pragmatic Feminist Perspective
1993
Carlyon, David J.
Dan Rice's Aspirational Project: The Nineteenth-Century Circus Clown and Middle-Class Formation
King, Thomas A.
The Hermaphrodites's Occupation: Theatricality and Queerness in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century London
1992
Heinrich, Paul
Satirical Theory and Dramatic Practice: Towards a New Model of Satire in Performance
1991
Fosdick, Scott
The Press on Chicago Theater: Influencing an Emergent Style
Nellhaus, Tobin
Changing the Script: Orality, Literacy in the Performance Strategies of the York Cycle, Ben Jonson, and Richard Steele
1990
Kaplan, Howard G.
Borderline and Narcissistic Rage and Emptiness: Their Dramatization and Drama Therapy
