Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies Theses and Dissertations

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End date: 2009Subject: search.filters.subject.Theatre

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    Scenic Design for Anna in the Tropics
    (2009) Wheatley, Deborah; Conway, Daniel; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this Thesis is to provide research, supporting paperwork and production photographs that represent the scenic design for Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz at the University of Maryland, Department of Theatre. This thesis contains the following documentation: research images which contribute to the intellectual design of the production and visually communicate to the director the ideas of texture, color, scale, and mood; photographs of the ¼"; scale model; a full set of draftings communicating to the technical director the look of each scenic element; a unit list which gives detailed information on each element of the scenic design; the props list which details the construction and purpose of each type of prop used in the production; and the props and paint research book which visually supports the information in the props and unit list. Archival production photographs are included to visually document the completed final design.
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    `SHE WILL NOT SUBMIT TO BE IGNORED': KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN AND PERFORMING AMERICAN FEMININITY AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
    (2009) Cole, Carrie Jane; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    "`She Will Not Submit to Be Ignored': Kate Douglas Wiggin and Performing American Femininity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" seeks not only to reintroduce Wiggin as an important American figure of her era, but to do so as an example of the complex restructuring of women's roles in early twentieth-century American culture via the public performance of self. This dissertation explores how Wiggin performed her different personae throughout her life, how she shifted between the different roles she personified, and how the fluctuation of the definition of "appropriate" feminine behavior affected when and how she performed. The multiple facets of Kate Douglas Wiggin's public personae have never received scholarly attention; this examination offers an ideal opportunity to simultaneously reinvigorate interest in her work and to develop scholarship based on theories of self-representation and performance. By defining and explicating a theory of the performance of self based on discrete acts of self expression, I open the door for scholars in theatre, performance studies, literature, history, and gender studies to re-interrogate and renegotiate previously held conceptions of women's roles in society in general and within the theatrical sphere in particular.
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    Lighting Design of The Winter's Tale
    (2009) Engel, Brian; Burgess II, Harold F.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this Thesis is to provide research, supporting paperwork and production photographs that represent the lighting design for by William Shakespeare at the University of Maryland, Department of Theatre. This thesis contains the following documentation: Research Images which contribute to the intellectual design of the production and visually communicate to the director the ideas of texture, color, quality, and angle of light; a preliminary, rough, and final wish list used in the design development process; the scenic ground plan and section; all three plates of the light plot communicating to the electricians where to hang each individual lighting unit; the channel hookup and instrument schedule paperwork which support the light plot; the cue track used to develop and record the cue structure; and the magic sheet used to efficiently access the design tools. Archival production photographs are included to visually document the completed final design.
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    Marisol By Jose RIvera: Scenic Design
    (2008-08-22) Foil, Jeremy William; Conway, Daniel; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this thesis is to provide a record of the scenic design process for Marisol, produced by the Theatre Department and performed in the Kogod Theatre at the University of Maryland. The attached packet contains visual research used as inspiration for the design, preliminary models and sketches that track process, technical drafting, and photographs of the performance. Marisol is set in Spanish Harlem during the early nineteen nineties and transforms to a post apocalyptic environment and a world turned upside down. I created a space in the round that uses raw metals and concrete to symbolize the location through simple line and shape. The set is purely realistic at its core and dissipates into a surrealistic form on the outer edges. Through the form of magical realism the ground becomes the sky, a subway lamp becomes the moon, and a fire escape becomes the portal to the heavens.
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    The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival as a Theatrical Event
    (2007-08-08) Bain, Carolyn; Hildy, Ph.D., Franklin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    On December 29 of 1938, Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams), little known American playwright, encountered the city of New Orleans. Through his engagement with the city's culture of multiple morés, Williams discovered in himself a personal freedom and theatrical productivity that changed the landscape of dramatic literature for the twentieth century. The phenomenon associated with Williams's identity and his experience with New Orleans as participant and spectator did not end with Williams's death, February 23, 1983; it continues today through the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, drawing thousands of attendees and celebrating its 21st-anniversary March 28 through April 1, 2007. This dissertation consists of six chapters accompanied by three integral videotexts that evidence a framework for understanding the theatrical contexts that inform the festival's processes and outcomes. The dissertation investigates the festival as a case study of the notion of theatrical eventness. The concept of eventness emerged in theatre studies discourse through an international colloquium, the Theatrical Event working group, within the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR). This dissertation represents an approach to bringing the study of festival into theatre studies through a discussion of its multi-layered communications and its creative outcomes. Chapter One situates the object of study as the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and questions how theatricality frames communication among attendees while it informs the identity of the festival. Accompanying Chapter One is a videotext summarizing the festival's origins and events. Chapter Two reviews the extra-theatrical influences on theatre studies and the development of the concept of festival as a theatrical event. Chapter Three examines the theatrical context of Williams's encounter with New Orleans. In Chapter Four, the "Stella Shout-off" contest mediates the past and present by eventifying a moment from theatrical history. A videotext evidences the theatricality of the contest. Chapter Five looks at performance and theatrical communications evident in the panels and the master classes. Accompanying the text, a video substantiates the theatricality of Williams's legacy through his relationship with Maria St. Just. In Chapter Six, the dissertation concludes by focusing on the festival's outcomes as the result of the festival's theatrical eventness.
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    "The Sauce is Better Than the Fish": The Use of Food to Signify Class in the Comedies of Carlo Goldoni 1737-1762.
    (2006-04-26) Coyle, Margaret Anne; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation explores the plays of Venetian Commedia del'Arte reformer-cum-playwright Carlo Goldoni, and documents how he manipulates consumption and material culture using fashionable food and dining styles to satirize class structures in eighteenth century Italy. Goldoni's works exist in what I call the "consuming public" of eighteenth century Venice, documenting the theatrical, literary, and artistic production of the city as well as the trend towards Frenchified social production and foods in the stylish eating of the period. The construction of Venetian society in the middle of the eighteenth century was a specific and legally ordered cultural body, expressed through various extra-theatrical activities available during the period, such as gambling, carnival, and public entertainments. The theatrical conventions of the Venetian eighteenth century also explored nuances of class decorum, especially as they related to audience behavior and performance reception. This decorum extended to the eating styles for the wealthy developed in France during the late seventeenth century and spread to the remainder of Europe in the eighteenth century. Goldoni 's early plays from 1737 through 1752 are riffs on the traditional Commedia dell'Arte performances prevalent in the period. He used food in these early pieces to illustrate the traditional class and regional affiliations of the Commedia characters. Plays such as The Artful Widow, The Coffee House, and The Gentleman of Good Taste experimented with the use of historical foods styles that illustrate social placement and hint at further character development. In his later plays from 1753-1762, Goldoni developed his satirical use of food in order to illuminate current social problems and bourgeois status issues. Plays such as Mirandolina, The Superior Residence, and the three plays of The Country Trilogy offer a social commentary about the role of consumption in the formation of class structure during the period. My work offers a new look at the theatre and literary output of the eighteenth century, and particularly how writers used material culture as a way of illustrating social changes.
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    The Phenomenology of Racialism: Blackface Puppetry in American Theatre, 1872-1939
    (2005-04-20) Fisler, Benjamin Daniel; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In 1872, a company headed by English theatrical entrepreneur William John Bullock introduced the first full marionette minstrel show to the American stage. Throughout the following sixty-seven years, puppeteers presented a variety of productions featuring ostensibly African or African American characters, including: traditional blackface minstrel shows, adaptations of Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo, numerous "Punch and Judy" plays, and productions of such ostensibly "authentic" portraits of black persons as Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and Joel Chandler Harris's "Uncle Remus" stories. This investigation employs phenomenology to explore the "essence" of specific blackface puppets, maintaining that none of the objects or plays discussed here are necessarily examples of authentic black representation. Rather, this investigation adopts the shifting perspective of phenomenology to show that what some past puppeteers thought were authentic African or African American characters, were, with but a single exception, consistently racialized exaggerations derived from the heritage of minstrelsy. Phenomenology, in its emphasis on the essence of "things," permits the scholar to investigate both the physical existence of empirically verifiable objects, such as the puppets that are still in existence long after the deaths of their creators, and the meanings their observers embed them with, such as the character the puppets were imagined to be during their manipulators' careers. Phenomenology helps explain the interaction between the puppet's corporeal form and its perceived dramatic meaning, which is often a result of apportioned, or as some critics call it, atomized components, including: object, manipulation, and voice. Thus, while phenomenology is useful in explaining how an early twentieth-century puppeteer might see Topsy as an authentic representation of a young African American woman, even if an early twenty-first century scholar would see it as a minstrel stereotype, it is equally useful in explaining how different components of a single puppet performance could contribute to a contradictory essence for a single blackface character. This investigation details the careers of a number of puppeteers and puppet companies, using the phenomenological method to explain the diverse essences of their work. Included are companies spanning a history from the Royal Marionettes to the Federal Theatre Project.