UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
11 results
Search Results
Item BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK: A LIGHTING DESIGN(2023) Reynolds, Heather; Chandrashaker, Amith; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis provides documentation and reflection on the lighting design for the University of Maryland - College Park School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies production of By the Way, Meet Vera Stark by Lynn Nottage. This thesis contains a written explanation of the design process and approach; visual research used to help communicate design intent to the production team; drafting plates used to convey the placement and organization of the lighting equipment; magic sheets, discussion of the organizational and communication tools for the lighting design team; a discussion of the effects of COVID-19 on the production and design process; and documentation of the creation of the “Belle of New Orleans” film required by the script. Included production photographs document the completed design. This production held two preview performances on October 7th and 9th and opened on October 13th, 2022.Item Embodied Performance: War, Trauma, and Disability on the Eighteenth-Century Stage(2021) LeRoy, Tamar Dora; Rosenthal, Laura; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project brings attention to the emotional work performed by plays about war from the Restoration and eighteenth century—how these plays position soldiers and communities in relation to one another and the state and in what ways they contribute to the work of negotiating trauma. War-themed plays of the period obsessively reenact tropes and devices that communicate particular affective scenarios or experiences of wartime. These affective scenarios include the temporality of soldiering and enlistment that locks the recruit in a state of inevitable injury and injuring; the longings for return of someone seemingly lost or displaced and the simultaneous fear of the outcome of this return (or no return); and a sense of rootlessness or displacement that unsettles surety in homeland, homecoming, or nation. The tropes and devices that convey these affective scenarios include devices involving the literal substitution bodies, such as bed tricks and dead tricks; an obsessive repetition of scenarios of recognition of identity, reunion, and the many complications of mistaken identity; and humor, joking, and comic tropes (like the soldier breeches role) that communicate a sense of the corporeal/temporal experience of war through the body. From these devices an experiential bridge is created in the playhouse between home front and warfront that positions the soldier as well as the grieving individual as part of a larger affective community. These figures are not isolated by their potentially extreme experiences of the battlefield, enlistment, waiting, or mourning: through the collective space of the stage, their extreme experiences are shown to be acknowledged by the larger group. From these plays, we see the affective experience of war at home from the community networks touched by military conflict.Item EURYDICE: AN EXPLORATION OF PROJECTION DESIGN IDEAS AND PROCESS FOR THE UNIVERSTIY OF MARYLAND’S DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE, DANCE AND PERFORMING STUDIES, 2018 PRODUCTION(2018) Costello, Mark Alan; Kachman, Misha; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following thesis navigates the artistic ideas and concepts, design process, and execution of Mark Costello’s projections design for the University of Maryland’s production of Eurydice. The production opened February 9, 2018 in the Kay Theatre at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. The play was written by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Mitchell Hébert. Matthew Buttrey designed set, Peter Leibold designed lighting, B. Benjamin Weigel designed costumes, and Matthew Nielson designed sound.Item Visa Denied: U.S. Playwriting and the anti-Political Habitus post-"Angels in America"(2013) Pressley, Daniel Nelson; Bryer, Jackson R; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Visa Denied: U.S. Playwriting and the Anti-Political Habitus post-Angels in America," a dissertation by Daniel Nelson Pressley, argues that an anti-political prejudice operates across the points of the U.S. theater-making spectrum, with particularly inhibiting results for playwrights even in the two decades following Tony Kushner's influential political epic. Using a reception framework suggested by Susan Bennett and others, along with the memory and "ghosting" ideas of Marvin Carlson and Diana Taylor, the dissertation suggests unrecognized anti-political patterns in criticism and production, explores broken links with the traditions of the 1930s and the lost lessons of workers' theater movements from the 1920s and 1930s, and contrasts contemporary American and British practice and reception by examining dramatic technique in plays by David Hare, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Arthur Miller and Wendy Wasserstein. The project acknowledges the absorption of political energy on the stage by the rising documentary forms since the emergence of solo performer Anna Deavere Smith, concluding that the acceptance and dominance of fact-based methods, while expanding the drama's vocabulary, contributes to an even greater outsider position for the playwright as political thinker.Item Meena's Dream: Theatrical Process and Production(2013) Yadav, Anupama Singh; Smith, Ashley H; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Meena's Dream is a one-woman play that portrays a young girl's epic conversation with God through the archetypal hero's journey, a metaphor for the universal battle to act with courage while coming face-to-face with our deepest fears. During the day, nine-year-old Meena wishes that her mother Aisha could get well; and by night, Hindu God Lord Krishna appears, entreating Meena's help in his war against the Worry Machine. Meena's Dream creates a fantastical world through storytelling and live music, from South Indian classical to indie folk, as Meena wrestles with life's unanswerable questions of mortality, suffering, and God's own existence.Item LA THEATRALITE ET LA CRITIQUE DE LA DROITE DANS LES MANDARINS DE SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR(2009) Bayliss, Ann; Verdaguer, Pierre; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the use of theatrical forms to illustrate social criticism in Les Mandarins. Simone de Beauvoir draws from works of classic theater and literature to depict the confluence of art, politics, and money in a capital city. Henri, editor of a political newspaper and a writer, is a contemporary Alceste whose desire to live in a better world seems at odds with his impulse to abandon it. Anne, wife of the leader of a left-wing movement, and a psychologist, is a modern Marion, loving, practical, and idealistic. As they and their friends search for meaning and solvency, they struggle against pessimism, fatalism, complacency, artistic escapism, the national interest argument among nations, the military-industrial power complex, and paranoia. Their tragic missteps recall Hamlet, while their everyday life invites comparison to a medieval farce, and the lovers take their cues from Beaumarchais. For the protagonists, as for the author herself, art and writing become a reason and a vision of human solidarity, putting into question the necessity of a world order dominated by capital.Item Studio Metamorphosis: A Performance Studio for Georgetown(2008) Chen, Anita Bui-Yu; Ambrose, Michael A; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Studio Metamorphosis explores the physical and psychological transformation of performance architecture. The performance theater is a threshold into the world of the narrative. It has a dual role of an actor and spectator. The actor takes on a physical transformantion of each narrative. The building and all its parts becomes a costume and physical embodiment of the charactor. The theater is also a spectator. As spectator, the theater suspends reality and allows for the world of the narrative to take over. This psychological canvas upon allows the world of the performance comes to life.Item Baltimore Community Theatre Project: Activating neighborhoods through exposure to process of production(2008) Soraruf, Louis Peter; Noonan, Peter; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mount Vernon neighborhood in Baltimore, MD is well known for its housing of schools and businesses for the arts. On the western edge of this vibrant neighborhood lies a social and cultural barrier that breaks up the tightly knit fabric of the city. There exists a node along this edge where six neighborhoods as well as the city's road grid come to a physical and socioeconomic confluence. This thesis contends that by involving a surrounding community in the process of theatrical production, there can be a nurturing of interest and exposure to the diverse skills and practices that go into process of performance. Exposing the process makes the final production more interesting in that this new model for theatrical performance challenges the performers by leaving them more exposed to the surrounding community while at the same time building a reciprocal bond of learning and cultural understanding.Item "A Different Kind of 'Strange Fruit': Lynching Drama, African American Identity, and U.S. Culture, 1890-1935"(2005-11-07) Mitchell, Koritha; Carretta, Vincent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since November 1999, the book and exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America has made nearly 100 pictures of mutilated victims readily available. These images convince Americans that we can plainly see the destruction that mobs caused and encourage us to overlook the disadvantages of equating lynching with the hanging body--what Billie Holiday called "strange fruit." My work argues that we not blindly accept the corpse as the ultimate symbol of racial terrorism by taking seriously the antilynching plays that African Americans wrote in the midst of mob violence (that is, before 1935). The dramatists insisted upon the body's inability to represent the horror of lynching. Rather than describe the crimes perpetrated on America's trees, telephone poles, and bridges, the genre takes us inside black homes where widows and orphans survive only to suffer. Thus, it is clear that the violence continues long after the corpse has disintegrated and that the home itself is a lynched body. When a father is torn from the family, the household is "castrated" and its head removed. (None of the plays mentions women lynch victims.) Yet, the scripts do not merely protest racial violence; they also affirm racial pride. African Americans understood that black identity was vulnerable to the power of representation, especially when technology was making the distribution of negative images more efficient. At the turn of the century, blacks proclaimed themselves sophisticated, modern citizensand they knew that mainstream messages to the contrary frequently caused--but more often did more damage than--physical assaults. So, even as recorded lynchings declined in the 1920s, black-authored lynching plays proliferated, in order to address the dehumanizing violence inherent in how the race was represented in America. In five chapters, this project examines why lynching drama emerged, develops a theoretical framework for understanding the plays, offers close readings of ten plays by black women and three by black men, grapples with the fact that most black-authored lynching dramas were not professionally produced, and argues that appreciating the genre requires complicating our understanding of theatrical value.Item 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.