Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Daggers of the Mind: Performing Madness and Mental Disorder on the Early English Stage(2023) Rio, Melanie; Passannante, Gerard; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Madness is such a popular device in early modern English drama that extant playscripts are littered with stage directions indicating that a character should enter “like a madman” or simply, “mad.” Because the public playhouse required the psychosomatic participation of actors and observers from every social class and category, it served as a unique cultural laboratory in which to explore questions of cognition, embodiment, identity, and interiority. Madness as a theatrical device also offers unique insight into the challenge of “performing” an invisible disability. This dissertation examines representations of madness in the early English playhouse—primarily in the works of works Shakespeare, but also considering works by Fletcher, Webster, Middleton, Armin, and others—as well as extradramatic primary sources such as court cases and physicians’ notebooks in order to demonstrate how intersecting indices of identity influence the construction and interpretation of early modern cognitive disorder.Item Beyond Resistance: Performing Postdramatic Protest(2022) Scrimer, Victoria Lynn; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As its point of departure, this dissertation takes stock of the fact that activist performances like sit-ins, marches, banner drops, rallies, and occupations are deeply informed by dramatic theatre in both the way activists design these actions and in the way audiences read them. The dissertation argues that these performative arrangements, narratives, images, and tropes are naturalized to the extent that they have come to constitute a sort of Gramscian common sense that can limit our ability to imagine other ways of thinking and being. The dissertation seeks a conceptual alternative to those limitations. Combining performance analysis, interviews with artists and activists, and autoethnographic accounts of my own experiences as an environmental activist, the dissertation illustrates the limitations of dramatic representation in activist performance and then explores how Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theatre—theatre that eschews the hallmarks of dramatic theatre—might provide alternative models for activism and new ways to talk about and understand the successes and failures of activist performances as they play out in the 21st century.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 SO AS TO COMPASS THE INTEREST: ARTISAN DRAMATURGY, COPYRIGHT REFORM, AND THE THEATRICAL INSURGENCY OF 1856(2014) Tobiason, Aaron M.; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1856, a change in American copyright law finally gave playwrights control over performances of their work. That change was the culmination of decades of concerted and sustained efforts by a small number of playwrights and their political allies, men who embraced a theatrical aesthetic at odds with antebellum American production practices. I argue that previous scholarship has underestimated the importance of the 1856 law to the development of American theatre. Using a series of case studies, I propose that antebellum theatrical production was guided by a system of artisan dramaturgy. Key to this formulation is the concept of bespoke playwrighting: those who composed antebellum performance texts were more wrights than writers, handicraftsmen and women whose medium was the manuscript rather than the printed text. They drew freely from an extensive public domain created and protected by American copyright law. Published and unpublished plays, novels, songs, poems, current events - all were raw materials for the antebellum dramatist, to be combined, recontextualized, and reimagined. The system of artisan dramaturgy encouraged plays tailored to particular actors, companies, and audiences. These practices, among others, vexed playwrights who resented subjecting their plays to the messy, collaborative undertaking of antebellum American playmaking. I explore how their vision for the theatre drew on a particular understanding of natural rights, one that led them to see copyright as the most effective way to alter the economic conditions of playwriting. I document the largely unexplored legislative history of their efforts, which ultimately interposed statutory law into an art form that had been regulated almost entirely by the common law. The1856 legislation accelerated a process that would ultimately alter the balance of power among the various theatrical collaborators in favor of the playwright, driving greater and greater synergy between dramatic text and performance and ultimately allowing playwrights to supplant the primacy of the actor or manager in shaping performances. By so doing, it also significantly reduced the vibrancy, flexibility, and innovation that had characterized the antebellum American theatre.Item Towards Cross-Border Hispanic Theatre: Breaking Barriers of Language, Space, and Time - Bilingual Website (English-Spanish) www.hispanictheatre.org(2013) Morales Chacana, Lina J.; Messinger Cypess, Sandra; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The need for critical reflection and dissemination of cross-border Hispanic theatre is the main focus of this research. Through this work I explore the influence of the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity in Western and Hispanic drama. I also delve into the impact of the new systems of representation of history and interdisciplinary studies on Hispanic theatre. In addition, I address the interconnections between history and literature, which have modified dramatic narrative processes and techniques as well as the construction of characters. In conclusion, I present a bilingual (Spanish-English) web site, www.hispanictheatre.org, devoted to cross-border Hispanic theater. This is a type of theatre that, in essence, reconstructs history, revises canons, problematizes discourses, establishes relationships between local and global issues, and takes into account the audience context; it is a transmedia creation produced by collaborative efforts, and is committed to breaking barriers of language, space, and time.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 THE ARTIFICE OF ETERNITY: A STUDY OF LITURGICAL AND THEATRICAL PRACTICES IN BYZANTIUM(2006-07-23) White, Andrew Walker; Hildy, Franklin J.; Majeska, George P.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study attempts to fill a substantial gap in our knowledge of theatre history by focusing on the Orthodox ritual aesthetic and its relationship with traditional theatrical practice in the Eastern Roman Empire - also known as Byzantium. Through a review of spatial practices, performance aesthetics and musical practice, and culminating in a case study of the Medieval Office of the Three Children in the Fiery Furnace, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate how the Orthodox Church responded to the theatre, and determine whether the theatre influenced the development of its ritual aesthetic. Because of the well-documented rapprochement between church and theatre in the west, this study also tries to determine whether there was a similar reconciliation in the Orthodox east. From the Early Byzantine period onward, conduct of the Orthodox Liturgy was rooted in a ritual aesthetic that avoided direct imitation or representation. This Orthodox ritual aesthetic influenced every aspect of the Liturgy, from iconography to chant to liturgical dance, and involved a rejection of practices that, in the Church's view, would draw too much attention to the material or artistic aspects of ritual. Theatrical modes of representation were consistently avoided and condemned as anathema. Even in the Middle Ages, when Catholics began to imitate Jesus at the altar and perform representations of biblical episodes using actors, realistic settings and special effects, Orthodox hierarchs continued to reject theatrical modes of performance. One possible exception to this rule is a Late Byzantine rite identified by western scholars as a "liturgical drama" - the Office of the Three Children. But a detailed reconstruction of its performance elements reveals that it was quite different in its aesthetics from Medieval Catholic practice. Some of the Office's instructions, however, lend themselves to a theatrical interpretation; and the instability of the Office's manuscript tradition, as seen in five extant versions, reveals strong disagreements about whether and how to include many of its key visual and musical elements.Item Ending and "Copping Out": Completeness and Closure in the Plays of Sam Shepard(2006-05-16) Couch, Joseph Dennis; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the interpretive dilemmas arising from treatments of completeness and closure in Sam Shepard's plays, an undertaking that raises two key questions about its own academic exigence. Shepard's plays expand the discourse on closure by providing dramatic texts to which the terms "the open work," "the sense of ending," "anti-closure," and the reading of texts in socio-political contexts can apply. More significantly, Shepard's theory of closure as a "cop-out" to resolution complicates the previous discourse on closure with texts that complementarily deny formal and thematic closure in ways that previous critics do not explore. The "unloosened ends," specifically, that each ending does not resolve not only draw attention to the unresolved status of an American socio-political theme but actually implicate the audience in the larger and false cultural assumption that the theme was closed before the start of the play and now need the audience's help offstage and therefore outside the boundaries of the text to resolve the issue. In terms of categories within the context of closure in drama, Shepard's endings combine Schmidt's categories of "unmediated" and "ironic" as a reflection of their thematic implication of the collective American audience's "cop-out" regarding the assumed closed discourse on a socio-political issue. Additionally, the endings "frustrate" the audience's expectations for closure thematically and formally even when they provide a moment of "cessation" in Schlueter's terms. The reason lies in the fact that the "consensus" required from the audience, as Schmidt claims, relies on the audience to close the work by closing the discourse on the issue that the endings suggest that the audience should recognize as open and unresolved. The issues of fate, home, family, and memory cannot truly reach a moment of cessation, Shepard's interrogations of closure reveal, until the audience makes the discourse cease by not "copping-out" to the false sense of closure that America's conventional society, both on and offstage, provides.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.Item A Stage for a Bima: American Jewish Theater and the Politics of Representation(2004-06-08) Solomon, David Lyle; Bryer, Jackson R.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how contemporary American Jewish playwrights and performers have presented Jewish identities in light of multiculturalism. Although American Jews have by large been supporters of the multicultural movement, in practice multiculturalism has been problematic for Jews because of its privileging of race and gender: are Jews different enough to be included in a multicultural portrait? Jews see themselves as outsiders to an American establishment, but are viewed as insiders. I investigate how contemporary Jewish voices in American theater have portrayed "Jewishness" as a permanent attribute of Jewish identity. In doing so, they articulate Jewish difference through the rhetoric of multiculturalism so that Jews are clearly positioned as distinct from an American mainstream. Contemporary Jewish playwrights have responded to popular culture's schizophrenic representation of Jews, questioning its portrayal of Jews as everymen figures while revisiting its stereotypical representations of Jews that were intended to mark Jews as different from mainstream America. Though Jewish American culture has sought to escape stereotypes, Jewish playwrights continue to evoke them, even as they debate the value of such tropes. If stereotypes disappear, does an articulated Jewish difference disappear with them? In chapter one, I discuss my theoretical approach and the difficulties in defining stereotypical "Jewishness." In chapter two, I discuss how Jewish playwrights and performers have responded to the shifting definitions of race in their presentations of Jewish identity by portraying contemporary Jewish identity through the model of the African-American experience. In chapter three, I look at how Wendy Wasserstein has presented complicated female Jewish characters by rooting them, ironically enough, in the gender-based stereotypes that have surrounded Jewish women, stereotypes initially designed to differentiate Jewish women from idealized genteel American women. In chapter four, I discuss how playwrights Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner have linked Jewish and gay stereotypes and experiences in order to complicate contemporary political paradigms that tend to lump all traditionally disenfranchised groups under the same umbrella. Finally, in chapter five, I discuss how stage portrayals of Judaism have been associated with the body, a connection that denotes the problematic nature of defining Jews solely as a religious group.