This project allowed me to utilize the knowledge I have acquired over the past four years at the University of Central Florida as a BFA Musical Theatre major, as well as challenged me to explore and research other areas of theatre that are foreign to me. All this work culminated with a performance of my play, Rest In Peace: A Musical Showcase, and this written thesis. I look forward to leaving the University of Central Florida with deeper insight into playwriting, theatre production, and performance. This project provided me with a performance opportunity where there was none before and provided the students on my production team an opportunity to be part of the development of a new piece of theatre. It also had an effect on the audiences that saw the production, as it reminded people of the important things in life that are easily forgotten by our current generation. It is easy to complain about not ·having performance opportunities, but why waste the time and energy on something that will not accomplish anything? My mother has always said "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” and that is what I intended to do with this project.

This study focuses on trends in contemporary Australian playwrighting, discussing recent investigations into the playwrighting process. The study analyses the current state of this country’s playwrighting industry, with a particular focus on programming trends since 1998. It seeks to explore the implications of this current theatrical climate, in particular the types of work most commonly being favoured for production. It argues that Australian plays are under-represented (compared to non-Australian plays) on ‘mainstream’ stages and that audiences might benefit from more challenging modes of writing than the popular three-act realist play models. The thesis argues that ‘New Lyricism’ might fill this position of offering an innovative Australian playwrighting mode. New Lyricism is characterised by a set of common aesthetics, including a non-linear narrative structure, a poetic use of language and magic realism. Several Australian playwrights who have adopted this mode of writing are identified and their works examined. The author’s play Floodlands is presented as a case study and the author’s creative process is examined in light of the published critical discussions about experimental playwriting work.

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No description available.

A Pact Sealed in Blood: The Creation of Blood Letters: An American Odyssey is a reflection on the project, writing, script and production phases of a student researched and written theatrical script, which debuted in the Shafer Street Playhouse on April 24, 2014 on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. This paper looks at the processes involved with the creation of that piece. The theatrical piece tells the tales of three men over the course of 150 years as each man goes through his own personal crucible. The first fights for his country and his family during the American Civil War. The second fights for his country and his love during World War Two. The third works for his country and searches for his family during bouts of political destruction, alcoholism, and lost love. The piece interweaves these three tales with a fourth, present day narrator, in an adaption of Homer’s The Odyssey. This paper looks at the research, development of the script, and the final product of that theatrical piece. It also delves into the author’s beliefs on the search for the human soul within writing and the importance of connection within that search. Finally, it is revealed that perhaps the greatest search lies within our own personal journey.

This paper describes my learning journey as I began to flesh out my system of devising and the resultant aesthetic. The research subject was the production of a new movement play titled Medea Myth. This one act play is a totally devised piece without any text. Unlike some devised work, this play is meant to tell a clear story and was focused on cross-disciplinary collaboration. In investigating the work, I have broken it up into three distinct phases: Inception, beginning at the inciting incident and ending with the first clear storyline; Development, picking up that storyline and developing it to a sequence of full scenes; Production, where the scene sequence is finalized and the show is polished. Concluding each chapter is a section on the learning outcomes of each phase and how I will adjust my methodology in the future. I chose to write this paper in the style of a guide to producing similar work using my experiences with Medea Myth as an object lesson.

A book of poems composed of an alternating lyric sequence entitled, "Heroin," and other poems.

A presente monografia analisa influências do jornalismo na produção de dramaturgos que também trabalharam como jornalistas, no Brasil, em meados do século XX. A partir de pesquisas no Arquivo Miroel Silveira, formado por documentos da censura prévia ao teatro no Estado de São Paulo de 1930 a 1970, e em acervos de jornais como o Banco de Dados da Folha de S.Paulo e a Hemeroteca do Arquivo Público do Estado de São Paulo, foi identificado que alguns desses dramaturgos escreveram peças inspiradas em acontecimentos relatados pela imprensa, num procedimento que aproxima as duas formas de narrativa. Com base num referencial teórico unindo categorias do jornalismo e das artes, estudaremos cinco peças onde se observa essa influência - O poço, de Helena Silveira (1950); O beijo no asfalto, de Nelson Rodrigues (1961); Vereda da salvação, de Jorge Andrade (1964); Barrela, de Plínio Marcos (1959) e Liberdade, liberdade, de Millôr Fernandes (1965). Analisaremos as influências do jornalismo nestes textos e a forma como a censura teatral lidava com estas aproximações entre dramaturgia e jornalismo. / This monograph analyzes influences of journalism in the production of playwrights who also worked as journalists in Brazil in the mid-twentieth century. From research in the Archive Miroel Silveira, formed by theater censorship documents in the State of São Paulo from 1930 to 1970, and in archives of newspapers such as Folha de S.Paulo and O Estado de S. Paulo, it was identified that some of these playwrights wrote plays inspired by events previously reported by the press, a procedure which approximates both forms of narrative. Based on a theoretical framework linking categories of journalism and arts, we will study five pieces in which we can observe this procedure - O poço, by Helena Silveira (1950), O beijo no asfalto, by Nelson Rodrigues (1961); Vereda da salvação, by Jorge Andrade (1964), Barrela, by Plínio Marcos (1959) and Liberdade, liberdade, by Millôr Fernandes (1965). We will analyze the influences of journalism in these texts and how theatrical censorship dealt with these similarities between drama and journalism.

Studies exploring the first wave of digital performance foregrounded technology by cataloging experimentation and novel interactions between liveness, projections and code. As exercises in medium, these high tech spectacles demonstrate the aesthetic potential of digital media while introducing key media concepts. Jennifer Haley is a writer with one foot in theatre and one in code. She is uniquely positioned in two interdependent spheres, which makes her particularly suited to engineer a theatrical bridge into the virtual, because at the heart of the contemporary technological revolution is a new level of writing and media literacy. Theatre has been effectively accessing the virtual imagination for millennia, and new technologies create new intricacies for engaging the virtual within theatrical space. Each is a medium defined by action, which host other media, and provide in depth simulations. Haley’s plays push beyond the fascination and spectacle of technology to incorporate the mundane reality of the digital into the structure of her work. Haley writes plays specifically to resonate with the similarities she sees between theatre and virtual worlds. Utilizing techniques and tropes from other media and then framing the narrative from within a theatrical world Haley exploits the essence of an active, critical audience and opens a dialog between virtual worlds and the perceptions of the audience. She treats her media generated worlds as places. Other digital theatre plays may peer through a window into the virtual by dramatizing a conversation through media; Haley sends an expedition over the threshold into another world. A flesh version of an avatar breathing before the audience establishes a material existence unattainable in two dimensional screen media. Haley illuminates the constructed nature of mediatized communication, but she does it dramaturgically deemphasizing the technology and re-centering the human within the virtual drama. Her approach builds a metaphorical bridge between theatre and virtual digital realities. Through a close reading of Haley’s plays I will demonstrate how Haley takes the artistic next step for computer technology and theatre.

According to Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact,” a text can only be considered an autobiography when the author, narrator, and character all share the same proper name. Any exceptions are thusly designated as works of fiction, regardless of whatever biographical resemblance may be detected between the author and character. This thesis aims not to challenge this useful generic distinction, but to develop an authoritative system for approaching the oft-neglected side of the equation: works of autobiographical fiction, and autobiographical dramas in particular. I propose to develop a reception-based methodology (the Biographical Grid) for assessing author-character resemblance with as much empiricism as possible. This is done by extracting the author’s biographical material in relation to the chosen fictional character (often the play’s protagonist) via their characterization within the text, and organizing this material within a specially-designed table. Each of these units is then assigned a numerical score based upon its correspondence with the author’s publicly-known biographical data. The result is not only a qualitative value assigned to the degree of resemblance between the character and its author, but moreover indicates precisely which character traits enforce the autobiographical kinship, and which represent conscious deviations from the biographical record as part of the process of fictionalization. This information can then be applied to well-informed analyses of the text’s use of its autobiographically-inspired content. Using Tolstoy’s play, The Light Shines in Darkness, as a case study, I demonstrate the process of building, testing, and applying the grid to assess a work of autobiographical drama. My systematic approach to autobiographical dramas of this kind supports the development of further research into methods of biographical criticism while strengthening analytical readings of individual plays.