1 Thesis Abstract The present thesis explores six plays written by three (post)modern American playwrights - David Mamet's Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Oleanna, Sam Shepard's Buried Child and True West, and Suzan-Lori Parksʼ The America Play and Topdog/Underdog in order to define and analyze the functions of performative storytelling in the dramatic texts as well as its effects on the characters' identity. In Reading Narrative, J. Hillis Miller analyzes performative storytelling as a human shaped process that people use in order to translate events into meaning and meaning into shared information. Moreover, in Narrative as Performance, Marie Maclean demonstrates the importance of this device in recalibrating human memory and communication and in enriching the traditional mimetic process used in theatre. These ideas are closely followed in the aforementioned American plays through the lenses of the most prominent themes of the end of the twentieth century American theatre. Each of the three American writers uses performative storytelling to delineate socio-political themes. David Mamet comments on the artificiality of the American self, Sam Shepard speaks about the importance of familial past and relationships, whereas Suzan-Lori Parks describes the impact of major national narratives on the...

This thesis examines the relationship between dramatic structure and women's responses to oppression. By looking at Blasted by Sarah Kane, Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts 1, 2, & 3 by Suzan-Lori Parks, and Feminaal by Nina Morrison, I examine the ways that questions of structure become questions of gender. I argue that these plays’ forms are purposeful embodiments of resistance and aggression and that the energetic connection between these plays is a current of anger.

In an interview conducted by Matthew C. Roudané, Arthur Miller elaborates on the extent the myth of the American Dream infuses our literature: “The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out—the screen of the perfectibility of man. Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story” (374). Suzan-Lori Parks is no exception to this rule. In her Pulitzer-Prize winning Topdog/Underdog, Parks reveals the illusory nature of the American Dream on a private, deeply personal level by focusing her drama on two brothers living in one under-furnished room in a rooming house. As the audience watches the main characters spiral into their tragic undoing, we are forced to question the validity of the American Dream and our free-enterprise system that supposedly enables that dream.

Three contemporary authors – Suzan-Lori Parks, Natasha Trethewey, and Colson Whitehead – within the African American Literary Tradition explore relationships to history in light of a dominant rhetoric that represents African American history through a white, hegemonic lens. In Parks’ The America Play, Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, and Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, these authors comment on historical representation through such symbols as iconic figures like Abraham Lincoln, photographs, and elevators as starting points to explore the possibility of an independent space for African American history. Rather than remarking on just the representation of the artifact, however, the authors enter a conversation on how history is remembered and experienced. Parks, Trethewey, and Whitehead each form their own expression on historical representation; in each case, their works address the ability, or inability, to achieve historical intimacy amidst a push back from hegemonic narratives in the public eye. Historical intimacy, as the leading concept of the dissertation, refers to developing a close proximity to history not as a mere representation but as lived experience. Parks sees historical insight developing only through brief moments of intimate contact, if at all. Trethewey imagines personal, even sensual, familiarity with the subjects of her poems as a way of breaking through social frames and learning to connect with the past. Whitehead works through paradoxes to dissolve representational patterns of discourse, like verticality, and reach for a post-rational space wherein both open historical possibility, which stresses self-reflexivity, and a foundation in a “real,” experienced history unlock the opportunity for the construction of an intimate history. Although no author presents historical intimacy as an achieved goal, their works suggest varying degrees of potential and connection.

As an Actor Combatant with the Society of American Fight Directors, theatrical violence is something that has always captivated me. When a female combat instructor once told me that even though I throw a great punch I will never be able to use it because women are always on the receiving end of violence in theatre, I wondered if this was truly the case. After a thorough exploration of several works with theatrical violence, I am glad to say that it is not the case. When most scholars examine violence in theatre, the focus is either male-centric or specifically on domestic violence situations involving a male abusing a female. I will examine theatrical violence through a new lens that has yet to be thoroughly critically explored: violence where the female is the aggressor. Through selected works of three American minority female playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks' In the Blood, Maria Irene Fornes' Conduct of Life, and Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, I will analyze the female-enacted violence that occurs within these plays using feminist theories and psychology to examine how it happens, why it happens, who the victims are, and what these acts of violence say about minority American women in society today. I will explore the stage directions and dialogue surrounding the violence and analyzing the use or absence of weaponry, the breakdown or build-up of language prior to and after the violent action, and whether or not the violent action occurs before or after a violent action is committed against the female. For comparison, I will also analyze work by an American male playwright with violence in the same way: Tracy Letts' August: Osage County.