The thesis, "The Renaissance Sense of Sleep in Shakespeare's Plays, Together with Some Modern Critical Interpretations," examines Shakespeare's use of sleep in his plays. Shakespeare uses sleep to denote physical action, the personalities of characters, and the dramatic situation and general condition of the drama and of those involved in the drama. He uses natural sleep for physical recuperation to indicate a character's previous action, such as a tiring journey or excessive drinking. He uses unnatural sleep induced by magic or supernatural power to control and determine dramatic development. He makes use of extensive meanings of the peace and serenity of sleep in the sense of the age old concept of the immortality of the soul, commonly held, also, by Renaissance writers who considered life and death as a state of peripheral transition in the infinity of eternal peace. In keeping with the sense of sleep as a lack of consciousness or awareness of reality, Shakespeare often depicts the state of dull sensibility as a sleep to reveal unnatural states, such as a character's "distracted mind" or "madness." This thesis contains eight chapters: the first chapter deals with an overall general view of Shakespeare's use of sleep, and the following seven chapters present detailed analyses of the use of sleep in selected major tragedies and romance-comedies. Generally, Shakespeare presents the fortunate soul possessed of the serenity and peace of sleep and the unfortunate, sorrowful, or tormented soul wanting such serenity and peace. In his later plays, Shakespeare uses sleep more pervasively, extensively, and figuratively than in most of the early plays. He uses sleep to reveal the responsive awareness or unawareness of characters in their dramatic condition. He uses it to denote temporary or permanent peace that can be obtained by undergoing figuratively purgatorial sleep. In the final romance-comedies, he uses the unnatural sleep caused by the intervention of supernatural powers to render consolation and provide for the restoration of orderly peace and blissful harmony. Shakespeare uses the concept, action, and consequences of sleep denotatively and connotatively, functionally and pervasively, in the dramatic development of the play itself.

In English Canadian theatre, there exists a significant divide between established works produced in the mainstream and new work that has traditionally been relegated to the margins of institutional practice. Seeking to bridge this divide are a number of festivals committed to fostering and showcasing plays by Canadian theatre artists and companies and to attracting presenters interested in programming new works for future seasons. In order to succeed in the festival circuit, independent companies must, to a certain extent, cater to the expectations of organizations that value performance that gives the impression of being novel and yet proves accessible to festival audiences and to those targeted by presenters. This plays a role in aesthetics that become characteristic of the companies' work. These aesthetics are not only accepted, but also exploited by festivals that are seeking to legitimize the notion of 'newness', in part, for the purpose of their own sustainability.

The first decade of the 21st century has been marked by a surge of political writing for the stage. Plays written in response to the events surrounding September 11, 2001 reveal an unprecedented level of theatrical experimentation directed specifically at describing the social, religious, and political forces that continue to rransform our post 9/11 world. These experiments have encompassed verbatim theatre; theatre based on real events and people, transcripts, speeches, and photographic evidence. They encompass the theatre of testimony where verbatim techniques are combined with first person narratives based on personal experience. These innovations also include theatre that employs fictionality to create possible worlds where transformations occur, and where the playwright has created a unique site for problem solving. Through text analysis of David Hare's Stuff Happens, Judith Thompson's Palace of the End, Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire, and Tony Kushner's Homebody Kabul, this study will chart the course of these experiments, highlight the innovations, and assess their implications for political theatre.

This work presents the solution to two problems in Computational Geometry. First, we introduce an algorithm to calculate (provided an O( n log n) preprocessing or linear if the polygon is convex) the area of an n-gon "cut" by a query interior segment in O(n log n) time. As an application we also show how to find the line cutting 1r of the area of a convex polygon and parallel to a given line. Secondly, we show how to illuminate a stage represented by a line segment s , with floodlights placed at n points above s such that the sum of their angles is minimized. The algorithm runs in theta(n log n) time and we include a videotape presenting it.

Honour, Desire, Discourse: The Notion of Authority in Aphra Behn's Comic Drama examines Aphra Behn's negotiation, within her comic drama in particular, with the notion of authority in one of England's most culturally and politically tumultuous eras. Contextualized within the sociohistory of the latter half of the seventeenth century, the paper looks in detail at three of Behn's comic plays: The Rover, or, the Banish't Cavaliers, Part I (1677), The Lucky Chance, or, The Alderman's Bargain (1686), and The Widow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (1689). Each study revolves around Behn's treatment of the notion of authority within the play, the particular social and political moods or events that inform this treatment, and Behn's use of the comic genre as a medium for discourse with dominant cultural paradigms.

No description available.

Plays from the Spanish Golden Age – even plays as famous as the world's first Don Juan play – are woefully absent from US stages. Arguing that translation problems are responsible for this absence, Don Juan Plays the USA synthesizes three new approaches to making the first Don Juan accessible for production. "Decoding Don Juan's Sex Life" introduces a tool that displaces sex-drive as the driving force behind Don Juan. Taking advantage of an extraordinary translation history (no less than ten translations in print or in production in the last 50 years), this study premieres the practice of Conspectus – i.e., reassessing critical passages in the play through the eyes of a series of translators. Using Conspectus as a tool, it's possible to determine that delight in seduction (not sex) motivates the first Don Juan, that a strategy of mirroring other characters advances his agenda, and that an energetic identity quest acts as his character spine. "Re-coding Multidimensional Damas" turns an unusual feature of the first Don Juan's publication history into a tool for revitalizing its performance. Two 17th-century scripts which are clearly twins but manifestly not identical record Don Juan's debut: El Burlador de Sevilla and Tan largo me lo fiáis. Rather than erase differences between Tan largo and the Burlador through conflating variant readings, this investigation uses textual variants to build a Stereopticon perspective on critical scenes, clarifying subtexts by re-viewing dramatic situations through divergences in the way they're scripted. From a Stereopticon perspective, it's possible to see calculated multidimensionality built into female characters – each one allied to a characteristic element, humor, and social status – and to recoup their political clout. "Targeting Re-Production of the 'Untranslatable'" addresses the problem of translation suppressing performance information which resists literal transcription. By analyzing inventive approaches to re-conceptualizing the play for production in the Caribbean and the UK, this study synthesizes new ways to transmit comedia's musicality, multifunctional characterizations, and social satire for re-production in the US. Modeling inventive approaches to excavating performance information from dialog and translating representative passages, the study concludes with "New Ways of Making Comedia Accessible in the United States Today." / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Theatre in the College of Visual Arts, Theatre and Dance in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2005. / November 17, 2005. / Tirso De Molina, Derek Walcott, Lynne Alvarez, Women In Theater, Nick Dear, Theater In Translation, Musical Theater, Golden Age Drama, Spanish Drama In English Translation, Comedia / Includes bibliographical references. / Carrie E. Sandahl, Professor Directing Dissertation; David H. Darst, Outside Committee Member; Stuart E. Baker, Committee Member; Laura Edmondson, Committee Member.

"Measure for Measure" is a complex play that deals with many socially charged issues of morality, religion and sexuality. In particular, the play emphasizes the issues of marriage, gender roles, and religious identity. Through an exploration of the Jacobean context of these issues, this thesis examines the play as a reflection of and commentary on the time period. Further, this project applies knowledge of these Jacobean cultural, moral, and religious ideals to a production concept of "Measure for Measure." Ultimately, this production concept sheds light on the multitude of opinions and beliefs that were a part of Jacobean England's culture. / A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2005. / March 17, 2005. / Morality, Production Concept, Jacobean, Comedy, Tragedy, Measure For Measure, Shakespeare, Religion / Includes bibliographical references. / Laura Edmondson, Professor Directing Thesis; Mary Karen Dahl, Committee Member; Carrie Sandahl, Committee Member.

U.S. and Western media depict the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s as one of the most horrific ethnic conflicts since the Holocaust. The Yugoslav Civil War developed while Yugoslavia was attempting to adjust to new definitions of state lines after the fall of Communism. The state of Yugoslavia had combined the former Hungarian province Croatia-Slavonia, former Austrian territories Slovenia and Dalmatia, former Austro-Hungarian Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro, and had enfolded different ethnic populations including Serbs, Albanians, Croats, and Bosnians. While differences between ethnic communities were suppressed when Yugoslavia was a functioning state, after Communism the assertion of independence by disparate states and the subordination of various ethnic minorities encouraged rising tensions and violence. Presenting the war as the product of solely Serbian aggression, the Western media helped promote the problematic idea of a centuries-long ethnic hatred between Yugoslavia's uneasily conjoined peoples as the cause for the civil war's eruption. In this project, I suggest that Jovanka Bach's unpublished play Marko the Prince (2002), the final installment of her trio of plays about Serbia and its diaspora, entitled A Balkan Trilogy, reframes the conflict for a U.S. readership. My examination explores how various strategies of identity construction in Marko the Prince reflect larger operations of nationalist discourse through which the text reconstructs the nation by means of heroicizing its ideal(ized) representatives. As I argue, Marko the Prince's heroicization of Serbian nationalism reiterates how the construction of national identity is dependent upon by and for whom it is recreated, suggesting means through which dramatic texts can uncover ideological strategies. To redefine the tenets of Serbian nationalism, my investigation examines the invocation of myth, the creation of sympathetic masculine figures, and explores the conflation of the idealized woman with the Serbian motherland. Homi Bhabha, in his theory of "acts of enunciation," argues that in the moment when cultures meet, they are simultaneously defined and exposed as constructed. This thesis positions Marko the Prince's reconstruction of Serbian nationalism as an act of cultural enunciation by and for a U.S. audience in light of Bhabha's theory. By redefining Serbian nationalism as a "heroic" construction, rather than the "monstrous" entity represented by Western media, I argue that Marko the Prince provides its readers and audience with an alternate encounter with discourses of the Balkan world. / A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2009. / March 30, 2009. / Dramatic Criticism, Balkans, Nationalism, National Identity, Serbia, Feminism, Masculinity, Theatre, Yugoslavia / Includes bibliographical references. / Natalya Baldyga, Professor Directing Thesis; Irma Mayorga, Committee Member; Kris Salata, Committee Member.

During the 1990s, a sudden outpouring of new musical talent flooded both Broadway and off-Broadway. Dubbed at the time by both critics and scholars as creating New Theater Music, these challenging composers were and continue to be drawn to atypical and less outwardly joyful material and possess affinities for atonal chords and complex harmonies, placing them more in the company of Sondheim than of Schwartz. This group includes such artists as Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa, and Jeanine Tesori, and when PARADE premiered on Broadway in 1998, its composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown was listed among the impressive group of up-and-comers thought to be continuing the trajectory of the American musical in the Sondheimian vein of darker, challenging, and more operatic works. Using PARADE as a case study of these New Voices, this thesis explores this particular musical in both production and in critical reception. The purpose of the production analyses of both the Broadway and London premieres is to demonstrate specifically how this musical has (or has not) worked onstage to engage audiences both intellectually and emotionally, as well as its potential to do so in the future. The analyses of the critical receptions that follow then work to further demonstrate how PARADE, and these two specific productions, worked (in)effectively to engage audiences, as well as to reveal any gaps, biases, and strengths in the critical analysis itself: elements critics largely focus on or disregard, the language with which they discuss elements of both the musical and its productions, and their distinctions between the productions and the musical itself. Critics shape the way audiences receive musicals through their written opinions, whether they desire to do so or not, and so to better understand the critic is to better understand the review is to better understand the production is to better understand the basic musical form. PARADE, an amalgamation of traditional and newer techniques and topics, is ideal for a case study of critical and musical analysis. Critical analyses of its Broadway and London premiere productions provide the perfect opportunity to discover how this musical works to engage audiences, how critical receptions alter over years and miles, and how both production choices and critical reviews affect and aid the continuing trajectory of the American musical. / A Thesis Submitted the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2008. / March 19, 2008. / Leo Frank, Rob Ashford, Hal Prince, Donmar Warehouse, Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, Audience Reception, Alfred Uhry, Jason Robert Brown, Parade, Criticism, Critics / Includes bibliographical references. / Natalya Baldyga, Professor Directing Thesis; Mary Karen Dahl, Committee Member; Tom Ossowski, Committee Member; Fred Chappel, Committee Member.