Thesis (B.A.)--Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

The drama of David Mamet is one which is, above all, concerned with language. His plays are scabrous tours de force which set out to expose what he sees as the decline in moral standards in contemporary America and the subsequent debasement of oral expression. The banality and aimlessness of much modern experience is captured, distilled and reconstituted in his extraordinarily rich and pungent dialogue. Mamet's wickedly funny yet fundamentally very serious works teem with language which is at once wholly authentic and yet strangely lyrical, the discordant sounds of urban aphasia being somehow raised into dramatic poetry. He takes the most basic - and frequently obscene - street language and shapes it into a new form of existence; it is real and yet not quite real, coarse but curiously poetic. Language is everything to Mamet: the lines spoken by his characters do not merely contain words which express a particular idea or emotion, they are the idea or emotion itself. His characters' speech dictates the form his plays will take, as well as the mood and swing of the discourse. Praised by the majority of critics for his ability to reproduce the idiom of the streets as a kind of free verse, he has been attacked by others for much the same reason, as well as being mistaken for a simple realist whose only concern is verisimilitude. Such critcisms are, I feel, unjustified and misleading. It is my opinion that Mamet is one of the best and most original dramatists now working in America. The subject of this thesis is Mamet's use of language as dramatic action in 'Sexual Perversity in Chicago', 'American Buffalo', 'A Life in the Theatre', 'Edmond' and 'Glengarry Glen Ross'. These works are excellent examples of Mamet's versatility with idiomatic language as well as covering, fairly broadly, his progress as a dramatist from 1974 to 1983.

<p> Inspired by the heightened representation of reality in early twentieth century art, the costume design for <i>Machinal</i> utilizes techniques found in Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism to reveal the principle character&rsquo;s inner experience and communicate her state of mind to the audience. Modifying traditional twenties&rsquo; dress with these aesthetic practices provided an opportunity to emphasize aspects of each character in relation to the protagonist, Helen. Additionally, by seamlessly including moments of modernity, the costumes emphasize the relevance of <i>Machinal</i>&rsquo;s themes to today&rsquo;s social and political environment. In fusing the aesthetic practices that contextualize Sophie Treadwell&rsquo;s play with historical fashion, a visual language developed that successfully meets Expressionist goals of communicating interior human reality while also remaining faithful to the twenties&rsquo; aesthetic and reinforcing the constraints of the patriarchal machine of society. </p><p>

<p> The issue of marginalization has acquired a position of important scrutiny over the past fifty years among Communication scholars. Two theories in particular deal with this issue in a theoretical and practical way: Muted Group Theory and Standpoint Theory. Muted Group Theory, based on the work of Kramarae (Foss, Foss, &amp; Griffin, 1999), Ardener, and Ardener (1973, 1975, 1980, 2005), purports that the linguistic nature of the world lends itself to power structures in which the language and word choice of one group is able to dominate the voice of another. Standpoint Theory, popularized by the work of Harding and Hill Collins, and brought to greater working prominence within the communication field through Wood and Houston, essentially deals with &ldquo;how the circumstances of an individual&rsquo;s life affect how that individual understands and constructs a social world&rdquo; (Littlejohn &amp; Foss, 2011, p. 110). While these two theories are typically applied to causes generally considered to be championed by liberal ideologists, they are not without their crossover value within the realm of conservative causes. The thrust of this study is to take one such cause&mdash;the voice of the conservative theatre practitioner within the greater theatre industry&mdash;and examine it through the lens of these two theories to the end that the issue of marginalization and its effects on these practitioners may be understood and that such marginalization may be mediated through the use of practical and theory-based strategies. </p><p>

<p> This dissertation is a hybrid project that includes a critical paper and a collection of creative writing, including poems, a nonfiction piece, several drama pieces, and an erasure project. The critical paper is an analysis of the mental ailments and disassociated discourse of Anton Chekhov&rsquo;s characters in three of his plays&mdash;<i>The Seagull, Uncle Vanya</i>, and <i>The Cherry Orchard</i>. Many of Anton Chekhov&rsquo;s characters display symptoms of depression, including suicide attempts, and formal thought disorder. The creative section&rsquo;s drama pieces were loosely influenced by Anton Chekhov&rsquo;s work, but all of the work completed in the creative section is connected through common themes of mental illness and grief. Many of the poems in this section symbolize grief through the loss of a father. Some of the more grief-stricken moments are symbolically represented through animals, such as the mice in &ldquo;All Summer.&rdquo; Later, this same type of grief is transformed in &ldquo;Flatlines,&rdquo; the titular work of the dissertation, to a young woman&rsquo;s reimaging and hallucination of childhood characters brought to life to her by her father&rsquo;s death. The last work presented in this creative section is the erasure project that blends the poetry with the drama&ndash;a stage manager&rsquo;s notes blacked out, silenced, and relit with a different perspective, but still a connection to the theatre&rsquo;s space, set, and characters.</p><p>

<p> Robert Wilson has been a major figure on the international arts scene for close to half a century. Whether re-imagining canonic works of theater, staging operas, crafting newly-conceived multimedial productions, or advising Lady Gaga's performance at the 2013 MI 'V Awards, his instantly recognizable visual style has led his work to be called a "theater of images." Indeed, the world of Wilson scholarship has always been image-centered, at the expense of other key elements of the director's theatrical imagination&mdash;especially music and sound. Both of the latter, however, have long played a crucial role in Wilson's work. Though he is best known, in musical circles, for <i> Einstein on the Beach</i> (the opera he created in 1976 with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs), Wilson has collaborated with musicians from the highest echelons of both popular and classical music. Furthermore, over the last several decades, he has developed a palette of sonic techniques in his theatrical productions that are no less recognizable than his stage designs.</p><p> This dissertation offers the first in-depth analysis of sound and music in Wilson's theatrical productions. Through analyses of live performances, production paratexts (including criticism and programs), archival materials, and conversations with Wilson and his collaborators, it harnesses Wilson's audio-visual language to develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding sonic media in a theatrical context. Approaching "sound" as a broad concept that encompasses all elements of a production designed to be heard&mdash;music and songs, spoken text, and sound effects&mdash;I focus on Wilson's theatrical productions where these sonic elements exist in a state of parity. Since live performances provide the bedrock of my analyses, the methodological roots of this dissertation lie in the performance-based scholarship of opera and theater studies. These fields are brought into extensive dialogue with literature, visual art, architecture, performance studies, semiotics, and sociology, as well as interdisciplinary discourses such as media and sound studies. Wilson actively avoids sounds that "illustrate" his visuals, and images that "decorate" sounds, and through this assemblage of theoretical perspectives I demonstrate that neither his images nor his sounds can be adequately understood without the other.</p><p> My starting point is Wilson's oft-stated belief that properly structured images may help us "hear better," and that carefully deployed sounds may similarly help an audience "see better." Following the introduction, which surveys the existing literature on Wilson's work and establishes the aims, claims, and methodology of the dissertation, the first chapter examines this idea as both aesthetic tenet and practical directive. Chapter One also provides a brief overview of Wilson's history as a theater practitioner and consumer, and outlines the many influences on his current work. Chapter Two, the first of four analytic chapters, considers a sound that we are acculturated to filter out while listening: the crackling of a record. It examines how this sound, elevated to a level of sonic prominence, creates ambiguity about a sound's source while engaging the divergent performance histories of a particular song (the "Moritat" from <i> Die Dreigroschenoper</i>) and the space of its performance. Chapter Three explores Wilson's frequent use of sounds to represent objects which are not present onstage&mdash;specifically coins and doors. Built on a foundation of semiotic theory, this chapter crafts a new understanding of audio-visual communication in the theater through recourse to scholarship on sound, gesture, and architecture. Chapter Four adopts the concept of framing (as employed in art history and literary theory), and uses it to excavate how incidental music may enable material from "inside" the performance (characters, music) to intersect and interact with material from "outside" the performance (the audience, the auditorium). In particular, it considers how music creates a time and space where characters may step out of the narrative frame while still remaining inside the diegesis. Finally, Chapter Five focuses on Wilson's production <i>Lulu</i>, examining how interpolated songs (by Lou Reed) disrupt the teleological flow of a canonical story by engaging intertextual experiences and forging new musical memories within the space of the production. </p><p> Like performance itself, music and sound are ephemeral. As scholarship expands to engage live performance as an object of study, this dissertation offers a methodology for incorporating sonic elements into this vital scholarly discourse. By unstopping our ears, I propose, we stand not only to deepen our understanding of an enigmatic artist, but also to expand the horizons of theater scholarship, cross discursive boundaries, and holistically engage multimedial forms of expression in theater, opera, and art.</p><p>

This thesis adapts a model of performance-based analysis and utilizes it to interpret the title role in Carlisle Floyd's opera, Susannah (1955). Using John Rink's model as a guide, this performance-oriented analysis reveals the relationships between the musical and textual elements within the role, and allows the performer to prioritize which relationships will most strongly guide her interpretation. The first chapter introduces the opera's libretto and its literary origins, outlines the analytical methodology, and addresses pertinent literature in the field of performance analysis as well as that regarding the opera Susannah. The second chapter provides the historical and political context of the opera, including discussion of Floyd's contemporaries and the impact of McCarthyism in 1950s America. The third and fourth chapters present analyses of Susannah's two arias, "Ain't It A Pretty Night" and "The Trees On The Mountains" respectively. The theoretically-based findings are weighed against actual performance considerations to create an analysis that could feasibly inform a performance. The fifth chapter situates the two arias in the context of the opera, and points to further research possibilities.

This project attempts to establish a base for future work in theatre audience research. The project was a survey of audience expectations of, and reactions to theatrical productions. Two specific aspects are examined. These are (1) the relationships between audience expectations and reactions and (2) the effect on audience response of a series of productions. In addition, the data was examined to discover general trends in audience attitudes, in so far as this was possible in so small a group. Three Vancouver productions were chosen for the purpose of the survey. These were the Frederic Wood Theatre production of As You Like It, the Playhouse production of Tango, and the Dorothy Somerset Studio production Inside the Ghost Sonata. Thirty-six participants were divided into three groups of twelve each. Each group was divided by age and sex, half being under twenty-five years of age. This division did not reveal any significant trends. The participants were examined by a series of questionnaires. The first was the General Questionnaire, which assessed each individual's background, outlook and experience of the theatre. The second was the Pre-Production Questionnaire which they completed before each production. Its purpose was to elicit an indication of their expectations. The third was the Post-Production Questionnaire, which concentrated on the participants' response to each production. The relationships between expectations and reactions and the cumulative effect of attendance on response are discussed at length in this paper. After an examination of the data, one important trend appeared. Apparently, the participants assimilate and evaluate theatrical productions according to a rigid and firmly established frame of reference. This does not always coincide with their enjoyment and it seems to inhibit critical and objective response. Future work might discover how prevalent this frame of reference is, its nature and its influence. There is an indication of a relationship between the fulfillment of expectations about a play's type and intention and the subsequent enjoyment and approval of the production. There is also some suggestion that the participants subconsciously interpret the performance to fit their expectations of the play's type and intention. The main cumulative effect of continuous exposure to productions appears to be the maintenance and reinforcement of the pre-established frame of reference. Specific points about audiences and audience response which deserve more extensive study are presented in the Conclusion of this paper. These include questions about the composition of audiences, audience expectations, attitudes to acting, costumes and scenery, and participants' frame of reference and general response to productions. / Arts, Faculty of / Theatre and Film, Department of / Graduate

Theatres have existed throughout the human civilization as places of artistic expression and leisure. Throughout various Western cultures such as the Greek, Roman, Italian and Shakespearean etc., different theatre forms emerged. The essence of the theatre lies in the actor to audience relationship. With the invention of motion pictures, part of the theatre talent (actors, directors and technicians, etc.) switched to the motion picture industry and a further change took place with the more recent invention of television in 1927. Each industry thus created became a self-supporting form of art and the process strengthened the parent art due to competition and public demands for higher performance standards. I decided to design a theatre for Vancouver that satisfies the needs of the community. There are a number of variables that govern the design of a theatre such as: the needs of the local community as to the size and type of a theatre dictate the seating capacity and its functional usage (drama, opera, orchestra or multipurpose, etc.); economics dictate the administrative and technical structure and space-needs; and the desired actor to audience relationship dictate the stage design and seating layout. To establish a design program (space needs) a questionnaire was prepared and a number of persons connected with theatre arts were interviewed for comments and suggestions. The questions were designed to explore needs for - type of theatre, seating capacity, actor to audience relationship, orchestra size, public areas, stage design, workshop spaces, actors' accommodation, administrative organization, mechanical services and possibilities of an open-air-theatre, etc. A site for the proposed theatre was selected by establishing criteria for site selection and then testing a number of possible sites in the city against these criteria. Some of the criteria were: accessibility by car, rapid transit access, land costs, parking availability, site area, population distribution and proximity of buildings of other cultural/recreational usage and environmental setting. Out of five possible sites in the city, Vanier Park site was selected as the most appropriate site for the proposed theatre as it qualified best against the established criteria. The final proposed design has the following features: the theatre is sited towards the Music School building; public spaces such as lobbies, restaurants and lounges, etc., are directed to the best view towards -the Burrard Inlet, the downtown core and the mountains; basic actor to audience relationship has a 90 degree encirclement; seating capacity 800; stage design is a combination of proscenium stage and thrust stage with hydraulic lifts for changing scenery; a flytower over proscenium stage for flying and storing backcloths; provision for production, administrative and actor's spaces; workshops (scene shop, paint shop, metals shop and costume shop) large enough to put up a medium sized set; a projection room with light control and sound control rooms in between orchestra and balcony floors; a back stage projection room; four exits designed from each orchestra and balcony floor; stage designed with three fire-exits; technical areas designed with two fire exits and a small independent open-air-theatre for 150 seats. The only two modes of transportation - pedestrian and vehicular, have been separated from one another. Concrete is used as the primary material of construction with large span roofs of auditorium and fly-tower of steel-space-frame trusses. The sloping roofs are lined with orange coloured clay tiles. The main stage and rehearsal stage flooring is tongue and grooved Columbia-pine softwood. Orchestra and balcony floor is carpeted. A large lake is planned on the pedestrian plaza level with all elements of landscape. The proposed theatre can either be owned by the city as at present it owns a number of them or owned privately as many such ventures are running quite profitably. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate

From the end of World War II through the 1950s, the American film industry produced many musicals, especially of the western and naval-themed variety. The iconic cowboy, frontiersman, and sailor figures in these film musicals express elements of the American character through posture and dance. Rugged individualism, improvisational ingenuity, expansionism, and the provider-protector ideal are all expressed through these singing, dancing figures. By appealing to patriotism, these western and naval musical films wrapped up the idealized social models that they presented in an attractive package. The social model that they presented was a conservative one—men were in the workplace as breadwinners and women in the home as homemakers and caregivers. This period coincides with the early years of the Cold War, a time of intense anxiety for many reasons. With the communist Soviet Union as its primary adversary, the United States was involved in a competition to maintain world superpower status. One point of anxiety hinged on shifting gender roles. While women had entered the workplace during WWII to assist in the war effort, they were expected to return to the domestic world of home and family when the men returned from the war. These western and naval musicals were a part of the popular culture of the era which counteracted shifting gender roles by presenting social models that were strictly delineated along gender lines. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Dance in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester, 2009. / April 3, 2009. / Social drama, Oklahoma, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Anchors Aweight, On the Town, Calamity Jane, Annie Get your Gun, South Pacific / Includes bibliographical references. / Tricia Young, Professor Directing Thesis; Sally Sommer, Committee Member; Patty Phillips, Committee Member; Jennifer Atkins, Committee Member.