Death disrupts. The social space accorded to rituals of death and memorialization differs from all other spaces. Actresses disturb. Society contests, determines, and enacts the burial of an actress as her final performance. This study explores the actress burial as a site of meaning. Contestations over the fate of the actress body reveal power structures and the motivations of cultural institutions. This study highlights four actressesLecouvreur, Oldfield, Bernhardt, and Dusewhose burials cover a wide range of circumstances. Each chapter gives the relevant biographical information for the actress and the social background for the cultural contestation over the actress body. Traditional history often overlooks the contestations of the burial moment in its attempts to find meaning from the recorded life. As a strategy for this study I ask, what if we take death not as the end but as the beginning of a new cultural operation? What if we posit the actress burial as a key time in a process that continues to produce social meaning even as the body that initiated the action disappears from view? Currently, actress burials in the theatrical historical record provide a starting point without a meaningful exposition. Without an evaluation of what occurred after an actresss death, neither an actresss effect on a culture or that culture's effect on her can be understood. Actresses not only embody a signifying/surrogacy function, their burial also reflects the cultures attitude toward women. The intensified reaction to actresses ranges from extreme antitheatrical prejudice to worshipful admiration, strikingly displayed in the fate of the actress body.

This production thesis on directing Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weills The Threepenny Opera is divided into two sections. The first section consists of four research/critical chapters. Chapter 1 discusses the directors understanding of the theories of Bertolt Brecht. Chapter two discusses potential differences between the directors aesthetic point of view and Brechts theories. Chapters 3 and 4 lay out the findings and opinions based on those findings of research into two issues that influenced production decisions: Chapter 3 focuses on Brechts relationship with totalitarian communism and Chapter 4 looks into questions raised about the authorship of The Threepenny Opera. Section II consists of a statement of the directors interpretation of the play and a journal that charts the production process from the selection of the play to opening night. The Conclusion assesses how the director met certain challenges posed by the production.

The scenic design for the Louisiana State University Theatre production of Marlane Meyers The Chemistry of Change was selected and approved as my thesis project in the spring of 2001. This document represents a written account of the scenic design as it was conceived, developed, and executed. Records include research, a description of the design process, photographic evidence, and a final evaluation of the result.

The lighting design for this production of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht was selected and approved for my thesis in the autumn of 2001. This thesis represents a written account of the lighting design as it was conceived, developed and executed. It contains a brief analysis of Brechtian theory, a production journal describing the major events of the design process, a cue description, records of research, photographic and literary evidence of the realized product, and a personal evaluation of both the process and outcome.

This thesis is an account of the production process involved in directing The Chemistry of Change by Marlane Meyer. Particular attention is paid to the Suzuki and Viewpoint methods of actor training used in rehearsal; periods of discussion with the playwright regarding the script; negotiations with designers; and an evaluation of the audience reception of the public performances. These aspects of producing a play for the theatre are recorded from the point of view of the director and described with the intention of revealing the learning process for all involved in the collaborative process.

This thesis describes the directorial process of a production of Christopher Sergels's adaptation of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It follows the process of preproduction through rehearsals. It makes use of the influences of the prior history and the recent educational experience of the director. Throughout it accesses the choices made and concludes with conclusions on the final product.

Critical discourse regarding musical theatre takes, for the most part, the form of a profound silence, due presumably to a dismissal of the genre as simplistic and insubstantial. Not only have the elements of musical theatre been present in the majority of theatrical history, but many of the greatest theories regarding theatre have included these elements, including Brecht and Wagner. Musicals have also often concerned themselves with the Other, centering and sympathizing him/her in a manner unavailable to non-musical works. The Others that have thus been positioned are often delineated from hegemonic groups which are concretely those in power, but which are difficult to define. While officially, America is a classless society, class distinctions make a difference, and musicals have long championed the underdogs, both financial and social. Many non-white ethnic groups have been subordinated in American society but centered within musical theatre. While the musical stage has often established the idea of Jewishness as pertaining to ethnicity, it has also elevated Jews to leading characters, often while simultaneously serving to place audiences in the position of having to confront their own antisemitism. While heteronormativity is certainly the hegemonic stance regarding sexuality in America, the musical has often subverted it, whether through setting up alternative family structures, weakening male primacy within sexual contact, or setting up queer characters as sympathetic and leading characters. This dissertation explores all the above subaltern groups, examining how many creators of musicals have placed characters from these congregations at or near the forefront of sympathy and primacy, with particular attention given to how music aids in this positioning.

This dissertation addresses the problem of the denigration of the voice in poststructural theory and contemporary performance criticism. The problem has antecedents in twentieth-century language philosophy. Saussure defines language as a compendium of arbitrary words recognized according to the degrees of phonetic difference between them. Since for Saussure the arbitrary words of language also designate arbitrary concepts, he concludes that the sounds of words cannot be thought constituent of their sense. After Saussure, structuralism dislodges the voice from its privileged position in the phonologic discourses of Western thought. Poststructuralism views meaning as a product of socially constructed language systems, and it argues that neither the voice nor the speaking subject can be afforded linguistic agency. A strain of contemporary theatre criticism, premised upon poststructuralism, interprets the postmodern stage as a site in which the voice, language, and the speaking subject come under critique and suspicion, stripped of agency and communicative efficacy. This dissertation investigates twentieth-century theories of voice, language, and speech in order to define the status of the voice in various disciplines ranging from paleoanthropology, phenomenology, structuralism, speech act theory, theatre semiotics, the philosophies of technology, and media studies. By comparing the status of the voice in other disciplines, this dissertation argues for a recuperation of the voice against the denigration evident in poststructural theory and performance criticism. Relying on Heidegger's phenomenal view of language, the autonomy of the voice in speech act theory and theatre semiotics, the centrality of vocalized language in human evolution, and the resurgence of orality in electronic media, this dissertation argues that the voice continues to act as an important and primary signifying agent on the postmodern stage, regardless of poststructural arguments to the contrary.

Neo-Onnagata: Professional Cross-dressed Actors and Their Roles on the Contemporary Japanese Stage explores the representation of male and female gender in the contemporary Japanese theatre. I particularly discuss a specialized subset of Japanese actor: the neo-onnagata, a contemporary theatre counterpart to Japan's highly stylized classical kabuki tradition of cross-dressed representation. This dissertation represents my attempt to provide these basic aims: to situate the contemporary Japanese cross-dresser in Japanese tradition, to show how cross-dressing acts as a sharp social commentary and mirror, and to introduce some little-represented cross-dressing actors of the contemporary Japanese stage to the academic community at large. In addition, I examine the conservative gender role system of Japan and demonstrate how the neo-onnagata challenge traditional performance and sex roles. Particularly, I seek to showcase neo-onnagata as expanding opportunities for male actors and as new gendered models for men.

This study examines the issues and contradictions of identity formation found in contemporary Irish-American cultural performances. Using a theoretical language grounded in post-structuralism and cultural studies, this examination hopes to demonstrate the primacy of performance and theatre in the formation of culture, Irish-American specifically, or otherwise. The performances featured in the study are: Riverdance, St. Patrick's Day parades, pub performances, and improv theatre.