abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore the ways in which childhood was perceived in the circuit Chautauqua movement. The methodology followed a threefold approach: first, to trace the development of the Chautauqua movement, thereby identifying the values and motivations which determined programming; next, to identify the major tropes of thought through which childhood has been traditionally understood; and finally, to do a performance analysis of the pageant America, Yesterday and Today to locate perceptions of childhood and to gain a better understanding of the purpose of this pageant. My principal argument is that the child's body was utilized as the pivotal tool for the ideological work that the pageant was designed to do. This ideological effort was aimed at both the participants and the audience, with the child's body serving as the site of education as well as signification. Through the physical embodiment and repetition of different roles, the children who participated performed certain values and cultural assumptions. This embodiment of values was expected to be retained and performed long after the performance was over - it was a form of training through pleasure. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Theatre 2012

This is the first study of the avant-garde Yiddish art theater movement, which flourished across five continents during the interwar period. From Warsaw to San Francisco, Buenos Aires to Winnipeg, Mexico City to Paris, and Johannesburg to Melbourne, the Yiddish art theaters were acclaimed by critics and popular with Jewish and non-Jewish spectators alike. These theaters had a significant impact on renowned theater practitioners around the world, who credited the Yiddish art theaters with inspiring their own artistic practice. In tracing how a small group of Yiddish theater artists developed a modernist theater movement with a global impact, my project provides a key and heretofore missing chapter in the history of the modern stage. I argue that the spirit of innovation that characterized the activities of the Yiddish art theaters and enabled them to become so influential was a direct product of the transnational nature of their movement. Operating in a Jewish cultural context unbounded by national borders, the success of these companies was propelled by a steady exchange of actors, directors, scenic designers, and critics across the world. Buoyed by a global audience base and unconfined by the geographical-linguistic borders that limited the national theaters of their neighbors, Yiddish theater artists were uniquely able to develop a fully transnational modernist theater practice. The global reach of the Yiddish art theaters is best exemplified by the Vilna Troupe (1915-1935), the catalyst for this movement and the primary focus of my study. The Vilna Troupe was the epicenter of the international Yiddish art theater movement throughout the interwar period. I demonstrate how the Troupe remained itinerant throughout its history, enabling it to reach an ever-larger global audience and inspiring dozens of other Jewish actors to create Yiddish art theaters of their own. Where previous generations of Yiddish actors had been subject to the double disapproval of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals alike, the Vilna Troupe legitimized the Yiddish art theater movement as a key contributor to the global theatrical avant-garde. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation investigates the radical black feminist theatre of the 1940s through the 1970s, focusing on the work of playwrights Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Sonia Sanchez. Each of these artists critically intervened in the discourses of gender, race, and class during the civil rights movement, and, later, the Black Power and Arts movements. Using archival and historical research, I argue that there was a vibrant, radical black feminist theatre movement throughout the twentieth century that sought equal representation for African Americans and a voice for black women. Chapters Two and Three add to the growing body of scholarship that situates Alice Childress as a major figure within the black left and the Communist Party. Through archival research and readings of her work, I demonstrate how Childress scripted dignified, humorous, and realistic portrayals of working class black women. Childress illustrated the theory of "triple jeopardy," the idea circulated within black radical circles that working class African American women were triply oppressed due to their class, race, and gender. Through her experimental forms and daring content, Childress revised racist stereotypes of, for instance, the black female domestic worker, into full-fledged characters. The manner in which African Americans were represented—artistically and politically—was her greatest concern. In Chapter Two, I argue that Childress's body of work can be viewed as an alternative feminist chronicle of African American women through its scripting of the working class black woman, specifically in her play Florence (1949) and her experimental novel of monologues, Like One of the Family (1956). Childress wrote, "I concentrate on portraying the have-nots in a have society, those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor." Her focus on the ordinary is anti-bourgeois in its refusal to participate in racial uplift stories lionizing the successful black middle class. In Chapter Three, I focus on Trouble in Mind. While this play has been hitherto regarded as formally conservative, I argue that, to the contrary, Childress uses innovative Brechtian structures. Childress employs radical formal experimentation to forcefully argue for black self-determination in the arts, well before the artists of the Black Arts Movement would. Chapter Four, "The White Problem: White Supremacy and Black Masculinity in the Work of Lorraine Hansberry," focuses on Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs and the playwright's critical interventions into the racial discourses of whiteness, black masculinity, and their intersections, in the civil rights era. By focusing on Hansberry's critique of whiteness and patriarchal white supremacy, this essay redresses a gap in scholarship on Hansberry. I argue that Hansberry was one of the central assessors of whiteness and black masculinity in the civil rights-era United States. Hansberry's representation of black men across her career attempts to find common ground for progressive black masculinity and black feminism to work together to defeat the white supremacist patriarchy detrimental to all African Americans. Moving into the Black Power era, my final chapter posits an alternative model to current scholarship on gender ideology within the Black Arts and Power movements. Rather than envisioning a movement led by men who repressed women, or considering women as marginal figures fighting from the periphery to address questions of feminism, gender, women's issues, and sexuality, I ask, what happens if we center such feminist concerns in our narrative of the Black Arts Movement? Using works by Alice Childress and Sonia Sanchez, I demonstrate that black feminists in this time not only critiqued the masculinist rhetoric of much Black Arts writing, but also proposed a community-centered alternative model of black nationalism. This feminist model was grounded in love and support between black women and men, and advanced by black feminists as imperative for the success of the black nation's political goals.

During the 1920s and 30s, Mexican artists, teachers and state officials collaborated to stage educational plays in working class neighborhoods and rural communities in an effort to foster revolutionary citizens. The authors of live-action drama and hand-puppetry, known as teatro guiñol, infused their comedies and morality plays with the lessons of Mexico's revolution, endeavoring to improve rural life, strengthen class-consciousness and promote artistry among spectators young and old. In support of these initiatives, the Ministry of Education constructed thousands of open-air stages throughout rural Mexico, trained teachers to operate puppet theaters and disseminated scripts in its biweekly magazine. Many of the initiators of these projects viewed the role of theater in contradictory terms; it was a means both to elevate the standards of national culture as well as to nurture the folkloric artistry that was to be fountain of a "cosmic race." However, subsequent officials would manage theater as part and parcel of the state's adoption of socialist education, resulting in an important role for didactic theater in the state's repertoire of civic festival. Moreover, communist activists and avant-garde artists penned works of popular and puppet-theater inspired by the pedagogical practices of Russia's 1917 revolution and sought to further advance Mexico's social transformation. Engaging with literary critics, historians, and scholars of cultural studies, my study adds the role of lesser-known artists and intellectuals back into the mix to understand the multi-stranded, negotiated process that took place within the realm of post-revolutionary cultural politics. I examine play scripts written by teachers and artists, policy directives from mid-level ministry officials and reports filed by rural teachers. In this way I identify explicit and implicit moralizing messages in the plays, paying close attention to overlapping and colliding projects as well as narrative strategies and stylistic elements that relate to specific political agendas. Through an exploration of the context in which plays were produced and performed, my study shows how teachers and artists facilitated state projects even as they attempted to fashion didactic theater to suit their pragmatic needs, artistic sensibilities or more radical agendas.

This study reconsiders power dynamics and authorial style through a study of the structure of interruptions. By considering this everyday occurrence as an aesthetic phenomenon, literary critics can more fully understand the relationships inherent in drama, itself a relational art form. This dissertation illuminates how the everyday becomes aesthetic and how the aesthetic helps us to comprehend the everyday. Interruptions are ubiquitous both in everyday life as well as within literature. While sociologists and linguists have studied them in their quotidian occurrences, literary and performance scholars have almost completely ignored their aesthetic iterations. Some recent studies into this structure evaluate poetry and prose, but rarely consider drama, and even in the studies of prose and poetry, interruptions are deployed as a structure inherently understood. This dissertation offers a fuller consideration and evaluation by studying interruptions through their comprising elements and their distinctive types. This study examines early modern drama as an exemplary, influential moment of dramatic output, focusing on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher. Through an informed neo-formalism, this dissertation reveals two significant aspects of interruptive structures. First, interruptions demonstrate dynamic power relationships not only among characters within a play, but also between an audience and a performer or a reader and a text. Second, interruption usages indicate aspects of authorial style, emphasizing a playwright’s use and control of a text and its implications/expectations. The chapters of the dissertation explore four types of internal interruptions, or those which an author writes into the text. Chapter Two examines dialogic microinterruptions, which are specific moments within dialogue where a conversant speaks out of turn. Through exemplary scenes within Volpone, The Tempest, and The Humorous Lieutenant, the chapter develops an understanding of both the shifting power relationships among the characters and how the playwrights approach those shifts in building character and community. Chapter Three examines another type of internal microinterruption, the self-interruption. By considering the methodology and rhetoric of stopping oneself on stage, the chapter reveals the emotional, manipulative, and comedic usages of the structure, while developing a reading of each author’s approach to interiority and character. The final two chapters focus on macrointerruptions, or those that disrupt larger governing structures within a text. Chapter Four explores dramaturgical macrointerruptions through audience expectations of structure. Through Jonson’s Grex in Every Man Out, Shakespeare’s surprise reveal of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale, and Fletcher’s exposition in The Chances, each playwright explores the possibilities of rupturing dramatic structures and the effects that such ruptures create for audiences. The final chapter examines interruption of theatrical conventions, specifically through the convention of male to female crossdressing. As this type of crossdressing was not as prevalent as female to male in the period, it presents an already interrupted convention, that the authors, in plays such as Epicene and The Loyal Subject, further complicate through the relationship between the convention and the expectation. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 10, 2018. / Dialogue, Dramaturgy, Fletcher, Interruption, Jonson, Shakespeare / Includes bibliographical references. / Gary Taylor, Professor Directing Dissertation; Kris Salata, University Representative; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member; Terri Bourus, Committee Member.

One of the key issues that arises when discussing the long eighteenth century is that of identity: self/individual, and group/national. Whereas recent critical work in both literary studies and historiography has concerned itself with the circumstances surrounding the long eighteenth century's fundamental shifts in conceptions of identity, much of this work overlooks the potential for identity to be relational, rather than either exterior or interior to an individual/group. This dissertation explores the relational nature of identity formation in the long eighteenth century by examining a literary genre and a character that depend upon relational interactions in order to sustain themselves: stage comedies and lawyers. Representative dramatic comedies by writers such as George Farquhar, Richard Cumberland, Thomas Lewis O'Beirne, William Wycherly, Christopher Bullock, Henry Fielding, John O'Keeffe, Colley Cibber, George Colman and David Garrick, and Samuel Foote, offer opportunities to study staged representations of lawyers whose clients' issues essentially become those of identity formation. This dissertation argues that, for many characters struggling to establish an identity that can participate in a national British identity, the key to such participation lies in access to real property; when access to real property is denied them, they must turn to someone who is himself struggling to establish an identity. At this point, lawyers in eighteenth-century British comedies become much more than stock characters or mere comic relief. Instead, the lawyer—often ostracized and derided himself—becomes a mediator not just of individual identity, but of "Britishness." Careful attention to lawyers' success representing different types of clients struggling to establish identities through access to real property highlights both the power of relational identity formation and the key roles that arguably minor characters have in arbitrating issues of national significance. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / March 27, 2017. / British drama, British literature, Eighteenth century, Identity, Law and literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Helen M. Burke, Professor Directing Dissertation; Charles Upchurch, University Representative; Celia R. Caputi, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

This dissertation investigates Shakespeare's presence in nineteenth-century American culture and the meanings audiences made of Shakespeare's texts. My interest and my method has been to examine the intersection of textual representation, performative representation and cultural reception of the six most popular Shakespeare plays on the nineteenth-century American stage. The careful and extensive examination of the reviews of many productions and the promptbooks that guided performances has formed the backbone of this inquiry and has suggested how the culture read the performances it was seeing. An analysis of nineteenth-century American Shakespeare productions raises questions about and challenges current beliefs about the attitudes nineteenth-century audiences held on gender, race, ethnicity and democracy. I look at American Shakespearean performance between about 1835 and 1875 to see where the smooth surface of theater history appears to give way—to rupture in some way—and reveal something startling about gender, race, ethnicity and attitudes toward democracy, something that would not be readily apparent without the Shakespearean overlay to bring it out. My reading of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet addresses the practice of women taking on the roles of Romeo and Hamlet and examines how the almost certainly disruptive figure of the transvestite on stage would have called into question gender and gender roles. The discussion of Othello investigates how blackface minstrelsy powerfully influenced productions of the play in the legitimate theater before and after the Civil War; meanwhile, The Merchant of Venice became a site of exploration for audiences struggling with Jewish difference, revealing a collective ambivalence toward American capitalism. In my reading of Richard III and Julius Caesar, I discuss how these two plays, in championing freedom and yet cautioning against unlawful rebellion, provided audiences with a vocabulary in which to frame feelings of uneasiness about the democratic experiment.

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