Rome Sweet Rome, written, directed, composed, and choreographed by the Q Brothers Collective, is a hip-hop musical adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts produced Rome Sweet Rome in the fall of 2016 as part of the Mainstage season and the 2016-2017 Partnership in the Arts production. This thesis explores the unique production process of Rome Sweet Rome from the stage manager’s perspective. Since leadership, communication, and organization are essential attributes of stage managers, Samantha Paradis’ personal leadership, communication, and organization goals and outcomes for this production are addressed. Because theatre and life can be unpredictable this paper includes the analysis of new challenges that arose. Paradis concludes her exploration with final thoughts on the production and her development as a Graduate Stage Manager at the University of Iowa.

Seed, written by Scott Bradley and directed by Patrick Du Laney, is a play that was written to explore the legacy of suicide in the Midwest Region and its specific correlation to the disappearance of the family farm. The University of Iowa Department of Theatre Arts selected Seed to appear as a part of the annual Iowa New Play Festival in May of 2017. This thesis examines the specific challenges faced during the production process as relates to the production as a whole and those faced from the stage management perspective. This was an influential production to the stage manager, Lindsay Warnick, so connections between these challenges are looked at in two ways: how they played a role in Lindsay’s development as a stage manager and her growth as an individual.

This thesis paper presents the research and character development process that I undertook to play the role of Eva, in the Pomona College Fall 2012 production of Diane Samuels’ award winning play, Kindertransport. In the ten-months prior to the 1938 outbreak of World War II, nearly 10,000 predominately Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were evacuated to Great Britain to escape the looming Holocaust. The program was given the name, Kindertransport (children’s transports) by German railway officials because only unaccompanied children under the age of 17 were allowed to leave. Once the Kinder arrived in England, host families took them in for what was believed to be a temporary stay. At the time, no one could have foreseen the challenges and consequences for the children that had been separated from their families and heritage. Samuels' play examines the themes of separation, survival and denial of one’s past through the character Eva, who at the age of nine is sent to England on one of the transports. The first part of this thesis concerns the historical events leading to the disenfranchisement of the European Jews, as well as the people and politics that were a part of the Kindertransport rescue network. The second aspect of this paper addresses the staging of Samuels’ play, my character study, and the role preparation that I carried out to play a Jewish German girl from the age of 9 through 17.

Early disability research in the social sciences focused on the individual, or the person with the disability. Only recently has disability research accepted that every family member is affected. The disabled does not suffer the disability alone; the entire family— as well as friends and relatives—suffer ramifications. Parental roles are altered, and grief, anger and guilt often blur the parameters of acceptable parental care. By using disabled family dynamic research in dialog with The Glass Menagerie, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and Time for Ben, I argue that the disabled family dynamic is present, accurately portrayed, and significant to these three plays. Not only is the disabled family dynamic accurately portrayed in the plays, each of these plays precedes disability research in the issues that it presents. By examining the characters and issues presented in the plays through a disability research lens, I argue that these playwrights realistically portray the ramifications of the disabled family dynamic.

This thesis investigates the ways in which Webster’s Duchess of Malfi has been framed and interpreted, selecting various case studies from the four hundred years of the play’s history. It analyses the way in which a number of discourses have been brought to bear upon the play to delimit and shape its meanings, in the absence of a powerful determining author-figure such as Shakespeare. The investigation is organised around three “strands”, or elements which reappear in the commentary on the play. These are “pastness”, the sense that the play is framed as belonging to an earlier era and resistant to being completely interpreted by the later theatrical context being used to reproduce it; “not-Shakespeare”, the way in which Malfi has been set up in opposition to a “Shakespearean” model of dramatic value, or folded into that model; and “the dominance of the Duchess”, the tendency for the central character to act as a focus for the play’s perceived meanings. It identifies and analyses the co-opting of these elements in the service of wildly varying cultural politics throughout the play’s history. Sited within the assumptions and practices of Early Modern performance studies, this thesis constitutes an intervention in the field, demonstrating the possibility of a radically decentred approach. Such an approach is freed from either a reliance on Shakespeare as a prototypical model from which other works are imagined as diverging, or from the progressive narrative of theatre history in which twentieth century scholars “discovered” the true inherent meaning of early modern drama which had been “obscured” by the intervening centuries of theatre practice. It reveals blindspots and weaknesses in the existing Shakespeare-centred conception of the field, and opens up new possibilities for understanding Early Modern drama in historical and contemporary performance.

Educators and researchers have long discussed methods for improving student achievement in the social studies and history. Research on student attitudes reveals that the social studies suffers from a lack of interest among students. Common complaints among students are that the subject is tedious, does not relate to their lives, is not particularly useful for their future careers, is repetitive, or that it is simply boring (Schug et al., 1982}. Even when students recognize the utilitarian value of skills they learn from social studies/ history, they rarely express an interest in the subject (Chiodo, 2004). After reviewing the body of literature on student attitudes towards the social studies, Shaughnessy and Haladyna (1985} concluded, "most students in the United States, at all grade levels, find social studies to be one of the least interesting, most irrelevant subjects in the school curriculum" (p. 694). Russel and Waters (2010) linked these attitudes to the prevalence of passive learning (lecture, worksheets and other busy work, and rote memorization) within contemporary social studies classrooms. Studies examining social studies/ history education suggest that pedagogical techniques from drama/ theatre may be effective at teaching these subjects by helping students actively engage with and retain material. Drama-based strategies can be particularly effective in improving student reading skills (Rose et al., 2000). By strengthening such basic skills, drama/ theatre helps support student achievement in social studies/ history. Teaching strategies that utilize historical narrative have been shown to get students to effectively engage with and improve their understanding of social studies content (Downey et al, 1991; Brophy et al., 1991). Drama can act as a form of historical narrative and be particularly effective at reaching students (Otten et al., 2004; Jackson et al., 2005). Drama-integration methods also complement the social studies curriculum by being well suited for multicultural education practices, cross-curricular learning, and the investigation of social justice issues (Gay & Hanley, 1999; Fautely & Savage, 2011; Lement & Dunakin, 2005}.

This thesis discusses the work of theatre director Krzysztof Warlikowski, which holds an important place within Polish and world theatre, although it remains little known in the UK. It argues that that existing approaches to Warlikowski’s theatre are inadequate as they focus too much on the perspective of an interpreter of productions who decodes the meaning of the performance. Instead Warlikowki’s work should be approached from the perspective of an observer of the complex creative processes that lead to performance and determine its relationship with the audience. The connection between actors and spectators takes the form of an ‘encounter’ that offers a particular experience of theatregoing. It aims to challenge the existing customs of spectatorship and is based on destabilising and violating the sense of safety of both actors and spectators while expanding their experience of performance beyond the ‘here and now’.This thesis asks questions about the distinctive conditions that make possible the type of encounter that lies at the heart of Warlikowski’s oeuvre and distinguishes it from Polish repertory theatre. The theoretical framework of ‘intertheatricality’ facilitates identification of the matrix of elements that inform this encounter. These elements are constituted by: 1.The strategies that have led Warlikowski to become a successful director and enabled him to create a new way of theatre-making and communication with audience; 2. The complex processes of the creation of his ensemble of actors; 3. The family-like setting and the collaborative nature of rehearsals; 4. The status of actors who become the co-authors of performance and their idiosyncratic involvement in the creation of shows that cross the borders between work and life; and finally, 5. The role of the audience that becomes an integral element of the performance making process. Seeing Warlikowski’s work from the perspective of performance as event shows it not as a static and completed artefact, but as a fleeting, transient process that is open to changes and resonates with the outside world. Through its focus on creative processes, this approach sheds new light on the theatre of Warlikowski. It shows how he integrates the actors and audience into his performance making process, and also helps to demonstrate his impact on the status of audience within Polish mainstream theatre post-1989.

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