abstract: In this document I detail the inception of the community service learning program, Flashback, that I created for Actor's Youth Theatre of Mesa Arizona. I first provide the organization's history and then expound upon my beliefs and how the ASU theatre for youth program, along with the needs of AYT, led me to create the program. I then describe the goals and processes of implementing the community based project. I also define service learning and why the program was designed around its principles. Finally, I describe the program's curriculum, devising process and Flashback's first trial run, and then continue, evaluating the performance and reflecting upon the process. The appendix includes the devised script, photos of the performance and interaction with the community, some of the planned curriculum and portions of my journals written during the process. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Theatre 2012

The theme of this Thesis is the subject of propaganda and an attempt to establish the measures by which propaganda posed an influence on the form of the children's theater in the 1950's. The goal of this thesis is to capture the changes and the evolution of the Municipal Theater for Youth (prev. Theater of Jiri Wolker since 1953) during the time period of 1949 - 1959, using the analysis of stage drama and play texts of that time period. The author has chosen the Theater of Jiri Wolker because it was the single and only official professional drama theater that specialized exclusively in the production of performances for children in Prague. The author of this thesis will attempt to capture and show evidence of how the attitudes and stances of the authorities, during the given time period, have changed and morphed towards certain kinds and genres, as well as present the deviations and editorial changes that were made to the original texts (i. e. main character, motive, theme, language, the ratio of propaganda and art, life expectancy, ratio of czech and soviet titles, and the switch from a fable to a fairy tale genre).