How can a playwright share authorial control with a group of actors when creating a new play script? How does the individual playwright address matters of genre, form, style and structure to create a unifying theme, while remaining true to the dramatic intention and aesthetics of the group? What impact will the collaborators have on a playwright's work? Will they help or hinder the writing process? This exegesis closely follows the creation of a new play, The Woods, in a process where the playwright intended to facilitate a collaborative process with the actors rather than act as sole author. Issues arising in this mode of working include the real meaning of sole authorship, aesthetic integrity and creative power balance. The analysis of these issues will have relevance for theatre practitioners working in collaborative contexts.

Joanna Murray-Smith and Daniel Keene are both successful mid-career Melbourne playwrights. Taking them as a starting point and re-tracing an Australian theatrical lineage, this project explores new Melbourne narratives in which two branches of the Australian theatrical idiom converge in a single creative work, my play Friday Night, In Town. An analysis of the writing of Friday Night, In Town, authored by myself and presented for examination herein, demonstrates its narratives are structured with deliberate reference to Murray-Smith and Keene revealing a new form of contemporary urban playwriting. The play's originality, it will be shown, and its contribution to new knowledge, lie in its engagement with these playwrights and their Australian predecessors. These elements combine with a redeployment of the medieval pageant-play, which is thus reinvigorated as a mode of contemporary playwriting practice. The play text presented herein (Friday Night, In Town) represents 75 per cent of the weighting for this M.A. (by Research) with the exegetical component weighted at 25 per cent.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo apresentar e discutir as comédias escritas por George Farquhar, Love and a Bottle (1698) e The Beaux Stratagem (1707), que, respectivamente, foram revisitadas pelo dramaturgo irlandês Declan Hughes e pelos dramaturgos norte-americanos Thornton Wilder e Ken Ludwig. Este trabalho visa verificar quais razões motivaram os dramaturgos a (re)escreverem tais obras e investigar seu método de (re)criação, analisando as mudanças significativas que ocorreram em seus processos criativos. Ademais, entender quais estratégias provocadoras de riso são utilizadas por George Farquhar, por Hughes e Wilder- Ludwig é fundamental para esta pesquisa. O referencial teórico deste estudo baseia-se em obras sobre adaptação e apropriação como A Theory of Adaptation (2006), de Linda Hutcheon e Adaptation and Appropriation (2006), de Julie Sanders, assim como obras sobre o riso e a comédia de Restauração, História do riso e do escárnio (2003), de George Minois e A Companion to Restoration Drama (2001), organizado por Susan J. Owen. / This study aims to present and discuss the comedies Love and a Bottle (1698) and The Beaux \'Stratagem (1707) written by George Farquhar and, respectively, revisited by the Irish playwright Declan Hughes and by the American playwrights Thornton Wilder and Ken Ludwig. The objective of this dissertation is to identify the reasons that motivated the playwrights to (re)write such works and investigate the method of (re)creation, analyzing the important changes that occurred in their creative processes. Moreover, understanding which strategies to provoke laughter are used by George Farquhar, by Hughes and Wilder-Ludwig is essential to this research. The theoretical framework of this study builds on works about adaptation and appropriation as A Theory of Adaptation (2006) by Linda Hutcheon and Adaptation and Appropriation (2006) by Julie Sanders, as well as works on laughter and Restoration comedy, Histoire du rire et de la dérision (2003) by George Minois and A Companion to Restoration Drama (2001) organized by Susan J. Owen.

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My purpose in this work is to examine the major social problems with which the playwrights of the decade between 1930 and 1940 have dealt.

This thesis argues that prominent in the purposes of the dramaturgy of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey was the promotion of his political causes - most notably socialism. In his avidity for the cause of establishing a workers' paradise, following the Soviet model, in Ireland, his ire was drawn to the movements and institutions he perceived as distracting the masses from pursuit of this ideal: republicanism and the Church. These political ideals are prominent themes in his collected works - both fiction and non-fiction. The work is essentially divided into two sections. The first examines the development of O'Casey's ideologies - his socialism, anti-nationalism and anti-clericalism - and the backdrop against which they developed. The purpose is to establish just how passionately O'Casey felt about these ideals and how, in his letters, histories and autobiographies, he dedicated much of his effort to promoting them. Having dedicated so much time and energy to championing socialism and attacking the Church in these texts, it is little wonder they should appear so prominently in his plays. The thesis argues that O'Casey distorted the content of his Autobiographies to reinforce his role as self appointed champion of Dublin's "bottom fifth" and his beloved working class. It contends that O'Casey embellished the suffering of his childhood and the hardship endured by his family to fortify his credentials as a "socialist hero" - to be "for them" he sought to be "of them," and to provide a model for how learning and conversion to the socialist ideal would liberate them from the economic oppression that kept them low. A number of facts, even elementary ones like the number of children in the Casey brood and particular dates and addresses where he had lived, were changed to cultivate the working class hero image, the disadvantaged boy who rose up against all that an unjust and unsympathetic world could throw at him, that he so coveted. The more abject the origins, the greater the final triumph. The thesis then looks briefly at the origins and purposes of the Abbey Theatre, and its part in the Irish Renaissance that gave O'Casey his start. It focuses particularly on the role of Yeats, and his desire to build a dramatic movement which created work free from opinion. His famous determination to "reduce the world to wallpaper" brought him into conflict with O'Casey, who saw his plays as a legitimate vehicle for the expression of his own world view. It is important, in terms of the objective of this study, to establish that O'Casey's works were deliberately constructed pieces of didacticism, to demonstrate just how inimical to the original intent of the movement his purposes were. With this in mind, it is instructive to compare him with the other great Irish dramatist of the period, John Millington Synge, whose works, with their more rustic focus, promoted the kind of impressionistic 'slice of life' theatre the Abbey founders were championing. For O'Casey, the cause was paramount. He wrote morality plays. The study examines how O'Casey's dominant ideological position evolved by examining his own changing perspective about the world around him. It shows how O'Casey began to see all struggles in terms of the economic one between classes, and how he came to be converted to the tenets of socialism. His opposition to nationalism and his anti-clericalism essentially reflected his belief that they were hostile to the interests of the workers, and therefore must be engaged. The dominant sources in this section are O'Casey's letters, his Autobiographies, and his book, The Story of the Irish Citizen Army. The second section of the thesis focuses on the first seven extant plays: The Harvest Festival, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, The Silver Tassie, Within the Gates, and The Star Turns Red, and examines how each promotes O'Casey's causes. The purpose of the thesis is not to promote a reworking of the biographical detail of O'Casey's life, but to trace the shift in the playwright's ideology - from Protestant Orange to Republican Green and finally, and most steadfastly, Socialist Red - and examine how these beliefs found voice in the characters and construction of his earlier plays.

In the wake of Emily Glassberg Sands' well-publicized thesis, Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender, theater artists across the country are up in arms about the disparity that has long existed between male and female playwrights. Glassberg Sands’ audit study showed that literary managers and artistic directors rate female-authored scripts lower in terms of quality, marketability, and audience response. In addition, recent studies show that only 20% of the plays produced in American regional theaters each year have female playwrights. As a positive step towards equality, I curated and produced a festival of new American plays by women entitled Voices in Contemporary Feminism(s). It was my goal to instigate change first by staging new American plays by women and then by engaging artists and audience members alike in conversation about feminism(s) and feminist themes, female playwrights, the current position of women in American theater, and how we can change the status quo. This thesis describes in detail the impetus behind creating the festival, the planning process, and the events of the festival itself, and then draws conclusions about the role dramaturgs can play in combating gender inequity.

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Drama has been the slowest of the arts to develop an authentic New Zealand 'voice.' This thesis focuses on the work of five playwrights: Bruce Mason, James K. Baxter, Mervyn Thompson, Renée and Robert Lord, all of whom have set out to identify such a 'voice' and in so doing have brought about a metamorphosis in the nature of New Zealand drama. New Zealand has traditionally been regarded as being on 'the margin' in relation to the dominant culture of the colonizer (the Eurocentre). Before Bruce Mason began to challenge this 'centre' of power in the early 1950s, New Zealand playwrights were so intimidated by the Eurocentre that they usually set their plays in Europe, particularly in England, in order to make them acceptable to their audiences. Mason proposed that 'the margin' of New Zealand, rather than being seen as inferior, should be redefined as a fertile place capable of nurturing a new individual dramatic form quite distinct from colonial norms. All of my chosen playwrights have insisted upon the intrinsic value of a two-tiered concept of 'the margin.' By setting their plays (wherever possible) in the country of their birth, highlighting New Zealand social issues and in the process persuading theatre-going audiences that plays about this country are worth watching, they have given new life to 'the margin' (the culture of New Zealand as a whole). At the same time all of these five playwrights have recognized that minority groups - 'voices' from 'the outer margin' in relation to the Pakeha 'inner margin' of power - have been largely unrepresented or misrepresented in New Zealand plays. They have advocated the vital importance of women's 'voices,' Māori 'voices' and gay 'voices,' for example, in their exploration of a more sophisticated and inclusive understanding of what constitutes our national identity. Moreover, in a period of less than forty years, they have helped to facilitate the transition of New Zealand theatre from amateur to professional status and have been instrumental in providing the practical framework whereby future New Zealand playwrights may find an outlet for their work.