From retrospect to Millie's War: Writing a configurative play
dc.contributor.committeeChair | Bert, Norman A. | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Check, Ed | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Stoune, Michael | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Marks, Jonathan | |
dc.contributor.committeeMember | Person, Lorraine | |
dc.creator | Wintour, Elizabeth G. | |
dc.date.available | 2012-06-01T15:50:12Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2006-05 | |
dc.degree.department | Theatre Arts | |
dc.description.abstract | Millie's War is a configurative play written as an experiment in form, an exercise exploring the possibilities of a more suitable structure for the content of an earlier written play. In 1990, I wrote Retrospect, a play about a woman who discovers the answer to a mystery in her past: the death of her father in World War II. The story becomes a murder mystery, but in the end, Retrospect answers all the protagonist's questions about the death of her father. Retrospect is a linear play with horizontal movement. It tells a complete story. Traumatic memory rarely works in this way. Since the original play, Retrospect, failed to handle the issues of war, loss, and suffering in a manner that satisfied me, I wrote a new play. The motivation for the new play was to take the internal traumatic experience of a young girl who lost her father in war, and see if I could represent dramatically how the mind goes through trauma. With Millie's War, I was interested to see if, by changing the shape of the play, I could better express the traumatic experience. With Millie’s War, I explore what happens when logical, causal structure is transformed into a structure shaped by image, chance, juxtaposition, and movement. A successful Millie’s War shall mirror the pre-narrative stage of traumatic experience dramatically through a configurative structure. The play shall thus embody the chaos of a traumatized mind: it shall be repetitious and illogical as it replays snatches of memory in a circular fashion. Rather than presenting a story, meaning and significance shall come through the power of its symbolic associations, like a dream. Additionally, in the Millie’s War script, I feel an audience response should be measured in a Brechtian sense rather than an Aristotelian sense. In other words, an audience, instead of empathizing with Millie, should be enlightened to the experience of trauma caused by war. I provide a dramaturgical analysis of Millie's War to place it within the context of current playwriting practice. I explore elements of configurative form and their relationship to Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe, Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, Suzan-Lori Parks’s Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom, Joseph Chaikin with Jean-Claude van Itallie’s The Serpent, and Joseph Chaikin with Susan Yankowitz’s Terminal. Additionally, I chronicle my writing process from the inspiration of the first play, Retrospect, through the writing and production processes of the new play, Millie's War. Finally, I evaluate how well the new script held up as a tool for communicating my vision of the play, and I explore possible solutions for revisions. | |
dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/2346/1412 | |
dc.language.iso | eng | |
dc.rights.availability | Unrestricted | |
dc.subject | Herman, Judith | |
dc.subject | Boal, Augusto | |
dc.subject | Artaud, Antonin | |
dc.subject | Nonlinear | |
dc.subject | Playwriting | |
dc.subject | New plays | |
dc.title | From retrospect to Millie's War: Writing a configurative play | |
dc.type | Dissertation | |
thesis.degree.department | Theatre Arts | |
thesis.degree.department | Theatre and Dance | |
thesis.degree.discipline | Theatre Arts | |
thesis.degree.grantor | Texas Tech University | |
thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | |
thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy |
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