Dissertation

Staging local and oral history in America: Maryat Lee's EcoTheater, Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, and Tectonic Theater Project

Stoller, Terry

2003

Overview

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the dramatic use of written and oral testimony proved to be a rich resource for the American stage in an exploration of how people respond to public and private events and how they view their lives. In this dissertation I look at theatre companies that have staged community stories and history through the voices of the townspeople. The three companies I focus on each represent a distinctive type of organization. Maryat Lee's EcoTheater, based in West Virginia, was a seminal grassroots company. It viewed urban commercial theatre as one that catered to a small percentage of the population and had little relevance to the lives of the people in rural America. Using indigenous players, it staged its own stories about local history as well as contemporary life and performed those stories mostly for local audiences. The Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble is a small-town professional ensemble in Pennsylvania. It also set out to create a play relevant to its community. It staged the words of the rural Pennsylvanians as they had written them to their local newspapers, attempting to chronicle the history of Bloomsburg over a period of two hundred years. While the Tectonic Theater Project is a professional company based in New York City, it too sought to stage the words of the people of a small American town. Responding to a specific event, the group members fashioned themselves as investigative journalists and traveled to Laramie, Wyoming, to interview the townspeople about the aftermath of a homosexual hate crime. Crafting a play from their interviews and with an eye on dissemination of their work, they performed the finished piece in Denver and New York City before returning to Laramie to present it for the townspeople there. The variety of approaches taken by the companies to staging local and oral history raises a number of questions that this dissertation explores. Who collects the material? Who shares their stories? And what are the tensions and changes that occur when that material is transformed into theatre?

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Du Bois, W E B (1868-1963) / Freire, Paulo / Hochhuth, Rolf / Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712-1778) / Smith, Anna Deavere / Theater / Weiss, Peter (1916-1982)
• ISBN: 0496507443, 9780496507443