| Description |
In theatre, nothing ever happens just the way you plan it. This thesis tracks the genesis of a new play: from drafting and developing to producing and performing. Local Utah playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett has written a two-man, one-act play for performance by myself and fellow actor Michael Johnson, who is also a senior in the Actor Training Program at the University of Utah. The play, titled Wild, Wild Love, revolves around a man who discovers that his fiancee has had an affair with another man just days before their wedding, and explores our tendency to equate love with ownership. The purpose of my Honors Thesis is to document the process of putting on this play. It is a historical, dramaturgical project, which captures the creative and production processes, which are rarely documented. Yet these documents are what enable us to better understand theatre making both past and present. Unlike other art forms, theatre is fleeting and spontaneous; I am striving to capture this process by documenting around the event itself. I will detail the specifics behind every aspect of our production, what we discovered, what we had to change, and we did not expect. What this document contains will hopefully be a valuable contribution to theatre history. The thesis document will include three parts: a DVD of the performance, an annotated script that documents how the play evolved, and an essay chronicling the process as a whole. This document will serve to capture the process behind an intangible art form. |
