Date of Defense

4-24-2026

Date of Graduation

5-2026

Department

Theatre

First Advisor

Mark Liermann

Second Advisor

Joan Herrington

Abstract

For my thesis project, I wanted to dive more thoroughly into directing stage plays. I’ve directed a few plays before, and for this I wanted to try something new. I tried directing a stage play with almost zero preparation beforehand. The goal of this was to sort of discover the piece as the rehearsal process went along. This was very different than how I’ve directed things in the past. Typically I would do weeks of preparation.

The process started out pretty good! I had two actors who loved the script and wanted to work, but I quickly ran into my first roadblock. Without me having a clear vision of what I wanted, I couldn’t direct these actors. I was facilitating rehearsals but I wasn’t directing. We were going in blind and the actors had no parameters to meet.

By the final week we were so far away from having a finished project, and I knew that if I wanted to produce what I needed to produce, I was going to need to switch things up. I took a weekend and crammed all of the prep work I should of done. We showed up for tech week and crammed in as much rehearsal as we could, and by the end it actually turned out pretty good.

By the end of the process I learned many things. I learned how valuable time is when directing, I learned how important preparation is, and I learned how important it is to be adaptable. I went in believing that creating a “devised piece” just meant coming in not knowing what you’re going to do, but I learned very early on that every director who does a “devised piece” knows exactly what they want, they just allow the actors to figure it out instead of telling them.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Restricted

Download

Share

COinS