The Thesis Overview: Exploring the Impact of Gender on Audience Perception through "The Last Five Years"
Exploring the Role of Gender in Musical Theatre and Its Impact on Audience Perception through "The Last Five Years" | |
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For my thesis topic, I will be exploring the role of gender in theatre, specifically within the context of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years. The show traditionally features a cast of just two people, one man and one woman, who fall in and out of love over the course of the show (a period of five years). It is a very polarizing show, causing most audience members to feel a strong allegiance for either one character or the other. I am especially interested in the role of gender in the audience’s perception of each of the two characters, and how this might change if the characters’ genders were inverted so that the traditionally female character would become the male and vice versa. I will be staging the full show as it is originally intended with the standard casting and then a brief intermission followed by a few excerpts of the more heated or pivotal moments in the show with the inverted casting. By doing this as sort of a double feature, it would allow the audience to fully understand the characters as they are originally intended through the full narrative of the show, and then see if their perceptions of the characters at those moments change with the inverted casting through surveys before, during, and after the performances.
The Last Five Years contains all of the classic male/female tropes of a traditional musical: the masculine man who is the “breadwinner”, and the female character who is extremely emotional, desperately in love, and reliant on her man for support because she cannot keep a steady job. This would be an extremely interesting gender dynamic to invert, and I believe it will lead to a very insightful discussion about the role and depiction of gender in theatre, and especially musical theatre, which seems to be a worse culprit of these stereotypical “traditional” gender roles.
The role of gender in theatre is by no means a new topic of study, but there is not currently live performance audience evaluation data to support the literary and qualitative analysis of the experts who have written extensively on the subject. This is where my research will differ because I have added an analytical layer to my research that is unprecedented. I believe that the audience survey analysis component of my project through these unique productions of The Last Five Years will really flesh out this research and set it apart from previous work on the topic.
The Last Five Years contains all of the classic male/female tropes of a traditional musical: the masculine man who is the “breadwinner”, and the female character who is extremely emotional, desperately in love, and reliant on her man for support because she cannot keep a steady job. This would be an extremely interesting gender dynamic to invert, and I believe it will lead to a very insightful discussion about the role and depiction of gender in theatre, and especially musical theatre, which seems to be a worse culprit of these stereotypical “traditional” gender roles.
The role of gender in theatre is by no means a new topic of study, but there is not currently live performance audience evaluation data to support the literary and qualitative analysis of the experts who have written extensively on the subject. This is where my research will differ because I have added an analytical layer to my research that is unprecedented. I believe that the audience survey analysis component of my project through these unique productions of The Last Five Years will really flesh out this research and set it apart from previous work on the topic.
- Samantha Squeri
Thesis Objectives:
- to create an intellectual, socially conscious theatre piece
- to expose new people (especially students) to theatre who may not have previously had experiences with theatre
- to analyze the impact of gender in theatre on an audience through a controlled theatre experiment and audience surveys
- to cultivate and explore new ideas about the impact and influence of theatre and media in general
- to develop and apply knowledge acquired from Film, Television, and Theatre (FTT) classes and previous experiences to produce a unique, informed theatre production and research paper