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Queering William Finn's a New Brain

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Queering William Finn's a New Brain Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2019 Trouble in His Brain: Queering William FNicihnolnas 'Ksri satof eNr Reichward sBonrain Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS “TROUBLE IN HIS BRAIN”: QUEERING WILLIAM FINN’S A NEW BRAIN By NICHOLAS KRISTOFER RICHARDSON A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2019 © 2019 Nicholas Kristofer Richardson Nicholas Kristofer Richardson defended this thesis on April 16, 2019. The members of the supervisory committee were: Aaron C. Thomas Professor Directing Thesis Mary Karen Dahl Committee Member Chari Arespacochaga Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have so much for which to be thankful and I am indebted to a great number of people. I will try my best to limit this section to those who helped me specifically with this thesis and these past two years of graduate school. First, I offer heartfelt thanks to my most admirable chair, Dr. Aaron C. Thomas. Thank you for guiding me through this thesis regardless of my many insecurities. Thank you for demanding rigor from me and my work. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for your faith in me. It’s been a pleasure to learn from you and work with you. I only wish I had opened up to you earlier. I sincerely hope this isn’t the end. (There will always be more tea to pour.) Prof. Chari Arespacochaga, I’m so happy to have someone interested in staging Finn’s works on my committee. Thank you for joining my team and for your time and effort spent reviewing my thesis. I’m honored to be your first! I owe a great deal of thanks to Dr. Mary Karen Dahl, who supported this project in its infancy – just the seed of an idea in her dramaturgy class. Thank you for nurturing my writing since my senior year of undergrad and for inviting me to pursue a master’s degree. Thank you for always encouraging my many interests in academia and performance. I cherish our relationship and our many conversations – from A New Brain, to Snoo Wilson, to Lady Gaga, and everything in between. (Actually, Snoo and Gaga seem far more related when placed next to each other in the same sentence!) Alongside Dr. Dahl, all of my professors in the Theatre Studies program (both past and present) have believed in me, even when – and especially when – I didn’t believe in myself. I must thank each of them for their steadfast confidence in me: Dr. Beth Osborne, Prof. Patrick McKelvey, and Dr. Samer Al-Saber. I need to add an additional thank you to Prof. McKelvey for iii pointing me towards sources very early on in the process, some of which found a place in my thesis! Though I never got to work with Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti directly, she has been nothing but friendly and lovely – and we did discuss A New Brain! Dr. Tony Gunn, who would’ve guessed four years ago that I’d be wrapping up the M.A.?! Thank you for supporting my work since my sophomore year, from Kinky Boots in Play Analysis to A New Brain. Two other professors of mine deserve a huge helping of thanks. Without Dr. Kris Salata in Performance and Dr. Jen Atkins in the School of Dance, this thesis would not exist. Full stop. Do not pass “GO,” do not collect $200. Thank you both so very much for allowing me to work on my thesis through your courses. You have absolutely opened my thinking and shaped my thesis in exciting and thorough ways beyond my hopes and dreams. Thank you both immensely. The School of Theatre at Florida State staged A New Brain as part of its theatre season in Fall 2018, and I’m beyond grateful to have served as dramaturg for our production. Thank you to Prof. Tom Ossowski, Holly Stone, and the cast and crew of FSU’s A New Brain. It was invaluable to work so intimately on the show while thinking through it critically, and I so enjoyed our many conversations surrounding our production! As part of my research for the production, I interviewed Dr. Rajesh Sriraman, a pulmonary ICU doctor. Curious about the HIV reference in the show, I asked him about the relationship between arteriovenous malformations and HIV. Little did I know how crucial that question – and even more crucially, Dr. Sriraman’s answer – would become to my thesis. Thank you, Dr. Sriraman, for sharing your expertise and experiences with me. I attended the Song, Stage and Screen musical theatre conference at the University of California, Los Angeles in the summer of 2018, where I met two wonderful individuals. Dr. Alex Bádue, thank you for sharing your research and archival materials with me. How nice to be in iv conversation with another Finn scholar! Dr. Dan Blim, your support has been anything but infinitesimal. Thank you for always listening. Thank you for all of your advice and care in so many aspects of my life. To all of my beautiful friends from the Theatre Studies program at FSU, thank you for seeing me through – some of you even through my undergrad! Dr. Sean Bartley, thank you for gracefully shifting from my TA to my friend, for all of the many pep talks, and for scaring me when I needed to be scared. Dr. Allison Gibbes, you deserve a huge mega-thank-you for helping me acquire video footage of the original 1998 production of A New Brain (!!!); in addition, thank you for always championing me and for our impromptu hours-long hangouts. Marisa Andrews (and Pretzel) and Shelby Lunderman, thank you for cheering me on from near and far. Merritt Denman, thank you for (literally) holding me together these past two years. I wouldn’t have made it without you. To all of my peers, know that I appreciate you. Phyllis Pancella and Mitchell Giambalvo, thank you for all of the music we’ve made over the years. Thank you for keeping me singing, acting, and laughing through the ups and downs of my graduate studies. Thank you for letting me take up rehearsal time to talk about my work, and thank you for asking me all sorts of questions about it. Frequently our rehearsals became my space for emotional release, which wasn’t always pretty or productive; thank you for your forgiveness, reconciliation, and friendship. I can’t forget the many people at home in Virginia Beach and across Hampton Roads who have followed my journey and have always welcomed me home with open arms – David Prescott, Sondra Gelb, and the Spotlight crew, just to name a few. I hope I make you proud. And to my friends from home and from undergrad who keep me going – Caroline, Britni, Macy, Emily, Sara, Maddie, Miranda, and Mary Beth, just to name a few – thank you. v Mama and Dad, I owe so much to you for an endless amount of reasons. In regards to my thesis, thank you for taking such a vested interest in this project. Thanks for listening to the cast recording with me multiple times, for crashing a rehearsal of our production here at FSU, for watching A New Brain and Falsettos with me, and for letting me talk through my ideas with you. Thank you for chasing after these ludicrous dreams with me, wherever they may lead us, and thank you for letting me steer the ship. My map-reading skills remain questionable, but at least we are travelling together (with Whitney and Michael CDs, of course) (sorry Dad). And to everyone who has listened to me blab on about this thesis, I thank you kindly. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... viii 1. INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................................... 1 2. “STORIES OF ILLNESS”: HOW AIDS CHOREOGRAPHIES HAUNT A NEW BRAIN .... 22 3. “I SHOULD TRY TO LOCATE ROGER”: LOCATING THE GAY MALE IN MUSICAL THEATRE THROUGH INTERPELLATION, FORMATION, AND SIMULATION ........... 46 Part One: Hailing the Gay Male into Being .............................................................................. 47 Part Two: The Gay Male in Musicals Pre-1990 ....................................................................... 55 Part Three: Appealing to Gay Males and Heterosexuals in Musicals of the 1990s ................. 60 4. “WHERE THE HELL’S MY SENSE OF HUMOR?”: CAMPING IN THE HOSPITAL ...... 73 5. CAMP REMAINS, HIV REMAINS, AND CONCLUSIONS ................................................ 93 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................... 97 A. HUMAN SUBJECTS OFFICE LETTER OF DETERMINATION ........................................ 97 References ..................................................................................................................................... 98 Biographical Sketch ..................................................................................................................... 103 vii ABSTRACT My thesis argues that a critical study of the gay themes and issues in Finn’s work – both obvious and otherwise latent – elucidates historically specific and significant queer texts and subtexts, along with queer modes of reception. Queerness makes meaning of and in Finn’s works; reciprocally, Finn’s works also shape constructions and understandings of queerness in return. My thesis takes on queerness as the central lens through which to read Finn’s 1998 off- Broadway musical A New Brain. I provide queer readings of various aspects of the show; in other words, I queer the musical. In my first chapter (“Stories of Illness”: How AIDS Choreographies Haunt A New Brain), I investigate HIV/AIDS choreographies from both the concert stage (Neil Greenberg’s 1994 Not- About-AIDS-Dance) and the streets (ACT UP’s street protests in the ’80s and ’90s), alongside David Gere’s book How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS, to determine patterns in movement vocabularies, aesthetics, definitions, and metaphors for HIV/AIDS-afflicted bodies and narratives.
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