| Title | Finding Money in the Walls |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Uncovering the Feminist Power of Teresa Deevy’s Dramaturgy through an Embodied, Practice-Based Approach |
| Contributor | Ann M. Shanahan (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0432.08 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0432/chapters/10.11647/obp.0432.08 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Ann M. Shanahan; |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-04-07 |
| Long abstract | ‘Finding Money in the Walls: Uncovering the Feminist Power of Teresa Deevy’s Dramaturgy through an Embodied, Practice-based Approach’ considers Teresa Deevy’s plays through the lens of the author’s feminist directing approaches, which draw on her lived experiences. She argues that Deevy’s dramaturgy is a complex, layered materialism, based in Deevy’s lived experience. Using the metaphor of money in the broken-down walls of a ruin in Temporal Powers, the author explores how Deevy places material objects in the liminal spaces of her settings as a key feature of her dramaturgical project, throughout her career. These material objects figure significantly in the conflicts of the plays, and their resolutions. Identification with the material of these objects engage audiences’ bodies sensually, both in dramas for stage and radio. Further, Deevy inserts actual bodies as meta-audiences in the plays, which stand as representatives of audiences’ bodies at key moments of recognition and resolution in the dramas. The latter section of the chapter applies this analysis to Strange Birth (1946) and Light Falling (1947), written both for radio and stage. The chapter concludes by arguing that a practice-based approach is uniquely valuable in illuminating Deevy’s feminist dramaturgy, and larger project designed to evoke connective, embodied experiences for audiences both inside and outside her dramas. The chapter is relevant to feminist theatremakers and academics, Deevy scholars, those interested in Irish theatre practice and history. |
| Page range | pp. 175–200 |
| Print length | 26 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Ann M. Shanahan is a scholar-artist specialising in feminist directing and pedagogy, gender and theatrical space, and theatre and social change. She has directed over sixty productions and writes about her own, and others’, directing practice. She is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to this appointment, she served as Artistic Director, and was Chair of the Department of Theatre at Purdue University, and served in the faculty in Theatre and Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago for twenty years. Selected recent publications include: Landscapes of Perception: Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman (Methuen, 2023); ‘Making Room(s): Staging Plays about Women and Houses’, in Performing the Family Dream House: Space, Ritual and Images of Home (University of Iowa, 2019); ‘Teaching Maria Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends’, in How to Teach a Play: Exercises for the University Classroom (Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019); and ‘Pirated Pedagogy: Re-purposing Brecht’s Performance Techniques for Revolutions in Teaching’, in New Directions in Theatre Pedagogy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018). Ann is founding co-editor of the Peer-Reviewed Section of the SDC Journal (Stage Directors and Choreographers Society) and, from 2024–2030, is co-director of the Comparative Drama Conference (CDC), which will be convened in alternate years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.