PHD Student Experiences

Ashley Lucas

I loved working as a dramaturg for Professor Nadine George’s UCSD production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Fucking A. Dramaturgs can play many roles, but what Nadine wanted most from me was to share my research on both Suzan-Lori Parks and the prison industrial complex with her and the cast and crew.

My research is primarily focused on U.S. Latina/o theatre, especially Chicana/o theatre. I also have strong interests in prison-related theatre. My dissertation has two chapters on prison-related plays. One is on Voices in the Rain by Michael Keck and The Exonerated by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. The other chapter is on my one-person show Doin' Time: Through the Visiting Glass, which is about the families of prisoners.

As a former student of Parks’s and as someone who has studied prisons extensively, I loved talking with Nadine and the cast about how prisoners and their families might react to the situations posed in the play, and engaging my research in a working theatre setting was both refreshing and inspiring in terms of my related academic writing.

—Ashley Lucas

Summer Neilson Moshy

In the winter of my third year in the PhD program in Theatre at UCSD, I decided to direct some of my fellow PhD students in a Cabaret performance of Sarah Kane’s play Crave. In my dissertation work, I examine the sacrifice of the female body onstage. I examine the texts of Euripides as well as those of Kane in an attempt to connect the concept of “traditional” sacrifice with one of “modern” sacrifice.

I deliberately chose PhDs as my actors because I knew that the rehearsal process would be both tedious as well as illuminating and I was excited to have an additional four minds involved that were trained in academia and the vigorous questioning of texts. In our particular program at UCSD, all of the PhDs have some sort of practical theatre background. Aside from the four PhDs who acted in Crave, the assistant director, dramaturg, choreographer, and stage-manager were also current PhD Theatre students at UCSD. Their combined insight was overwhelming and a definitive point in my research path.

After the production of Crave, I felt that I had experienced Kane’s work in a personal way that would have been impossible to experience had I not done this show. I was able to test out a myriad of theories in the rehearsal process. Through this process the text ceased to be elusive and vague and became a very specific set of stories that I am now able to actively discuss within my work.

—Summer Neilson Moshy