Dissertation Defenses

Doctoral Dissertation Announcement

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Candidate: Ronald Riekki

Degree of: Doctor of Philosophy

Department: English

Title: Incarcerated: A Collection of Short Plays

Committee:
W. Arnold Johnston, Ph.D., Chair
Steve Feffer, Ph.D.
Robert Eversz, M.F.A.
Ken Urban, Ph.D.

Date: Wednesday, July 11, 2007 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Emeriti Lounge, Walwood Hall

Abstract:
Incarcerated: A Collection of Short Plays includes Home Schooling (2005 WMU Creative Writing Award for Best Play in the Graduate Category), Good Behavior (produced at The Renaissance Guild: San Antonio’s Premiere Black Theater Company and upcoming staged reading and production with Abstraction Theater), 2 Mics (produced at WMU, Whole Art Theater, and an upcoming film production with IntroSpec Pics), and All Saints’ Day (2006 WMU Creative Writing Award for Best Play in the Graduate Category, produced at WMU and Theatre Entropy). Incarcerated explores Foucault’s carceral networking and Althusser’s ideological and repressive state apparatuses as exemplified in characters faced with such cataclysmic events as the Holocaust (Home Schooling and All Saints’ Day) and the degradation/slavery of the American prison system (Good Behavior and 2 Mics). In this RCG-centered working-class playwriting, we see how Butler’s performativity is inherent in carceral sociology, where each character in all four plays has to take on masks, costumes, and roles in order to survive, because incarceration (whether in literal prisons or metaphorical prisons) is all about one word: survival.