Scholarship
Overview
Jennifer received her Doctor of Fine Arts in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from Yale School of Drama in 2018. Her dissertation, “The Silent Sex Speaks: Female Solo Performance in American from 1890-2000,” traces the history of the one-woman show in America, focusing on women who write and perform their own monologue-based solo shows. Jennifer received the American Theater and Drama Society’s Emerging Scholar Award in 2015 for her paper “The Virtuosic Avant-Garde: Process, Play, and the Everyday” and has presented papers at ATHE, ASTR, Theatre Symposium, and the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Her writing has appeared in Etudes, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and HowlRound Theatre Commons. In the fall of 2019, she will be joining the faculty of Hanover College as Assistant Professor of Theatre.
The Silent Sex Speaks: Female Solo Performance in American from 1890-2000
The Silent Sex Speaks follows the development of a distinct form of character monologue as it grew out of the society entertainments and vaudeville acts of Beatrice Herford and May Isabel Fisk around the beginning of the twentieth century and then expanded after the mid-century successes of Ruth Draper and Cornelia Otis Skinner into the one-woman shows of Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg, and Anna Deavere Smith. Although these women are separated by time, class, race, and sexual orientation, they share a common form, and while the early part of their chronicle has sunk into obscurity, I argue that their work constitutes a distinct tradition of female solo performance. This tradition continually questions the place of women in society over a period of time that coincides with three waves of the feminist movement. By comparing the monologues written and performed during this time span, my dissertation examines how portrayals of female character and social identity change (or don’t) as the status of women evolves. In addition to the women at the core of this tradition, I also consider the work of many other solo performers, including the solo readings of Shakespeare by nineteenth-century actresses, Charlotte Cushman and Fanny Kemble, the ground-breaking comedy of Jackie “Moms” Mabley, performance artists Holly Hughes, Marga Gomez, and Robbie McCauley, and contemporary practitioners like Sarah Jones. Despite the breadth of female solo performance practice, the work of all these performers is interrelated and attests to the invaluable contributions of women to solo performance.
Dissertation
News and Upcoming Events
Recent Publications:
For Journal of American Drama and Theatre: “Unruly Reproductions: the Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville”
For HowlRound Theatre Commons: “Hope in the Shadows: Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me”
For Etudes: “Toward Unmediated Performance: Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe”
Upcoming:
Paper presentation at ATHE, Orlando, “Changing the Scene from Private to Public: Amateur Performance in the American Women’s Club Movement”
Publications and Presentations
Publications:
“Toward Unmediated Performance: Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” Etudes, December 2018
“Hope in the Shadows: Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me,” HowlRound Theatre Commons, November 2018
“Unruly Reproductions: the Embodied Art of Mimicry in Vaudeville,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, “Embodied Arts” special issue, Spring 2019, vol. 31 no. 3
Upcoming: “In America by Susan Sontag”; “Dance Night by Dawn Powell”; “Dawn Powell”; “Thornton Wilder,” entries in reference series Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Literature in Context, edited by Linda de Roche, ABC-CLIO/Greenwood
“An Unlikely Utopia,” Hunter Online Theater Review, Feb. 13, 2013
Presentations:
Upcoming: “Changing the Scene from Private to Public: Amateur Performance in the American Women’s Club Movement,” Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Orlando, FL, 2019
“Marieluise Fleisser and the Exploitation of Invention,” Mid-America Theatre Conference, Cleveland, OH 2019
“The Body as Image-Maker: Redrawing Female Types on the Vaudeville Stage,” Theatre Symposium, Southeastern Theater Conference, Decatur, GA, 2018
“Looking at the Other: Trudy as Stage Witch in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,” American Society for Theatre Research Conference, Atlanta, GA 2017
“Reaching Out to Students with Disabilities in the Graduate Writing Lab,” National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing, Hofstra University, NY 2017
“The Solo Amateur: Female Monologists and Society Entertainment in the Progressive Era.” American Society for Theatre Research Conference, Minneapolis, MN 2016
“The One-Woman Variety Show: Diversity in the Solo Performances of Ruth Draper and Cornelia Otis Skinner,” Mid-America Theatre Conference, Minneapolis, MN 2016
“The Virtuosic Avant-Garde,” Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Montreal, CA 2015
“Giving Voice to the ‘Silent Sex’: Two Monologues by May Isabel Fisk,” Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Montreal, Canada 2015
