Profitable dissents: The mainstream theatre of Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner as a negotiating force between emergent and dominant ideologies

By combining cultural theory with empirical data, this dissertation asserts that late-twentieth-century mainstream theatre had the potential to support emergent ideologies in the U.S. context. The study finds fault with those who dismiss mainstream theatre based on its commercialism and shows how a production's mainstream status may position its emergent ideology as conventional rather than radical. Much of this work is done through the media's reception of productions, and this dissertation employs the media theory espoused by James Carey to suggest that newspapers do not transmit information as much as they report news with rhetorical strategies that confirm the ideologies of their readers. Ideology, here, is defined by the writings of Louis Althusser and Raymond Williams and is understood as an unconscious "frame" through which one sees the world. On the rare occasions that a periodical does transmit new information, readers tend to shift their ideologies accordingly. Using Ric Knowles' materialist semiotics, this study analyzes three productions and their cultural surroundings---particularly newspaper reviews---to illustrate how they contributed to and changed the ideologies of spectators and readers. It reveals that while mainstream theatre may be part of the socializing force of Horkheimer and Adorno's culture industry, one must nevertheless contextualize that socialization and ask whether it supports the dominant or an emergent ideology.;The analysis of this dissertation's first case study, the 2001 New York Theatre Workshop production of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, shows that historical context and media reception are of equal importance to textual content when evaluating a production's ideological work. In the second case study, the 1985 Public Theatre production of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, the emergent ideology was explicitly argued in the script and incorporated into the mainstream media, helping these ideas become part of the dominant ideology. Finally, the 1993 Broadway production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, presented an emergent ideology, but because the production was framed as mainstream by its Broadway location and as high art by its critical reception, its emergent ideology was implicitly marked as conventional. These case studies show how mainstream theatre could support emergent ideologies in the late-twentieth-century U.S. context.