Year of Award

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Name

Individualized Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program

Department or School/College

Interdisciplinary Studies Program

Committee Chair

Bernadette Sweeney

Commitee Members

Pamyla Stiehl, Kathleen Kane, Quan Manh Ha, Robert Hubbard

Keywords

Dramatic Literature, Fun Home, Ghosts, Grief, Phenomenology, Theatre

Abstract

“Ghostly Grieving in Theatre’s Now Also” explores how contemporary American plays and playwrights stage the dead as a way of understanding theatre’s unique language for dealing with the shared, complex human experience of grief. Focusing on theatrical ghosts and other “impossible” presences, I articulate how these figures function as dramaturgical devices. I also argue that theatre’s ghosts “set the stage” (as it were) for communicable meaning-making by inviting audiences into the tasks of creation and mourning.

My work draws on performance theory (especially phenomenological accounts of theatrical storytelling), on dramaturgical analysis, and on grief studies. In this dissertation project, I examine plays in which hauntings trouble experienced reality, time, and memory. I propose that theatre is uniquely positioned to be in conversation with grief’s many simultaneities: there and here, then and now, presence and absence, memory and materiality.

Focusing on plays and musicals written after 1990, I argue that stage ghosts are embodied absences that make the ongoing, unruly work of mourning conversable in theatre’s shared space. I explore how pieces like Fun Home (Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori) and Wit (Margaret Edson) rely on “ghost time” – my term for the simultaneous staging of many time/space realities at once. I also articulate methods for staging what grief theorists Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff call the “awful instant,” the moment of death itself.

Ultimately, I’m seeking to develop a unique language for the way that theatre grapples with events and experiences which interrupt our lived experience and cannot be explained rationally, linearly, etc. Techniques like “retropresence” are theatrical in nature. “Retropresence” is my counter-term to “flashback.” Where a flashback relocates us wholly into the narrative past, retropresence describes moments where present-tense characters are delivered back into their own histories and allowed to act within them. This project traces how such structures reconfigure time, perception, and spectatorship in plays that bring the dead and the past into the here and now.

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© Copyright 2026 Jacob Mann Christiansen