Abstract
In her longitudinal research project On the Road: A Search for American Character, Anna Deavere Smith created a performance process blending journalism and theatre, and by doing so succeeded in capturing an inherent essence of character through language, tone and gesture by recreating verbatim excerpts from conducted interviews onto the stage. In most of her works, Smith applies politically driven and event based topics that affect targeted groups or cultures within a community such as the Hasidic Jews and African Americans of Crown Heights, Brooklyn featured in Smith's earlier work Fires in the Mirror. In the following Master's thesis, I provide a comparative analysis of my adaptation of Smith's docu-theatre process and argue its ability to succeed by accessing a personal and familial-based topic with its own social repercussions - namely Alzheimer's disease. Moreover, I explain the effectiveness of this adaptation given the instructional and informational application of the topic of my play, Sweetening the Broccoli: Reflections on Alzheimer 's that can be targeted towards a more specific audience of caregivers and family members of Alzheimer's patients. mnittee Chair DeTmda S. 69d/ h Dade v