Theater aiming to end or rectify societal ills has arguably been around since the Greeks. Indeed throughout theater history there have been several notable examples of performances attempting to do something revolutionary, namely function like political rallies where audiences of like-minded individuals gather to hear political messages and then be prompted to enact some kind of societal change. Traditional dramatic criticism however does not take into account a performance created for a specific time and location and that looks to an audience to finish or remedy what was seen on stage. I propose that we bring the concepts and ideology of political rhetoric to the study of the types of performances marked by context, characterized by deliberation, and where the conclusion, in a sense is left to the audience. By supplementing dramatic criticism with Aristotle's Rhetoric, we can shed new, unprecedented light on political performance. With its countless insights and exhaustive description of the modes of persuasion and subject matter for rhetoric in general and political rhetoric in particular as well as its systematic description of human psychology, the Rhetoric offers new tools for understanding and analyzing political performance.

My research focuses exclusively on 20^th century political drama in the United States. The selected case studies of my project mark very different theatrical performances from very different highly politicized moments of the 20^th century: the Pageant of the Paterson Silk Strike, Triple-A Plowed Under, and Hotel Universe. My selection of these varied performances is intended to demonstrate how Aristotle's Rhetoric can serve different kinds of theatrical performance from pageantry, to documentary theater, to theater using commedia and agit-prop techniques. In this project I identify logical, pathetic, and ethical appeals to audience and bridge these appeals to the performance's overall objective. I locate strategies of argumentation and then evaluate these strategies in terms of how they work for a particular audience at a particular time.

The Rhetoric is a comprehensive guide uniquely equipped to address the persuasive mechanisms undoubtedly at work in political performance; it can serve as a touchstone text for the theater scholar and can assist the playwright crafting a performance in hopes of ending or altering societal atrocities.