“When the Only Cure for Motion Sickness is to Keep Moving” is a six-episode podcast in which Zoë Wilson (’23) catalogs and analyzes the key textual changes made to Tony Kushner’s Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America between 1987 and 1994. It also functions as her personal travelog, as she traveled to London, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles over the last year-and-a-half to find various drafts of the play at theatre archives, libraries, and museums. The first two episodes explain her research process— which began when she was a senior in high school and saw the 2018 Broadway revival of Angels and was reignited when she took a course on the dramatic literature of the AIDS epidemic at University College Oxford in Spring 2022. The middle three episodes feature clips of student voice actors reading changed and cut scenes, each of which is explained and put into context via commentary by Zoë. These episodes also contain conversations with one of the three Bucknell faculty members (from both the English and Theatre/Dance departments) whose help Zoë enlisted due to their familiarity with the play and ability to critically read dramatic texts. The sixth episode serves as a wrap-up and explains the dramaturgical potential and critical implications of using textual pasts to inform performative futures in theatre, particularly those related to the key theme of travel (to which the title of the podcast is a reference).
The project served as Zoë’s culminating thesis in English: Literary Studies and would not have been possible without the help of Wes Bernstein and Bertrand Library’s equipment. During Spring 2023, Zoë borrowed an Apple laptop from Wes in order to edit her project using Garageband. She also used a Sony digital audio recorder to record all of the clips with voice actors and faculty members, and she recorded all solo clips within the audio studio on the library’s first floor. The project was funded by the Presidential Fellowship, the Program for Undergraduate Research (Summer 2022), and the Mellon Foundation (the Confounding Problems Grant and the Student Research Grant).
Project: English: Literary Studies Thesis, “When the Only Cure for Motion Sickness is to Keep Moving”
Student: Zoë Wilson
Faculty Advisor: Chase Gregory
DP&S Liaison: Wes Bernstein
Voice Actors: Bethany Fitch ’23, Kieran Calderwood ’24, Reid Fournier ’24, Chaim Gould ’23, Griffin Miller ’23, Isaiah Mays ’23, Sarah Downey ’25, Maddie Buckley ’24
Faculty Guests: Chase Gregory, Bryan Vandevender, Meenakshi Ponnsuwami
Additional Support: Virginia Zimmerman (English Department), Kathi Venios and John Penniman (Bucknell Humanities Center and Mellon Foundation), Margaret Marr (Program for Undergraduate Research), Sally Koutsoliotas (Presidential Fellowships)
Date: Spring 2023