Primary researcher(s): Zoe Wilson, Chase Gregory, Bryan Vandevender, Meenakshi Ponnsuwami
Date: Summer 2022 – Spring 2023
When the Only Cure for Motion Sickness is to Keep Moving” is a six-episode podcast in which Zoe 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 Zoe. These episodes also contain conversations with one of the three Bucknell faculty members (from both the English and Theatre/Dance departments) whose help Zoe 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).
