Patrick D. Murphree

This article applies the equal protection standard adopted by the Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe to argue for the use of Medicaid to provide mental health services to undocumented immigrant children to address the traumas of migration, racial prejudice, and living in the United States without documentation.

If a transgender student requests that a school acknowledge that student’s gender identity and that student’s parent objects to a school doing so, the school faces conflicting constitutional imperatives. Resolving this conflict between a transgender student’s right to gender affirmation under the Equal Protection Clause and a parent’s right to dire...

This comment describes federal and Louisiana statutes that prohibit the possession of firearms by individuals convicted of domestic abuse or made subject to a protective order. It then outlines a mechanism for courts to uphold the constitutionality of the Louisiana statutes despite the mandate in the Louisiana Constitution that any restrictions on...

The article critiques a Louisiana Supreme Court decision which upheld a zoning ordinance that discriminates against non-biological and non-marital relationships. I argue that the ordinance violates the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act.

Comedy was the most popular theatrical genre during the French Revolution. Through an examination of over 180 comedies staged in Paris between 1789 and 1799, this dissertation reveals the manner in which the generic structures of comedy, by creating audience expectations of plot, character, and staging, conditioned contemporary theatrical represent...

This article explores a nineteenth-century legal publication: Félix Moreau’s Le Code civil et le théâtre contemporain. The 300-page volume is a detailed catalogue of every reference to the Civil Code in the plays of Alexandre Dumas fils. Moreau itemizes each time one of Dumas’s characters makes a statement about the law that does not accord with th...

Theatre history scholarship has insufficiently explored the role of the names under which theatres advertise themselves to the public. Some names describe the dramatic genres or sensations on offer. Others boast of the real or desired audience composition. Still others relate the theatre and its artists to legal and aesthetic authorities such as pa...

The parodies of Julie Molé's Misanthropie et repentir (1798), an adaptation of Kotzebue's Misanthropy and Repentance (1788), critique not only the sentimental excesses and departures from realism found in the work itself, but also the polarized audience reaction that it generated, ultimately advocating a moderate and rational response. In the conte...

Despite classical precedent for mixed-sex companies, by the seventeenth century most Indian theatre forms employed all-male casts featuring specialized female impersonators. The modern theatre abandoned the practice in the early twentieth century, and although many traditional secular forms followed suit, female impersonation remains the rule in re...

Revolutionary France invaded Belgium in 1792 and annexed its territory in early 1793. La Montansier, a Parisian theatre manager, led one such mission, directing a combined Franco-Belgian company at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels in what was intended to be a repertory of republican propaganda pieces. When the politicized repertory failed to a...

Although masterpieces are exceptional by definition, theatre historians spend most of our time studying "great" plays and "significant" works. In doing so, we privilege the high, the critically-acclaimed, the serious, the avant-garde, and the controversial over the low, the popular, the comic, the familiar, and the conventional. Through my research...

Sentimental Invraisemblance and Post-revolutionary French Identity: Three Parodies of Misanthropie et repentir By the late eighteenth century, the doctrinal tenets of sensibilité had become common cultural property in France, infiltrating not only the arts but also the political and social theories of the philosophes. Their revolutionary descendant...

Outdoor patriotic festivals were a characteristic feature of French Revolutionary culture. In addition to lending their performative and scenographic expertise to the outdoor festivals, theatre artists participated in this culture of celebration by representing revolutionary fêtes and rituals on the stages of Paris.60 Staging these ceremonial festi...

The opening tableaux of Jean Genet's The Balcony show leaders of the church, the judiciary and the military rapturously absorbed in sadomasochistic revels. The Bishop, the Judge and the General turn out to be ordinary men playing these roles in a brothel: Le Grand Balcon, Madame Irma's "House of Illusions." Genet sets his play in a brothel to foreg...

When confronting a script, I frequently ask myself, "What would the actor do with this material?" By imagining and then enacting the specific performance choices available to an actor for a particular scene, speech or moment, a theatre historian can develop a different understanding of a historical stage event than that arrived at through documenta...

This paper evaluates a unique contribution to dramaturgy of the early years of the French Revolution: the convent drama. I argue that the scenographic potential of displaying "hidden" and liminal spaces on the stage reinforced anticlerical and patriarchal attitudes towards nuns. The evolution of this dramatic genre paralleled the political process...

This paper analyzes two French plays of 1793: Laya's L'Ami des lois and Marechal's Le Jugement dernier des rois. Each play reflects a particular republican vision for revolutionary France: the former a conservative vision and the latter a more radical vision. I demonstrate how the structures and themes of each work both reflect and create the socia...