Personal Praxis: Experiencing Lucille Ball’s Performance Strategies & Innovations Across Media

Lucille Ball has long been lauded the “first lady of television” known for her comedy modernisms as both a practitioner and producer. But how did the comedienne discover, create, and then elaborate on a persona that would come to be fittingly loved by slews of fans for years to come? 

The event will commence with the 10-year anniversary screening of Becoming Lucy, the short film that inspired the workshop to follow.

In the hopes of discovering and experiencing this phenomenon, we will explore Lucille Ball’s performance strategies & innovations across two mediums - radio and television - through a live workshop of the 1948 My Favorite Husband radio episode, “Liz & Iris' Easter,” a precursor to I Love Lucy’s “The Diet." As first written by Bob Carroll Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and Jess Oppenheimer, how might contemporary improvisations and script updates affect a present-day audience, writer, and performer? 

With similar scripts but the innovative introductions of a live studio audience and heightened physical comedy, we expect varying results. As the related fields of adaptation theory and intertextuality continue to grow, this experiential research anticipates ramifications beyond the theatre, radio, and film communities. And who better to lead this inquiry than an accomplished playwright and an award-winning Lucille Ball impersonator? 

Gabrielle Sinclair Compton is a playwright who researches new ways to generate creative work. Recent plays include: The Resolute (finalist, Jane Chambers playwriting award), Alcestis (co-writer, UGA mainstage), This Little Light (ATHICA artist residency), The Bride Project (Love Me Gender Festival, Vienna), Showing (Ingram New Works Lab, Nashville Rep), and Telling the Bees: The Just Now (Winner, Georgia Theatre Conference One-Act Play Competition). Gabrielle is currently pursuing her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at UGA. MFA Playwriting - Actors Studio Drama School, NYC. 

Alexis Lygoumenos is a Theatre and Performance Studies PhD student at the University of Georgia. She received her MFA in Acting from the New York Film Academy, trained at the Yale Summer Actors Conservatory, the New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts, and the University of Oxford’s Light Entertainment Society. Under the stage name Alexis Nichols, she is an award-winning actor, writer, director, and voiceover artist.  She is most noted for appearing as Lucille Ball in Becoming Lucy, a film she co-wrote, which premiered at the Festival De Cannes Court Metráge in May of 2013 and has been traveling around the world ever since.