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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
A study of drama and theatre in the United States since 1900, including Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre, Thorton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Emily Mann, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Lorraine Hansberry, David Henry Hwang, David Rabe, Luis Valdez, and Tony Kushner. We explore these writers and their texts as they relate to the page, to the stage, and to U.S. culture at large. We discuss how these writers (and others) represent themselves and notions of "American-ness" in their dramatic works. We include important works from the margins, as well as those that represent the mainstream. Does modern U.S. drama lead or follow U.S. culture? Does it tend to be a design for living or a reflection of custom? We also explore the role of gender in culture as demonstrated in these works. Does U.S. drama question the status quo or reinforce it? These and other interrogations inform our readings, discussions, and written assignments.
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4.00 Credits
This course (different each time) focuses on two or three related major playwrights, for example, Brecht and Shaw, Chekhov and Williams, Churchill and Bond, Beckett and Pinter, Strindberg and O'Neill. Makes an in-depth study of their writings, their theories, and the production histories of their plays in relation to biographical, cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts.
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4.00 Credits
The study of African American dramatic traditions from early minstrelsy to turn-of-the-century musical extravaganzas; from the Harlem Renaissance folk plays to realistic drama of the 1950s; from the militant protest drama of the 1960s to the historical and experimental works of the present. Issues of race, gender, class; of oppression and empowerment; of marginality and assimilation are explored in the works of such playwrights as Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Charles Fuller, George C. Wolfe, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Anna Deavere Smith. The sociohistorical context of each author is also briefly explored.
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4.00 Credits
Acts as both an introduction to the genre of Asian American theatre and an interrogation into how this genre has been constituted. Through a combination of play analysis and historical discussion-starting with Frank Chen's The Chickencoop Chinaman, the first Asian American play produced in a mainstream venue-the class looks at the ways Asian American drama and performance intersect with a burgeoning Asian American consciousness. We review the construction of Asian American history through such plays as Genny Lim's Paper Angels and more recent works such as Chay Yew's A Language of Their Own. We also read theoretical and historical texts that provide the basis for a critical examination of the issues surrounding Asian American theatre. Orientalism, media representation, and theories of genealogy inform our discussion.
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4.00 Credits
Major forms, plays, and theories of socially engaged theatre exemplifying performance as a site of resistance, social critique, and utopianism. While the course provides an examination of the historical development of political theatre, focus may vary semester to semester, from an examination of activist forms including agit-prop, pageantry, epic theatre, documentary, street theatre, and women's performance art, to major theoretical perspectives and their practical translations since Brecht, including Boal and feminist and queer theory, to plays and productions by the Blue Blouse, Clifford Odets, Bertolt Brecht, the Living Theatre, Bread and Puppet, El Teatro Campesino, Heiner Mueller, Caryl Churchill, Athol Fugard, Ng˜ug˜ wa Thiong'o, Split Britches, Tony Kushner, Emily Mann, and others.
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4.00 Credits
The two decades or so following World War II were a particularly exciting period in the history of drama in Europe and America. This course focuses on five playwrights-Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Adrienne Kennedy, and Peter Weiss- whose engagements with postwar history and politics shaped the form and content of their works for the stage. Questions include modes of representing historical experience, theatre and historical forms of spectatorship, and challenges to genre. The presumption is that we cannot know in advance what it means to describe a play as "political." Readings include Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and selected shorter plays; Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Orpheus Descending; Genet's The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens; Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White; and Weiss's Marat/Sade and The Investigation.
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4.00 Credits
Explores plays written by Shakespeare's collaborators, rivals, and followers-English drama in the age of Shakespeare written by playwrights other than Shakespeare. These are plays about worldconquering heroes, murderous conspirators, riotous good-fellows, and star-crossed lovers; they are also about the fast-changing culture of early modern England, dealing with new patterns of urban life, emergent notions of republican politics and personal liberty, the discovery of new worlds and new sciences, and the increasing pressures of European war, revolution, and civil war. A different play each week. Plays by Beaumont, Brome, Dekker, Fletcher, Ford, Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, Milton, Shirley, and Webster.
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4.00 Credits
An introduction to the history, theories, and practices of Latin American drama, focusing on the 20th century. We pay special attention to the historical reinvention of European-based theatrical forms in the Americas through their continuous interaction with non-European cultural forms. Through the plays of leading dramatists-including Jorge DÃaz, Major/Minor in Dramatic Literature Egon Wolff, and Sergio Vodanovic (Chile); José Triana (Cuba); René Marquez and Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico); Isaac Chocrón (Venezuela); Emilio Carballido, Luisa Josefina Hernández, Sabina Berman, and Elena Garro (Mexico); and Osvaldo Dragún, Eduardo Pavlovsky, Roberto Cossa, and Griselda Gambaro (Argentina)-we explore the significance of modernist and postmodernist dramatic forms in cultures where industrial modernity is an insecure social context. We study the wealth of oppositional theatre in Latin America-exemplified by Augusto Boal's "theatre of the oppressed"-in relation to the historical use (or abuse) of theatrical spectacle as a political means to control peoples, from the early Spanish conquerors to recent authoritarian state leaders. We read postcolonial Latin American theories of culture and art, such as hybridity, transculturation, Brazil's modernist and anticolonial antropofagÃa, and the "aesthetics of hunger," drawing on the work of Fernando Ortiz, Angel Rama, and Néstor GarcÃa Canclini, among others. We consider "magical realism" in the theatre as a social poetics of scarcity.
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4.00 Credits
This course (different each time) examines different traditions, innovations, representations, and locations of Asian theatre. The influence of major aesthetic texts, such as the Natyasastra and the Kadensho is studied in relationship to specific forms of theatre, such as Kagura, Bugaku, Noh, Bunraku, Kabuki, Shingeki, Jingxi, Geju, Zaju, Kathakali, Kathak, Odissi, Chau, Manipuri, Krishnattam, Kutiyattam, Raslila, and P'ansori. The dramatization of religious beliefs, myths, and legends is examined in a contemporary context. Different focuses include Middle Eastern performance, Japanese theatre, traditional Asian performances on contemporary stages, religion and drama in Southeast Asia, and traditions of India.
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4.00 Credits
An in-depth study of the origins, characteristics, and practical application of techniques of nonliterary/ multimedia theatre, performance, and dance theatre. Emphasis is placed on theatrical forms that have been influenced by the theories of Artaud and the European avant-garde; John Cage and visual aesthetics related to American acting, painting, collage, and environmental and conceptual art. Types of performance studied include dadaist, surrealist, and futurist plays; multimedia happenings of Karpov, Oldenberg, and Whitman; conceptual self-works and solos of performers such as Vito Acconci, Karen Finley, Spalding Gray, and Diamanda Galas; and the work of avant-gardists such as Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, Mabou Mines, LeCompte's Wooster Group, and Pina Bausch. Readings are supplemented by slides, videotape, and attendance at suggested performance events.
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