Theatre 100 introduces students to the history and practice of theatre. Beginning in the fifth century BCE and progressing through to the twenty-first century, we will examine representative dramatic texts and discuss their theatrical and social contexts. We will also discuss the development of modern theatre as a collaborative art form relying on the contribution of many artists -- playwrights, actors, directors, designers, stage managers, and technicians. Discussing the evolution of these various roles as well as the changing stages on which theatre has been performed, we will answer such burning questions as: "How did Shakespeare's acting troupe get by without a director?", "Why do method actors have so many psychological problems?", and "Why do actors in small avant-garde companies insist on harassing me when I'm in the audience, touching me, talking to me, making me uncomfortable?"
What are the characteristics of a good play? What does “good” mean, anyway? Should plays follow a clear formula? Should theatre appeal to the mind, to the heart, or to the senses? Should the stage be used as a place of instruction or as a place of play, where anything goes and morality can and should (if only temporarily) be discarded? What should or shouldn’t be the rights and responsibilities of theatre practitioners and their audiences? What is the relationship between individual and collective performance and identity, gender, community? How have larger critical movements influenced the theatre, and how have theatre practitioners influenced larger critical movements in their turn? In Theatre 252, we will examine, discuss, and debate these and other questions/problems as we survey performance theories and methodologies from those of the Greeks to those of today. The premise of this class is that theatre shouldn’t just be something we do–it should also be something we examine and theorize and debate, from a position of familiarity with and understanding of its rich critical and practical history.
Do you ever wonder what could lead a mother to tear her son limb from limb in the forest under cover of darkness? It crossed Euripides’ mind. Or have you ever envisioned a scenario where a father sacrifices his daughter on the day she is supposed to marry the class hunk? It piqued the curiosity of Aeschylus. Why did fifth century Athenians tell and enjoy such tales? Generations of inbreeding? Perhaps. But in this course we shall investigate how these myths and their dramatic representation constituted perhaps the key vehicle through which Athenians articulated and contested some of the ideas and tensions underpinning their democratic community.
In this course, we will examine some of the rich variety of middle English plays written and performed from 1375 to the 1550s, a period in English history marked by significant political, religious, and cultural upheavals. The Peasant’s Revolt (1381), numerous northern rebellions, periods of famine and plague, the development and spread of the Lollard heresy and the eventual Reformation – these events influenced the development and content of early English dramatic texts. As we study the plays, we will therefore work to place them in their social and historical contexts. However, because these texts are dramatic, we will discuss them primarily as blueprints for production, not only medieval but also modern.
In Theatre 353, we will examine representative critical and creative French and Spanish theatrical texts written and staged between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth. In both countries this was a period of productive (and often destructive, vindictive, venomous) debate over the artistic importance of classical dramatic theories and models to the contemporary theatre.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, visual artists in Germany rejected the conventions of realism and advocated a new subjective style of art that projected internal human states (emotions, attitudes) onto external physical reality, modifying or distorting that reality to express the artist's inner vision. In the 1910s, Expressionism in the visual arts began to influence the German stage; European tours made by American artists and the new medium of film allowed its influence to spread in the 1920s across the Atlantic Ocean to the experimental stages of Little Theatres in the United States. In this course we will read a selection of both German and American Expressionist plays, comparing and contrasting the products of these two related but distinct experimental movements.
In this course, we will study works spanning the career of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter: the master of menace, the crafter of the “Pinter Pause,” and the originator of the “Pinteresque.” In Pinter’s plays, the everyday innocuous rapidly degenerates to become the very strange and ominous. A woman on holiday visits the remaining members of her husband’s family, who offer her an alternative life of domestic “bliss.” A lodger at a seaside bed and breakfast is thrown a birthday party by the elderly female proprietor and two mysterious guests. A manipulative tramp is given temporary lodging by down-and-out brothers in their depressing hovel of a home. A group of friends enjoy a cocktail party while outside the army marches, arresting their family members, friends, and colleagues. *Warning: you will leave this course completely unsettled and with your faith in theatre restored.*
In this course, we will examine theatrical representations of Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection, from its early remembrance and re-enactment in the ritual of the Mass and the Easter liturgy to its reinterpretation and re-imagination in plays such as Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi and Adrienne Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000. As we discuss texts ranging from the early and late medieval to the postmodern, we will note and attempt to understand two apparently opposing representational impulses: to historicize the events leading to and including Christ’s death, and to transpose those events, making them contemporaneous with the time of theatrical production. Texts to be discussed will include Jesus Christ Superstar, the York Crucifixion, the N-Town Passion Play, W.B. Yeats' Calvary and The Resurrection, Ghelderode’s The Women at the Tomb, McNally’s Corpus Christi, and Kennedy’s Motherhood 2000. Some previous experience with late medieval English literature would be an asset but is not required.
Published in 1938, Antonin Artaud’s _The Theater and Its Double_ eventually became one of the most influential texts written about theatre in the twentieth century. This collection of manifestos called for an end to psychological realism on the stage and the creation of a new “metaphysical” theatre centred on the body—a body most material and least cerebral or spiritual when in pain. This privileging of body and of images of violation and destruction influenced generations of avant garde theatre artists in Europe, the United States, and Canada in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. In the course, we will study Artaud’s theories, his plays, and examples of the work he inspired.