ENG 242 - Introduction to Drama

American Theatre Post-Angels in America II
In a 2018 article, “The Great Work Continues,” the New York Times asked how American theatre had changed since the first production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in 1993, and named the best 25 American plays written since then. This course begins with a study of Kushner, laying the groundwork for further study of the current state of American theater. This semester covers plays produced between 2000 and 2007, and includes plays from the Times’s list as well as Pulitzer Prize winners. Writers will include Suzan-Lori Parks, Wallace Shawn, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Sarah Ruhl, Nilo Cruz, David Auburn, and others.

Black British Playwrights
What does it mean to be Black and British in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? This course will attempt to answer this question by reading a selection of plays written by Black British playwrights between 1998 and 2018. The course will look at how experiments with form, subject matter, and genre explore the experiences of Black people in local, national, and international contexts.

Introduction to Shakespeare
This course serves as a general introduction to Shakespeare’s drama and poetry. We will read major plays in the principal genres of comedy, history, and tragedy, charting the development of Shakespeare’s craft over the course of his nearly 30-year career by contrasting early and late examples of his work. We will consider plays within the performance context of the early modern theater, developing a working knowledge of the theatrical conventions and cultural understandings that inform them. Reading Shakespeare’s narrative poems and sonnets in tandem with this writing for the stage, we will explore the complexities of Shakespeare’s language, including his use of poetic forms and devices. Given the breadth and variety of Shakespeare’s artistic production, we will ask ourselves what shared themes and characteristics allow us to identify a work as “Shakespearean.” Assigned texts will include, among others, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Henry V, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, as well as performances recorded at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. This course applies toward the department’s pre-1700 requirement.

Irish Drama and the Politics of Place
The twentieth-century rise of Irish theater and Irish nationalism both coalesced around an ideal of rural life independent from British colonial rule. Depopulated by waves of famine and unrelenting emigration, the green world of peasant plays and Gaelic legends envisioned alternative forms of modernity grounded in a rural past, even as theatrical audiences became increasingly urban and global. This course explores the problem of pastoral representation in the history of the Irish stage and in the staging of Irish history. From the rose gardens and leisured English lovers of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) to the faerie stories and folklore of The Celtic Twilight, we trace a legacy adapted from British literary genres and motifs, but revived and reinvented for a national tradition rooted in precolonial myth. Pastoral drama was not merely a retreat from partisan violence, but a site of conflict in the turbulent decades leading up to Irish independence, as we find in the cultural nationalist projects of W.B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory, and in the audience riots sparked by J.M. Synge and Sean O’Casey unflinchingly unromantic portrayals of poverty and pain. Connecting historical developments to the politics of place, we analyze how Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh engage and resist the legacy of rural Ireland on the stage. Topics include exile and diaspora; sectarian violence in relation to gender, class, race, and ethnicity; postcolonial theory and global Englishes; and the history of the Troubles. Although at times this bloody history seemed, as the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney put it, “about as instructive as an abattoir,” the art it yielded still has the capacity “to hold in a single thought reality and justice,” one of his favorite Yeats quotations. From the Celtic Revival to the Celtic Tiger, we examine the struggle between reality and justice in Irish drama, and the power of theater to create the country as it was, and as it could be.

Shakespeare on Screen
Although Shakespeare’s plays were written for live performance “in the flesh,” we increasingly engage with his works through screens-in recorded performances, films, television shows, digital archives, and even video games. In this course we will use concepts from the fields of media and performance studies to analyze the implications of these shifts from live performance to screen-based engagement. How does the medium in which we encounter an early modern play influence our understanding of its language? What opportunities for interpretation and creative adaptation are opened or foreclosed by the different media in which a play appears?

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken 4 times for credit
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability. Review descriptions for specific applicability to department requirements.

Introduction to Shakespeare
This course applies toward the department’s pre-1700 requirement.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).