English: Introduction to Drama

Study of the play as a work of literature and as a dramatic experience. Continental, British, and American drama from all ages.

Open to Degree and PACE students

In this class we survey dramatic literature across a range of time periods, theatrical movements, and geographic locations. With a keen ear to the call and response between historical and modern plays, we explore issues of theatre history, dramatic form, genre, and language. As we investigate the function of world building in the theatre, we notice how drama operates as a blueprint – always attempting to map out what it means to be human across time and space. In our reading, conversations between playwrights are gleaned across centuries indicating the ways that the best writers are always prolific readers. A sample of plays we will explore include Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (429 BCE) alongside Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1955); the medieval morality play Everyman (ca. 1510) and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Everybody (2017); Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1604-5), and James Ijames’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fat Ham (2022); Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) with Sarah Treem’s The How and the Why (2011); and Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) and Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, English (2021).