College Catalog

Students are introduced to StatueFest, a theatrical project inspired by discourse on monuments and the dearth of statues reflecting the lives of women. Exploring the notion “Who deserves a statue?” students research, write and produce monologues celebrating the contributions of statue-worthy women. Guest speakers include librarians, historians and artists from previous StatueFest productions. The course culminates with a public performance.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: WRI1110

Through hands-on experience, students explore roles and responsibilities related to Front of House (FOH) management for performing arts venues. Designed to prepare students to work FOH positions in the Conservatories, PAC and other venues, the course introduces students to FOH strategies and duties before, during and after a performance. Focus is on ensuring the safety and well-being of every patron.

Credits: 2

Students explore the creative process by envisioning and developing a visual or performing arts project. Participants build innovative and critical thinking skills while applying basic principles and practices of arts management including fund development and marketing needed to connect and sustain their ventures in today’s challenging marketplace. The course culminates with a public presentation of individual and team projects.

Credits: 3

How have myth, ritual, and performance functioned as ways to comprehend, organize, and even generate the world around us? What are the values and constraints of symbolic structures as they shape and influence bodies and environments? Students consider both structural and poststructural approaches to performance as a medium for exploring, but also transgressing, structures of everyday life.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or THP2020 Or MSA1050 Or MSA1050

An introduction to styles of criticism and a practical course in writing short, critical essays (reviews) on the performing and visual arts. On-campus plays and films are assigned; students write about theatre, film, music, dance, painting, and other art forms.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: JOU2515

Was Shakespeare a rebel? Was he a reactionary? To address these complex questions, students explore Shakespeare’s varied depictions of characters rebelling against patriarchal gender norms, tyrannical leaders, and corrupt governments. In addition to reading plays including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Richard II, 2 Henry VI, Coriolanus, and Macbeth, students analyze various modern adaptations of these and related works.

Credits: 4

How does embodiment reveal shifting notions of race, gender, sexuality, and ability? Students read performance theory and explore contemporary representations of bodies as sites of display, resistance, and re-construction in literature, performance, and everyday practices in transnational and intersectional contexts. Authors include Ntozake Shange, NourbeSe Philip, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, and David Henry Hwang.

Credits: 4

An introduction to Western culture through the study of tragic drama, Plato’s dramatic dialogues, and philosophical reflections on tragedy. The focus is on the possibilities and limitations of human action. Topics include the relations of individual to city, mortal to divine, and male to female; and the roles of knowledge and desire in human conduct. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Toni Morrison are included.

Credits: 4

Explores what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might have meant when he wrote that “all of philosophy may be found in the plays of Shakespeare.” The focus is on a close study of selected works, together with commentary by such thinkers as Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Cavell, and Critchley. Plays include Hamlet, Richard II, Coriolanus, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and King Lear.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2205 Or PHI1515 Or PHI2110

An exploration of revision techniques and strategies in a workshop environment. Students revise existing material through examinations of character, dialogue, and structure; text analysis; and other tools. First drafts and production drafts of contemporary American plays are also studied and discussed.

Credits: 4

Students will examine songs, scenes, and the stories behind musicals from Vaudeville, "Golden Age," megamusicals, "contemporary musical theatre," all the way into the ever-expanding, excitingly diverse peripherals and new perspectives of what musical theatre in the now, fostering inspiration and creating room for what the American Musical Theatre has yet to become.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PSW1000

Examines the history and craft of storytelling in musical theatre. Students consider song topic and placement to structure a short original musical. The ability to read and write music is not required.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PSW1000 And PSW1010

Writers and actors learn tools for working together on new plays. Taught by a playwright and a director, the class studies different collaborative models, including devised theatre, and explores communication strategies for working through creative friction. The course culminates in a final showcase on campus.

Credits: 3

Exploring techniques of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, this course uses the arsenal of Theatre of the Oppressed exercises as a process to further understand self, each other, and surrounding social systems. Individual project forms may vary (sculpture, writing, etc.). In addition, the class makes a forum theatre piece to be performed with the campus community.

Credits: 3

This theatrical translation workshop combines literary analysis and creative writing. Students read Latin American plays in Spanish, discuss them in English, and translate scenes, examining not only the words, but also gestural, visual and cultural meanings. For the final project, class collaboratively translates an entire play and stages a reading. Students should comprehend written Spanish. (Contact professor with questions.)

Credits: 4

Sound Design Fundamentals allows students to explore sound and music through projects, sound experimentation and creation. Covering topics like sound synthesis, sampled instruments, basic music composition, foley as well as recording and post processing techniques for voiceover and field recordings.

Credits: 3

Students work on basic acting skills, e.g., developing the ability to produce free, imaginative, and purposeful behavior in relation to environments, objects, and other persons; individual silent exercises; and group exercises. This work leads to in-class performances of selected scenes from a variety of American contemporary plays, with special focus on the sensory requirements in the text. No previous experience required.

Credits: 3

Explore improvisation and performance techniques through the practical study of theatre games as developed by Viola Spolin in her seminal book, "Improvization for the Theater." Students study this text and practice Spolin’s games and those in her lineage as an introduction to improvisation, leading to longer-form exercises which culminate in an improvised performance at the end of the semester.

Credits: 3

Students participate in an ensemble-based studio production of a single classical text. The course is equal parts textual analysis and skills development for actors (gesture as action, rhetoric, meter, speech, diction, clowning and stage combat). Includes a lab dedicated performing heightened text with freedom and spontaneity. All are welcome. There is no audition required, no previous acting experience is necessary.

Credits: 4

Students participate in an ensemble-based studio production of a single classical text. The course is equal parts textual analysis and skills development for actors (gesture as action, rhetoric, meter, speech, diction, clowning and stage combat). Includes a lab dedicated performing heightened text with freedom and spontaneity. All are welcome. There is no audition required, no previous acting experience is necessary.

Credits: 1

COREQ: THP2000

An introduction to dramatic literature and theory and to seeing, writing about, and participating in theatre and performance.

Credits: 3

An introduction to the methods and goals of Applied Theatre, which generates theatre as a participatory community practice, often in non-traditional settings and with marginalized groups, focusing on issues of social justice, education, and human rights.

Credits: 3

Students work in a variety of capacities in productions within the theatre and performance program. Graded on a pass/fail basis.

Credits: 1

This class introduces students to the language, process, and best practices of intimacy direction and coordination for consent in the creation and realization of performance. Students engage in discussions of terms and theory, learning the fundamentals of approaching material that is intimate in nature, and creating artistic settings where best practices can be enacted and assessed.

Credits: 3

Students explore themes of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays. Students learn to read, edit, and modernize Shakespeare's words, and discover how he promoted, ridiculed, and subverted the sexual norms of his time. The course engages with modern productions, many of which subvert the toxic elements of Shakespeare’s work in provocative ways. 

Credits: 3

Students explore how Shakespeare’s works contributed to the historical formation of various racial and ethnic identities and how the global tradition of Shakespearean performance intermittently perpetuates and refutes racial and ethnic stereotypes. Additionally, students study how non-White authors and performers have and continue to respond to racism within the Shakespeare tradition. Students learn to write critically about race in Shakespeare.

Credits: 4

This course provides students with a foundational understanding of Black performance in several disciplines including theatre, film, dance and music. Students will learn how Black performance has evolved in response to political and cultural shifts and explore artists and historical moments including the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop.

Credits: 4

Discover how to bring your stories to life using the latest artificial intelligence tools and interactive media. The course focuses on narrative design and methods to enhance live performances through various forms of interactive media. It offers an introduction to production with a 21st-Century toolset or audience immersion and interactivity, taking a design-based approach to content creation.

Credits: 4

Learning from west African dancers, musicians, religious practitioners, and theater performers, students will dance daily, explore traditional/ritual based movement/music of indigenous religions/customs, and create sketches of daily life to explore and reflect on the customs and traditions of Beninese culture. Service learning will extend civic engagement for the same purposes.

Credits: 4

Students learn to transform poetry and personal stories into short plays and performance pieces. Poetry and movement are used to create choreopoems. Students also develop interview theatre pieces. Readings and/or video viewings include works by Ntozake Shange, Eve Ensler, and Anna Deavere Smith.

Credits: 4

An introduction to dramatic movement for the stage. Technique, improvisation, repertoire, and composition are explored, using physical language. Students work on solos, duets, and in groups with text, objects, and music. Assignments include classroom presentations, readings, and papers. Videotapes are reviewed and discussed.

Credits: 2

Students learn skills involving unarmed staged fighting for theater and film, incorporating spatial awareness, body language and expression, and working with a partner in a physical capacity, with an emphasis on safety protocols and body autonomy.

Credits: 3

American drama considered primarily as a critique of American society, values, and life. Covers the period from 1916 to 1964, including plays by Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Edward Albee.

Credits: 4

Students explore worldbuilding techniques and tools, covering geography, history, culture, conflict, storytelling, mythology, and religion. This course is designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge needed to create realistic and believable fictional worlds. At the end of the course, students will be able to develop unique and compelling fictional worlds that engage and excite their audiences.

Credits: 4

Explores anatomical and kinesthetic awareness of the body, developing concepts such as strength, alignment, mobility, gesture, and physical relationship. Applying modern dance technique, students engage in physical storytelling, improvisational movement, and emotional authenticity.

Credits: 2

An introduction to stage management, production, and company management. Students who successfully complete this course may be allowed to take TDT 2600.

Credits: 3

Western and world theatre from ancient Greece to 1642, when the theatres of Shakespeare’s time were finally closed. What would now be called actors, playwrights, producers, directors, designers, and theatre architects are all considered.

Credits: 3

Western and world theatre from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Playwrights, actors, directors, producers, and designers; neoclassicism, romanticism, realism, naturalism, expressionism. This course begins where THP 2885 leaves off, but either can be taken independently.

Credits: 3

Students receive training in lighting (hanging, focusing, and maintaining), the use of power tools, and basic set construction. Elements of lighting and set design are also discussed. Requirements include work on a minimum of two productions in the Humanities Theatre as crew and board operators.

Credits: 4

Through practical experience working as a production dramaturg, students learn research methods that bring textual analysis, social context, and theoretical concepts into the creative process. This course functions as a workshop for students to develop dramaturgical materials that will expand and enrich the theatrical experience for both artists and audiences.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2885 Or THP2890

Students create original stories from various sources of inspiration and gain the theatrical tools to tell them. The course focuses on ensemble creation and covers such areas as mime, heightened character, tréteaux, soundscapes, and object manipulation. Requirements include performing, directing, writing, and making props. Designed to help students get in touch with their creative side in a supportive group atmosphere. A background in performance/high school theatre is beneficial but not required.

Credits: 3

Offers film and television directors and actors the opportunity to develop their skills in communicating with each other. In a workshop environment, students rehearse short scenes, working alternately as actors and directors, and learn to communicate, give and take direction, and integrate feedback.

Credits: 2

Offers film/television directors, actors and directors of photography the opportunity to develop their skills in communicating with each other in a workshop environment. Students rehearse short scenes, working alternately as actors and directors, learning to communicate, give and take direction, and integrate feedback. DP's will become competent in building, operating and troubleshooting industry standard HD camera packages and accessories.

Credits: 2

Explores the fundamental connection between voice and text, based on Linklater technique. Using technical and imagistic exercises, students find a free connection to breath, develop resonance and range, release jaw, tongue, and throat tensions, and build vocal strength.

Credits: 3

Focuses on characterization and motivation, with emphasis on interpretation, finding interesting choices for the actor, and the “truth of the moment.” Different contemporary plays and screenplays are used by students. Scenes are used to deepen the actor’s ability to execute honest and purposeful stage acting and communication.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ACT1055 Or THP1055

An introduction to the history and contemporary practice of physical theatre and to the traditions of commedia and pantomime. Includes lectures, mask making, scenario creation, and instruction in and physical practice of the form.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ACT1055 Or THP1055 Or ACT%

Explores immersive design in both live and digital performance, combining practical experience with insight into emerging trends, including environmental, locative, and GPS related narratives and games. Through a mixture of lectures, collaborative design exercises, and guest speakers, the course provides a detailed overview of what it takes to produce projects that combine story and tech.

Credits: 4

Explores the genre of alternate reality or pervasive gaming currently used as an alternative to traditional performance by contemporary theatrical and visual artists, dancers, and musicians. The blurring distinctions between game and narrative are examined, opening new possibilities for performance. Students design and stage their own live alternate-reality game as a means of storytelling or extend an existing narrative through transmedia.

Credits: 4

Explore the unique aesthetics of Black Theatre via analysis and performance of plays by such writers as Baraka, Cleage, Nottage, and Morisseau. Participants direct and perform scenes with attention to the impact of social and historical contexts on our understanding of genre, style, and language in performance.

Credits: 4

Transmedia narrative can be described as storytelling across multiple forms of media, with each element making distinctive contributions to a user’s understanding of the story world. The course combines this with a study of immersive performance environments that wrap around viewers and production practices that blend video, photography, games, and music to extend the project’s meaning and theatricality.

Credits: 4

A study of the mystery plays, morality plays, interludes, masques, and entertainments of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Analysis of texts is combined with consideration of theatrical production in light of the ideological, religious, and historical contexts of the plays.

Credits: 4

An introduction to the Lecoq method of performance, focusing on physical approach to character, the notion of actor as creator, and the importance of mask work.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ACT1055 Or THP1055

Satire uses humor and ridicule to address fundamental moral, social and political questions. Students will analyze satirical works and practice techniques of “creative criticism” by making satire of their own. We’ll investigate how laughter gets people to let their guard down in order to challenge closed minds, provoke discussion where there was none, and plant the seeds of social change.

Credits: 4

An introduction to the diversity of Asian American theatre and performance, from the late 19th century to the contemporary moment, with an emphasis on 21st century work and current issues. Through an exploration of archival collections, plays, multimedia performances and critical race theory, students analyze the intersections of Asian American histories, aesthetics, politics and identities.

Credits: 4

The use of multiple mediums and immersive narrative design principles is reinventing storytelling. Students explore the bridge between traditional narratives, the emerging demands of mixed reality, and the metaverse. We will also explore how Storytelling affects changes in society. The course will introduce the use of virtuality and augmented design alongside real-world immersive environments.

Credits: 4

Students explore narrative designs that endeavor to extend live immersive performance using interactive media. An introduction to a 21st century toolset for audience immersion and interactivity, the course will take a design-based approach developing a proficiency in developing methodologies of creation techniques. Students will reach audiences with performances that are designed as both live and digitally immersive.

Credits: 4

Without our ancestors, we wouldn’t be here. They deserve celebration. But sometimes they did things we’d rather avoid. Students will research one or several ancestors, to honor them, and also to hold them accountable. Students will engage with family and community to research their familial and cultural pasts and relate them with our present and future through creating plays.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2020 And THP2885

Focuses on postmodern theory and performance. Historical and cross-cultural study of how theatre artists and critical thinkers have addressed issues of aesthetics, representation, style, space, and time.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2020 And (THP2885 Or THP2890 )

Introduces Asian theatre within a global context and explores the social, religious, historical, aesthetic, and political circumstances of traditional performance genres, including ritual, masked/painted face and puppetry, and contemporary intercultural drama and theatre. Training, audience involvement, transformation, authenticity, and theory are highlighted. Field trips are taken when possible.

Credits: 4

Truth Commissions responding to genocides and other conflicts have often involved theatre, in formal collaboration, as in Peru’s Yuyachkani, or informally, as with Serbia’s DAH Teatret. Examining case studies, students write critical and artistic responses, culminating in the creation of an original theatrical piece that fosters truth and reconciliation for a contemporary conflict.

Credits: 4

This course considers 20th- and 21st-century performance work by women in dance, theatre, and the visual art world (performance art) from a historical and theoretical perspective. Critical and theoretical feminist essays and other writings are assigned. Students read original texts, view documentation, and analyze contemporary works by women writers, choreographers, performance artists, and theatre directors.

Credits: 4

Explores the neutral mask and commedia dell’arte, as informed by Lecoq technique. The neutral mask focuses on finding a bodily sense of calm and openness, helps build the actor’s presence on stage, and highlights physical habits that can hinder expression. Commedia dell’arte calls on the actor’s timing, ability to improvise, and humor, and requires big physical choices and delving into the idiosyncrasies of type.

Credits: 3

An introduction to the fundamentals of designing costumes for theatre and dance productions. As they examine the design process, students explore how and why a designer makes certain choices. Emphasis is placed on how ideas are generated and communicated within the flux of the production process.

Credits: 3

Continued sensory-actualization technique to increase the physical awareness needed to create authentic theatre and characters. Classes include warm-up, technical exercises, improvisations, and monologues.

Credits: 2

PREREQ: THP2760

Come taste the finest sampling of the great Broadway songwriters. Each class examines a particular songwriter (Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim), idea (the subversives: Weill and Bernstein), or era (contemporary voices on Broadway). Students savor recordings, investigate the dramatic qualities of the songs, and analyze lyrics, melody, and song form.

Credits: 4

Designed to assist the actor in interpreting William Shakespeare’s stage directions and in reading clues within his verse in order to make informed performance choices. Classroom exercises assist in developing techniques of Shakespearean performance and enhanced understanding of Shakespeare’s sometimes daunting speeches.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: THP2205 And THP3315

Students read Italian plays and prose works by Luigi Pirandello, Elsa Morante, Elena Ferrante, and Jhumpa Lahiri while also devising and acting in an original performance based on these stories and interviews with local residents. The final performance offers students a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to perform (in English and Italian) for the community in Pisciotta’s oldest medieval piazza.

Credits: 4

Using physical theatre techniques, students work in ensembles‹with each student functioning as actor, director, writer, and designer‹to develop performances that address issues relevant to contemporary society. Coursework includes readings in pertinent genres (e.g., tragedy, melodrama, and documentary theatre), research into dramatically resonant current events, and a culminating performance of ensemble-devised work.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ACT1055 Or THP1055

Meeting at the Academy of Drama in Prague, students study and perform plays by Václav Havel, the dissident playwright imprisoned during the Communist era who became president of the Czech Republic. Students explore political and cultural contexts of theatrical performance, enhanced by meetings with theatre professionals and visits to sites relevant to the intersection of artistic creation and political revolution.

Credits: 6

Spend three weeks studying with Mayan artists and scholars to learn about the intersections of human rights and performing arts in Guatemala. Lectures and workshops cover ancient and modern Guatemalan history, Mayan cosmology, Mayan language, and local ecology. Artistic workshops focus on Mayan performance techniques. Create original works in collaboration with Mayan students, and present them in communities.

Credits: 3

Virginia Woolf captures sensory detail and internal thought like few other writers. This dramatization of perception makes her work ripe for adaptation. Students will read selections of Woolf's essays, short stories, and novels, and study theatrical adaptations of her work. Students will explore translating Woolf’s iconic vision into theatrical shape by creating immersive stage adaptations of her work

Credits: 4

An in-depth exploration of fundamental stage-management skills in each phase of the production process: preproduction, first rehearsal, rehearsal period, preparing for the tech, technical rehearsals, previews, opening, running of the show, and closing.

Credits: 3

This course aims to define a decolonized canon of Black American dramatic works. Plays are read as literature and considered in sociopolitical contexts, alongside study of significant creative movements and influential artists. Playwrights studied span the 20th and 21st centuries, including James Baldwin, Katori Hall, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Tyler Perry, among others.

Credits: 4

Students collect, assemble, and perform scripts based on “lore” (oral history, personal narratives). History is seen as a performative way to construct identity. Includes readings by documentary playwrights like Brecht, Emily Mann, and Caryl Churchill.

Credits: 4

Invites students on an introspective journey that uses performance to answer the question “Who am I?” Throughout the semester, students will explore various styles of solo performance, including as creator, audience and/or subject. Assignments include both creative and writing based projects.

Credits: 4

Explores how LGBTQ identities and issues are represented in diverse dramatic forms, performance styles, and cultural venues. Through discussions, presentations, and writing assignments, students analyze queer theatre in relation to production history, theories of sexuality, and cultural and political contexts (both past and present).

Credits: 4

Students analyze film, television and stage performances that depict Black gay men. Students synthesize historical and political context, artistic perspectives, and the unique intersectional realities of Black and gay identity towards a deeper understanding of these artistic and cultural perspectives. Works studied include both mainstream hits that permeate the zeitgeist, and niche, yet culturally significant works that shift the narrative.

Credits: 4

This course investigates indigenous theatrical literature and performances from the 1970s to the present. This global course examines indigenous theatre from North and South America, the Pacific Rim, and the Middle East. Attention is given to patterns of colonialism and capitalism, along with designing plans of action to initiate racial, economic, and environmental justice in response to works examined.

Credits: 4

The historical importance of Michael Chekhov lay in bringing revised Stanislavsky acting methods to America, emphasizing responses to psychological impulses via movement in harmony with the character’s thoughts, emotions, and desires. Students infuse tangible actions of body and voice with intangible feelings, sensations, and images from the actor’s imagination, using techniques such as archetypal/psychological gestures and “centers” in character development.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ACT1055 Or THP1055

Collaborate on creating site-specific work culminating in a performance. Students maintain journals of discoveries and observations and participate in writing exercises and structured improvisations. Readings, excursions, experiences, and individuals encountered in Benin will inform the performance. A goal is to discover how setting and surroundings can help shape and enrich expression and imagination.

Credits: 3

Students study, attend, and create contemporary performance works.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2020

Shakespeare goes to celluloid, Hollywood, Japan, TV, and elsewhere. On the one hand, this is a Shakespeare seminar, with emphasis on discussions of the plays themselves. On the other, it becomes a film course, focusing on analyses of screen adaptations.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2205 Or LIT2205

A team-taught introduction to collaboration between designers and directors with a focus on communication in realizing a given theatrical production. Students focus on the scenic designer and director collaboration with guest artists from other design and production areas. For directing and production concentrations in THP and anyone interested in learning skills of collaboration in the theatre.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2895

An immersion in project-based study of projection design for theater and contemporary performance. Students will develop designs based on script analysis, visual interpretation and collaboration with other designers and directors. Alongside learning principles of video projection and techniques for image editing and visualization, students will be introduced to software applications used in professional theatre.

Credits: 3

Engaging with a wide variety of plays and performances, students explore U.S. Latino theatre as a site of personal, cultural, and political intervention. Readings reflect the aesthetics, narratives, historical contexts, and systems of theatrical production pertinent to Latino culture in the U.S.

Credits: 4

Deepen our knowledge of the science, politics, and history around climate change, studying companies and artists who have used theatre to incite societal change, and interfacing with contemporary theatre artists addressing the climate crisis. Create theatrical actions and interventions designed to push public dialogue and action around this most crucial of issues.

Credits: 4

Together we map a geography of tourist productions across the globe. Through readings, lectures, fieldwork and archival research, students explore concepts related to tourist conventions and the tourist gaze. Topics include display culture and performances of ethnicity and identity; experience economies and the politics of travel and leisure; globalization and the commodification of culture and place.

Credits: 4

Examine the social construction of dis/ability, primarily in the US, with a focus on the role of theatre and performance in shaping and challenging dis/ability narratives. Through interdisciplinary, intersectional and interpersonal analyses, students explore issues and identities (as well as solidarities) related to physical, sensory, intellectual and psychological differences and variabilities.

Credits: 4

An introduction to directing plays. Students stage scenes from a diverse array of contemporary plays and investigate methods for preparation, text analysis, research, and the rehearsal/ production process. Readings from Anne Bogart, Katie Mitchell and others introduce the basics of the director’s craft while also imagining how to discover and shape the impact, or the “why now?” of a production.

Credits: 4

Study the craft of directing through staging a classic experimental play in translation, creating theatrical responses that radically interrogate form and trace its legacy in contemporary performance. Students explore language, intention, time, space and multidisciplinary tools while also learning best practices in collaboration. Study of innovative productions that re-imagine/explode classical work complements this invention, inspiring students’ own developing directorial voice.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP3680

In this introduction to strategies of collective creation, students are engaged in a process that culminates in an end-of-semester performance. Students engage with multiple modes of physical theatre creation, including training in Viewpoints, Laban and Lecoq.

Credits: 3

American theatre and society during the last 50 years. Plays by Jones (Baraka), Mamet, Shepard, Hwang, Kushner, Fornes, Marsha Norman, Sarah Ruhl, and August Wilson. Some knowledge of the American drama of O’Neill, Williams, and Miller is required.

Credits: 4

A study of revolutions in theatre, and theatre at the time of historic revolutions. Students study plays (Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, Buchner’s Danton’s Death, Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade), and movements (guerrilla street theatre, Chicano theatre, Bread and Puppet, Living Theatre), focusing on theatre as an active, participatory art and on drama as a literary form.

Credits: 4

Is there a childhood picture or storybook or graphic novel that you’ve always wanted to see onstage? This course studies the contexts and conventions related to page-to-stage adaptations of children’s literature. Through the interpretation of source materials, and the development of dramatic and sensory storytelling techniques, students will create multigenerational theatre designed to foster empathy, inclusion and imagination.

Credits: 4

For the ensemble director and actor/creator, a course in creating devised theatre. Using a range of source materials, including short stories, news articles, and interviews, students learn tools and strategies for company-created works. This is a rigorous immersion in building a collaborative vision through structured improvisation, space, character, narrative arc, and mise-en-scène.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP3680 Or THP3685

Examines major artists who work visually, experientially, and sonically across multiple performance platforms of theatre, opera, dance and installation, including William Kentridge, Ariane Mnouchkine, Simon McBurney, Bill T. Jones, Janet Cardiff, Kara Walker among others. Students create their own projects inspired by these artists’ experiments in order to explore new compositional approaches to theatrical form as directors and creators.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP3680

Malaise, futility, despair, and, sometimes, hope in the plays of Pirandello, Brecht, Giraudoux, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Osborne, Pinter, Churchill, and others, from World War I to somewhere short of tomorrow.

Credits: 4

Study and dramatic interpretation of 20th-century lyric poetry, including Eliot, Roethke, Sexton, Plath, Olds, Ginsberg, Rich, Stafford, and Giovanni. Workshop atmosphere; solo and group techniques of performance and script making; written analyses.

Credits: 4

A collaborative research workshop in which students and faculty members investigate current topics and trends in theatre training and pedagogy. Relevant topics include institutional contexts for theatre curricula; diversity and inclusion; culturally-responsive learning environments; equitable assessment and evaluation; arts-based research methods; interdisciplinary creativity; distributed problem solving; (pre)professional ethics, and community engagement.

Credits: 3

Focuses on the relation between text and production in the theatre through play analysis, theoretical readings, research, student presentations, and discussion of campus productions. A substantial research paper and senior project proposal with annotated bibliography are required. Required for all junior theatre and performance majors, and normally open only to them.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: THP2020 And THP2205 And THP2885 And THP2890

Students rehearse and perform a role or work on the production of a main-stage show directed by a faculty member or other professional director. Students may enroll only after they have been cast or assigned to the production.

Credits: 3

Rather than focusing on the critically acclaimed plays that make up the canon of American drama, this course examines plays that were the most popular and commercially successful of their time. Combining historical research, textual analysis, and cultural theory, students discuss the long-running Broadway hit plays of the past 100 years from artistic, commercial, and ideological perspectives.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: (THP2600 Or LIT2600 ) Or THP2890

Examines and develops skills in theatrical production including stage management, fundraising, marketing, and artistic producing. Studies production models in the recent history of the field and applies acquired knowledge and skills to the production of the cohort's individual senior projects.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: THP3890

Examines queer performance beyond traditional drama and theatre including drag shows, stand-up comedy, and live music. Students critically analyze and explore the ways in which queer performance engages with current struggles surrounding issues of queer identity, community, and representation. Assignments include both creative and writing projects.

Credits: 4

This course offers a workshop in creating performance/installation adapted and devised from these writings to celebrate how femme bodies (both human and from nature) rise and rebel against systematic abuse. Students study the ecofeminist movement, and performance that addresses climate change to guide their own investigations into creating original work about rising sea levels and female agency.

Credits: 4

Explores the variety of ways in which readers, critics, actors, and directors have interpreted, and can interpret, Shakespeare's plays and poetry. While written work and some research are required, there are also opportunities for oral presentations and performance.

Credits: 4

A deep dive into the theatrical culture of the 1980s—from Broadway musicals (Dreamgirls, Sunday in the Park with George) and popular plays (Neil Simon, August Wilson) to experimental theatre (Caryl Churchill, María Irene Fornés)—in an era pulled between multiculturalism and conservatism. The dramatic arts are positioned within a broader cultural landscape including film, music, television, and visual art.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2890

How do we as actors use our voices to convey story, character, opinion, emotion and information to the audience? Students work to build more dynamic, flexible, present and responsive physical instruments through the practice of tangible, reliable skills and techniques that integrate the breath, the body and the voice into text and performance.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: THP3050 Or THP3315