Global Arc

Some of the best movies ever made focus on the how and why of theatermaking. This course will focus on five classics of Global Cinema that deploy filmic means to explore how theaters around the world have wrestled with artistic, existential, moral, cultural, and professional issues equally central to any serious consideration of moviemaking. These films prompt questions about the nature of each medium, their interrelationship, and our apparent need for both. Along the way, they also offer compelling snapshots of theater and film history.

This course will cultivate an understanding of the reciprocal relationship between reading and producing plays. Students will learn to read plays as literature written for production, by developing an appreciation for what production entails. This course will offer a candid exploration of the wide-ranging role of artistic producing in professional theater and its relationship to the produced work. Using the season planning process at McCarter and othe professional venues as a catalyst for discussion, we will explore the process of creating work for the stage, both classic and contemporary, and the context in which it is produced.

This acting/directing workshop investigates how to stage ancient Greek plays on the contemporary stage and serves as preparation for a future production of a Greek classic in the Berlind Theater. Students will study some of the plays, the contexts in which they were first performed, and approaches taken by theater directors over the last few decades. They will also be on their feet, exploring the play's performative possibilities for themselves.

This seminar explores one of the most quintessentially "American" forms of performance--the Broadway musical theater--in the context of U.S. culture from the mid-20th-century until today. It will begin in 1949 with Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, move through the "Golden Age" of the "integrated" Broadway musical in the 1950s, the "concept" musicals of the mid-1960s, the so-called "death" of the musical in the 1970s, megamusicals of the 1980s, and end with some contemporary musicals. Two 90-minute classes.

This course will offer a survey of London-based drama and theatre from the Elizabethan period to the present, with an eye to the eight or so plays--and periods in theater history they represent--that we will see staged in London in March during spring break. Our historical focus will feature Shakespeare's Globe (and its current reincarnation) and the late-Victorian period. Our contemporary focus will be on the major institutions (the Royal Nation Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court, the Donmar Warehouse) and some seminal directors, actors, and playwrights.

As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of "real" life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States - as both industry and creative practice - does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.

From Cross Colours to boom boxes, the 1990s was loud and colorful. But alongside the fun, black people in the U.S. dealt with heightened criminalization and poverty codified through the War on Drugs, welfare reform, HIV/AIDS, and police brutality. We will study the various cultural productions of black performers and consumers as they navigated the social and political landscapes of the 1990s. We will examine works growing out of music, televisual media, fashion, and public policy, using theories from performance and cultural studies to understand the specificities of blackness, gender, class, and sexuality.

This course is designed to endow students with the conceptual and practical skills to design productions in the theater program, or to direct a production with design elements, and to support students in making technical decisions, as well as in collaborating with the rest of the creative team and the technical staff. The course will combine an exploration of visual storytelling and creative collaboration with a grounding in the practical and communicative skills necessary to create the physical world of a production. This course is also appropriate for directors and writers interested in working with design on a departmental production.

A practical course focusing on approaches to classical and contemporary acting styles. Primarily a scene lab investigating the actor/director relationship; performance as a collaborative experience: the exploration of a wide variety of techniques including movement, voice, comedy and musical theatre. Texts will come from a range of playwrights, classical and modern.

This junior seminar explores theories and practices in contemporary theater making in preparation for senior independent work. The seminar aims to create a collaborative cohort of committed theater students. The class will examine questions such as: what are the differences between process and product, what is collaboration, where does the audience fit in to the creative journey. The course will incorporate practical exercises, seminar discussions and visits to rehearsals and performances at Classic Stage Company in New York City.