Global Arc

2016 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. In conjunction with an exhibition at the University Art Museum, this course will largely focus on Shakespeare's "afterlives" since WWII. Although his reputation rests on his work, Shakespeare was invented in the 18th century as something beyond a "mere" playwright. We'll take a brief look at the start of this phenomenon with the 1623 Folio and David Garrick's Stratford Jubilee in 1769, then study some recent manifestations in theater, film, fiction, dance, television, comic books, actor autobiographies, and Shakespearean institutions and festivals from many nations and cultures.

What happens when there is a dead body on stage? Why do corpses star in so many movies? Reverence for the dead is one of the markers of humanity, bound up with the development of societies and cultures. But we also play with dead bodies, spinning stories around them that can be austere or grotesque, tragic or farcical, haunting or hilarious. Dramas and films use dead bodies to explore fear, sex, greed, guilt, innocence and grief. In this course, we contemplate corpses from Antigone to Alfred Hitchcock and from Shakespeare's tragedies to Stand By Me and Weekend at Bernie's and bring the dead to life.

The dramaturg of a Theater is at the center of the theater-making process. The dramaturg reads and assesses new scripts; prepares classic plays for production; acts as an historical and literary resource for playwrights, directors, actors and designers; advises on artistic policy; writes program notes; and works with the education and publicity departments on the theater's "public face."

This course offers a practice-based overview of theater-making in the twenty-first century through an intensive study of contemporary Latinx dramatists, companies, and movements in the United States. Through weekly readings, discussions and independent research/writing exercises, the seminar will investigate the cultural, artistic, social and political interventions of twenty-first century US Latinx drama.

The South African Anti-Apartheid movement saw mass resistance against the government's racial segregationist policies. Students will learn about the conditions that gave rise to Apartheid and the Anti-Apartheid movement, taking a look at the instrumental role that the performing arts and protest theatre played in dismantling the unjust system. Participants will develop performance work of their own based in South African protest theatre, encouraging a rejection of excess and on seeing obstacles as opportunities. Students will craft original protest theatre works that address sociopolitical concerns of their choosing.

Since he burst onto the theatre scene with The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996, Martin McDonagh has produced some of the most vivid, but also some of the most controversial work in contemporary drama and cinema. His plays and films are violent, lurid, transgressive and often grotesque, yet they also lend themselves to performances of great subtlety and sensitivity, like Frances McDormand's in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. We explore McDonagh's extreme imagination, its roots in Irish Gothic, Grand Guignol, the Grimm Brothers, Antonin Artaud and the theatre of the absurd and its uncomfortable use of race and disability.

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.