ENGL 216 - Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 1800

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Study of modern dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.

Topic for 2015/16b: Dysfunctional Families. This course explores modern American plays that present debacles in the private sphere and its most widely accepted, codified, and institutionalized social manifestation: the family. As a site of incessant conflicts and negotiations between the individual and the other, and between the intimate and the public, the family offers an ideal framework and subject matter for commentary on a variety of moral and social issues. Through an overview of twentieth (and early twenty-first) century American drama, this course pays particular attention to the vestiges of the American Dream in a range of dramatic representations of dysfunctional families. As a survey with a special focus, the course includes plays by Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, David Henry Hwang, Tracy Letts, Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Eugene O’Neill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson. We also read selected theoretical texts about the role and significance of family in the 20th century. We place a great emphasis on the performative aspects of our discussed plays: we perform selected scenes as well as view and discuss a theater production staged at Vassar or in our larger area during the semester. Mr. Márkus.