This course will focus upon late nineteenth through
early twenty-first-century drama to come to some conclusions about how Western
theatre, as a genre and as an institution, has been adapted, built upon,
rejected, parodied, or transformed in indigenous, national minority,
class-identified, gendered, and settler cultures and sub-cultures. We’ll look
at some landmark earlier writers—Ibsen, Brecht, Yeats, O’Casey—and then move on
to post-WWII writers, ending with a focus on Hawai‘i and the Pacific.
Playwrights and plays to be discussed will include,
depending on availability and time, Henrik Ibsen A Doll’s House; William Butler Yeats and Augusta Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan; Sean O’Casey Juno and the Paycock; Susan Glaspell Trifles; Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children and Galileo; Caryl Churchill Cloud Nine; August Wilson, TBA; Peter
Weiss Marat Sade; Anna Deveare Smith,
Fires in the Mirror; James Rado and
Jerome Ragni Hair; Victoria Kneubuhl,
Hawai‘i Nei: Island Plays; Vilsoni
Hereniko and Teresia Teaiwa, The Last
Virgin in Paradise; Suzan-Lori Parks Top
Dog / Underdog; Alani Apio, Kāmau
Students
will be required to provide frequent postings on the course content, as well as
theatrical review assignments, short critical and theoretical papers, at least
one staging assignment, and a final substantial research paper. There will be
individual conferences with an option for revision on all written