MWF 10:30-11:20 Kuykendall 401A
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, O’Casey, Brecht—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 Henrik Ibsen A Doll’s House and Ghosts; Susan Glaspell Trifles; William Butler Yeats and Augusta Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan; John Millington Synge, Riders to the Sea, Sean O’Casey Juno and the Paycock; Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children and Galileo; Caryl Churchill Cloud Nine; Peter Weiss Marat Sade; Tony Kushner, Angels in America, Anna Deveare Smith, Fires in the Mirror; 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, memorizations at least one staging assignment, and a final substantial research paper. There will be individual conferences with an option for revision on all written assignments.