Materializing Modern Drama and Performan

This course will situate modern dramatic writing at the intersection of several kinds of inquiry focusing the distinctive material conditions of modern dramatic production and theatrical/theoretical critique. One line of thinking will take up the question of booking the play, rendering the play as a printed object to be read, a network of practices we will trace from Bernard Shaw’s desire for a blackened box of dialogue on the page through the idea of a “poetic” drama, to Stein, Beckett, Pinter, Smith, Wellman, and Parks. In tandem, though, we will also be tracing that other materiality outside the text, constituting the text, or a text, as an instrument for use in the richly ideological field of stage production: the problem play in the naturalistic box; episodic revision in the alienating apparatus of epic theatre, the refusal of the “masterpiece” in the dis/embodiment of cruelty, and the script as code in the era of digital reproducibility. Here, we will also bring some of the classic texts of modern dramatic, literary, performance, and technological theory to bear on the drama’s potential intermediation of the literary and the theatrical.

This course, then, will provide both an introduction to an important dimension of performance theory, and an overview of modern drama; it would be a suggestive complement for students working in early modern drama (source of many of the textual issues that continue to animate dramatic writing), as well as for students interested in an introduction to performance theory, and modernism/modern drama.

Seminar meets weekly; there is a brief (one-paragraph) weekly post, and one longer essay. Students are encouraged to use the writing for this course to develop longer range issues (i.e., I’ve had philosophy students who are more interested in the philosophical texts on performance than the dramatic texts, that’s fine; early modern drama students who want to bring some of the thinking about modern problems (text, performance, theory) back to earlier concerns, fine; and so on.