Modern Drama and the History of Acting

In the professional theatre, the actor’s craft offers a serious methodology for textual interpretation. This course brings acting theory and practical acting exercises into the English literature classroom as tools to aid in analyzing modern drama. Because innovations in playwriting and acting often have arisen in tandem, the semester will take us on a tour of landmark 20th-century plays and developments in western theatre history. We will spend the beginning of each class session (around thirty minutes) on-our-feet, experimenting with a performance exercise from the week’s acting readings. We will then devote the remainder of each class session to a roundtable seminar discussion about the week’s play.

In addition to offering a new methodology for close-reading and enlivening new avenues of interpretation, acting’s traditional focus on the “character” or “role” will raise large questions about the human: What are the nature and limits of identification and empathy? Which acting styles encourage practitioners to seek something universal in human emotion or experience? Conversely, which propose to investigate the historical and cultural specificity of human behavior? Can the process of constructing a character shed light on the social construction of gender, race, and disability? How do these plays, from different decades and regions, represent changing conceptions of these social categories? Are some acting styles inherently political or more political than others? Each student will engage these questions in an embodied as well as a theoretical way by rehearsing a monologue or scene and performing it in-class. However, no performance experience is required to enroll in this course, and students will not be graded on their acting abilities.