Hatch - Contemporary American Drama ENGL 449 (Course Description)

This course will introduce students to recent developments in contemporary writing for the American stage. It will also introduce the historical, social/political, and conceptual frameworks necessary to make sense of these developments and to write about them critically and innovatively. We will investigate how twenty-first century playwrights in the US respond meaningfully to the broader concerns of their time and place(s), and thus how they reimagine the cultural and political function of theatrical forms for a new era. Among the concerns that make the plays on our reading list contemporary in the strong sense, we will discover the following: questions of subjectivity (of race, gender, sexuality, class) that go beyond and challenge the traditional frame of identity politics; the specter of terrorism and the crises of globalization; the link between revolution and democracy; the poetics of the everyday; theater’s relationship to other art forms and genres of writing; and the perennial question of spectatorship. The diverse body of work we will examine over the course of the quarter covers an extremely broad stylistic range; indeed, we will come to find that stylistic pluralism is one of the key characteristics of twenty-first century theater writing. Some of the plays we read will fall within the traditional genre of drama, while others subvert this traditional structure and thus require us to take up a new, “postdramatic” critical vocabulary to account for how they work as texts, both on the page and on stage. Though careful reading, engaged discussion, and critical writing, we will attempt to articulate what “theater” means to America, and what “America” means to the theater, in the new century.