ENGH 202: Texts and Contexts

ENGH 202-009: Dramatic Truths
(Spring 2013)

01:30 PM to 02:45 PM TR

Planetary Hall 206

Section Information for Spring 2013

“Each winter at the beginning of theatre season I fall prey to the same thoughts. A hope springs up in me […]. Our theatre desperately needs a new man who will scour the debased boards and bring about a rebirth in an art degraded by its practitioners to the simple-minded requirements of the crowd. Yes, it would take a powerful personality, an innovator’s mind, to overthrow the accepted conventions and finally install the real human drama in place of the ridiculous untruths that are on display today. I picture this creator scorning the tricks of the clever hack, smashing the imposed patterns, remaking the stage until it is continuous with the auditorium, giving a shiver of life to the painted trees, letting in through the backcloth the great, free air of reality.” –Emile Zola, Naturalism in the Theatre, 1881

Theater is inherently fake. Makeup, costumes, scripted lines, painted sets, clichéd emotions…

And yet, a defining feature of western drama in the twentieth century has been the desire to make the theatre “more real,” more authentic, more in touch with social realities—that is, to make the theatre tell the truth.

In this class, we’ll explore the means by which various writers during this period have asserted very different kinds of truth that theatre can tell. We’ll also consider the opposite point of view: we’ll read writers who have insisted that the theatre can’t get beyond its own artifice, and so must be abandoned to make way for a new kind of performance that's more real than what came before. At stake are enduring questions about the social function and value of drama--questions that have come under increasing pressure in light of the seismic cultural, economic, and technological shifts of the past 130 years.

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Course Information from the University Catalog