Academic Bulletin Theater - Course Descriptions - 2012-13

Designed for the liberal arts student, this course explores many aspects of the theater: the audience, the actor, the visual elements, the role of the director, theater history, and selected dramatic literature. The goal is to heighten the student’s appreciation and understanding of the art of the theater. Play readings may include Oedipus Rex, MacBeth, Tartuffe, An Enemy of he People, The Government Inspector, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Caucasian, Chalk Circle, Waiting for Godot, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Topdog/Underdog, and Angels in America .The student will be expected to attend and write critiques of the Wabash College Theater productions staged during the semester he is enrolled in the course. This course is intended for the non-major/minor and is most appropriately taken by freshmen and sophomores.

 Prerequisite: None.

Offered first half of spring semester.

Prerequisite: None.

Offered second half of spring semester.

 Prerequisite: None.

This course is intended to introduce students to film as an international art form and provide an historical survey of world cinema from its inception to the present. The course will focus on key films, filmmakers, and movements that have played a major role in pioneering and shaping film. Selected motion pictures will be screened, studied, and discussed with special emphasis placed on learning how to "read" a film in terms of its narrative structure, genre, and visual style. Specific filmic techniques such as mise en scene, montage, and cinematography will also be considered. Genre study, auteurism, and ideology will be explored in relation to specific films and filmmakers, as well as the practice of adaptation (from theater to film, and most recently, film to theater). Offered fall semesters.

 Prerequisite: None.

This course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of acting through physical and vocal exercises, improvisation, preparation of scenes, and text and character analysis. Students will prepare scenes from modern plays for classroom and public presentation. Plays to be studied and presented include Of Mice and Men, The Odd Couple, The Zoo Story, and original one-act plays written by Wabash College playwriting students. Offered fall semesters.

  Prerequisite: None.

This course introduces students to the fundamental concepts and practices of play production. Students develop a deeper awareness of technical production and acquire the vocabulary and skills needed to implement scenic design. These skills involve the proper use of tools and equipment common to the stage, technical lighting, sound design, scene painting, and prop building. Students will demonstrate skills in written and visual communication required to produce theater in a collaborative environment. The course will prepare the student to become an active part of a collaborative team responsible for implementing the scenic design elements of theatrical productions. Offered spring semesters.

Prerequisite: None.

This course traces the design and technical production of scenery as environments for theatrical performance from concept through opening night. Areas covered include set and lighting design, technical production, and costume design. This course will provide the liberal arts student with an exploration of the creative process. Lab arranged. Offered fall semesters.

Prerequisite: None.

This course is an in-depth look at the process of costume design from start to finish. Through a series of design projects, students will explore the relation of costuming to theater history and performance, and the culture at large. Combining historical research, character and script analysis, collaborative projects, and the intensive study of the elements and principles of design, color theory and rendering, students will gain a comprehensive understanding of the costume designer’s creative practice.

Prerequisite: None.

The course will survey non-Hollywood international movements in the history of cinema. It will explore issues of nation, history, culture, identity and their relation to questions of film production and consumption in contemporary film culture. Emphasis will be placed on major directors, films, and movements that contributed to the development of narrative cinema internationally. The course will investigate a variety of genres and individual films, paying close attention to their aesthetic, historical, technological and ideological significance. For example, African cinema introduces themes of colonialism, resistance and post-colonial culture, while the New Iranian Cinema articulates problems of politics and censorship within a new national film culture.

 Prerequisite: None.

The process of acting, its history, theory, and practice, are examined through classroom exercises, text analysis, and scoring. Students will explore various problems in acting styles and perform scenes from the extant works of Greek tragedy, Renaissance drama, commedia dell’arte, Neoclassical comedy, and modern and contemporary drama. This course is offered in the spring semester.

Prerequisite: THE 105.

The history and practice of stage directing is studied in this course. Students will examine the theories and productions of major modern directors and, through in-class scene work, advance their skills in directing. The course will also involve directorial research and preparation for projects involving classical and modern plays. Offered fall semesters.

Prerequisite: THE 105.

This course is intended to bridge the gap between theater history/literature/theory and the performance areas of theater. Aimed primarily at the theater major and minor (though by no means excluding others), this course will focus on the process of textual and historical research/analysis and its collaborative impact on the creative process of the director (production concept), actor (characterization), playwright (play structure, narrative and character development) and designers (scenic, lighting, and costume design). Dramaturgy includes a study of various historical approaches to classic texts, as well as the process or research and investigation of material for new plays. Ideally, students enrolled in the course could be given dramaturgical responsibilities on mainstage and student-directed projects. Offered spring semesters.

 Prerequisite: None.

Principles of dramatic construction are explored through the practice of playwriting and the study of representative one-act plays. Students will have various creative writing assignments including monologues and short plays and they will engage in classroom-staged readings and discussion of scripts generated by other writers in the class. Selected plays from this course will be presented each fall semester as part of the Theater Department’s Studio One-Acts production. Offered spring semesters.

  Prerequisite: None.

The study of major theatrical works written between the golden age of classical Greek drama and the revolutionary theater of Romantic period will provide the main focus of this course. Attention will be paid to the history of the classic theater, prevalent stage conventions and practices, along with discussion of varying interpretations and production problems inherent in each play. Among the works to be read and discussed are The Oresteia, Antigone, The Bacchae, The Eunuch, Dulcitus, The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, Everyman, Doctor Faustus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Volpone, The Masque of Blackness, Fuente Ovejuna, Tartuffe, The Rover, She Stoops to Conquer, The Dog of Montargis, and Hernani. The plays will be discussed as instruments for theatrical production; as examples of dramatic structure, style, and genre; and, most importantly, as they reflect the moral, social, and political issues of their time. This course is offered in the fall semester of odd-numbered years.

  Prerequisite: None.

The class will study the history of theater and the diverse forms of European drama written between 1870 and the present. Emphasis will be placed on an examination of the major theatrical movements of realism, expressionism, symbolism, epic theater, absurdism, existentialism, feminism, and postmodernism, as well as on the work of major dramatists including Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, August Strindberg, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett, and Caryl Churchill, among others. Attention will also be paid to theatrical conventions and practices, along with discussion of varying interpretations and production problems discovered in each play. The works to be studied include Woyzeck, A Doll House, The Master Builder, Miss Julie, The Importance of Being Earnest, Ubu Roi, The Cherry Orchard, From Morn until Midnight, Galileo, Waiting for Godot, No Exit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,Top Girls, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Terrorism. The plays will be discussed as instruments for theatrical production; as examples of dramatic structure, style, and genre; and, most importantly, as they reflect the moral, social, and political issues of their time. This course is offered in the spring semester of odd-numbered years.

Prerequisite: None.

This course will center on multicultural and intercultural theater and performance in the United States and around the world. The course will be divided into two sections: the first part of the course will focus on how theater has served as a way for marginalized racial and ethnic groups to express identity in America. We will look at plays written by African-American (Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus), Latino/a (Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics, John Leguizamo’s Mambo Mouth), and Asian-American (David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Julia Cho’s BFE) playwrights. The second part of the course will offer an overview of the state of contemporary global performance. Ranging from Africa (Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Athol Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys), to Latin America (Griselda Gumbaro’s Information for Foreigners, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden), to the Caribbean (Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain, Maria Irene Fornes’s The Conduct of Life), we will discuss how different cultures have performed gender, race, class, postcolonial and historically-marginalized perspectives. Throughout we will explore how theater exists as a vital and powerful tool for expressing the values, cultures, and perspectives of the diverse racial and ethnic groups in America and throughout the world. This course is offered in the spring semester of even-numbered years.

Prerequisite: None.

From Lincoln Center to the Astor Place Opera House, from the Disney mega-musicals of Broadway to edgy one-person shows in the East Village, New York City has shaped American performance culture since the founding of the Republic. The objective of this course is to examine and experience the vast array of performance offerings of the City, a rich and perpetually changing tapestry of theater, film, dance, opera, and performance art. We will also reflect on the ways in which New York City itself exists as a site of performance, both literally and symbolically. In this course, the student will study the history of New York performance, the distinctive theater and film industries and cultures of New York, and “the current season.” We will also learn about the world of New York theatrical criticism, and become critics ourselves. Through research papers, short critical essays, presentations, and an immersion trip, students will engage with New York City as a center of national and global performance culture. This course is offered in the spring semester of 2013.

In this course we will examine the noteworthy theories, genres, authors, and critical approaches that have shaped theater, film, and performance for centuries. Though the topics will shift from year to year, this seminar will require students to write a number of substantive critical essays, participate in class discussion, and delve into secondary source material. Typical courses may include the following topic, which will be repeated regularly.

Prerequisite: One previous theater course.

This course will survey the significant ideas that have shaped the way we create and think about theater. The objective of the course is to examine the evolution of dramatic theory and criticism and trace the influence of this evolution on the development of the theater. Ultimately the student will form his own critical and aesthetic awareness of theater as a unique and socially significant art form. Among the important works to be read are: Aristotle’s Poetics, Peter Brook’s The Open Door, Eric Bentley’s Thinking About the Playwright, Tony Kushner’s Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Robert Brustein’s Reimagining the American Theater, and Dario Fo’s The Tricks of the Trade, as well as selected essays from numerous writers including Horace, Ben Jonson, William Butler Yeats, Constantin Stanislavski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Peter Schumann, Robert Wilson, Athol Fugard, Ariane Mnouchkine, Edward Bond, Augusto Boal, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Eugenio Barba. Offered fall semesters.

Prerequisite: One course in theater history.

Individual students will work with a faculty member and the production staff in the development and stage management of a Wabash stage production. Students will study the entire production process, develop a prompt book and production documentation, and complete all assignments related to the management of rehearsal and performance. Offered first and/or second half, each semester.

Prerequisite: THE 102.

Any student may undertake an independent study project in theater after submission of a proposal to the department chair for approval. Students are urged to use this avenue to pursue creative ideas for academic credit outside the classroom or for topics not covered by existing courses.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor and the department chair.

Any student may undertake an independent study project in theater after submission of a proposal to the department chair for approval. Students are urged to use this avenue to pursue creative ideas for academic credit outside the classroom or for topics not covered by existing courses.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor and the department chair.

This course is designed as a capstone course for senior theater majors. Students will design and develop a major project in consultation with theater faculty. These projects will receive significant peer review and culminate in public presentations

Prerequisite: Senior theater major status