American Drama since 1900 (NEW)

This course introduces students to the modern and contemporary American stage since 1900. Students will read/watch canonical plays by Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, and Arthur Miller, etc., and learn to appreciate theatrical and literary devices and American dramaturgy of the 20th and the early 21st centuries. Besides the selected canonical plays, students will read/watch plays written by underrepresented, ethnic American playwrights and examine these plays within their specific intellectual and artistic, socio-cultural, political, and racial/ethnic contexts. The selected plays primarily focus on human struggles, the construction and deconstruction of an American identity, racial problems in America, and a sense of an underlying continuity in the history of American drama.