Course Name: Documentary Theatre
Instructor:
SLN: 13144
Meeting Time: M W 2:30-4:50pm
Term: Winter 2014
How does theatre differ for audiences when the material incorporates verbatim documents and testimony? How do playwrights negotiate issues of “fidelity” with artistic license? How might/does documentary theatre enable efficacious social change? Readings include plays: e.g., Büchner (Dantons Tod), Corrie/Rickman (My Name is Rachel Corrie), Mann (Execution of Justice) Smith (Fires in the Mirror, Twilight), Kaufman (Gross Indecency, Laramie Project), Ensler (Vagina Monologues), Blank/Jensen (The Exonerated), Hare (Stuff Happens; and recent scholarship on documentary theatre and theatre of testimony.