LIT 5047 Spring 2018 Gontarski

If writing itself is a process, theater, that is, production and performance, is all the more so since this realization or embodiment of text involves, in addition to the author and his own writing process, innumerable collaborators as producers, actors, directors, set designers, and even marketers contributing to the whole. Textual stability is eroded in direct proportion to the number of collaborators involved, markedly so in a text's transition, transformation, or translation into film, especially during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s when Hollywood saw itself as Broadway West. This course will feature Masterworks of American Theatre and the performance of those works by the likes of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, among others. We will examine and discuss all these playwrights as process writers with theater itself as an unstable extension of that process, and film as yet another revision. We will examine these playwrights' habits of writing, and rewriting their plays from performance to performance, sometimes offering two or three endings to directors and publishers, of adapting works from short stories, to plays, to films, of rewriting failed plays under new titles for stage and/or film, to the point in this process that deciding on a stable, final, publishable version is perhaps impossible for theatrical works. The result of such textual instability is a lingering uncertainty of whether or not the playscript, the book, the published artifact is itself, or in itself, the work of art. For “conflicting cultural and academic reasons,” then, the result often is “the neglect and dismissal of American drama as a legitimate literary form,” as Susan Harris Smith suggests in American Drama: The Bastard Art (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama, 2006). Such “bastard status” is further confirmed by publishers’ sales statistics as theater books, playscripts, tend to sell at performances and very little beyond (check your own bookshelves for confirmation). We will explore and test these conclusions and assumptions with not only close readings of individual works, but we will try to assess their translations, adaptations, re-writings into and after performance, especially the alterations made for film versions (which, of necessity, is our main source of performance).