LIT 3043 Spring 2019 Gontarski

If writing itself is a process, theater (that is, production and performance) is all the more so since this realization of text involves, in addition to the author and his own writing process, innumerable collaborators, from electricians to set designers to marketers, contributing to the whole. Textual stability is further eroded as the number of collaborators increases, markedly so in a text’s transition to or translation into film, especially the period from the 1930s to the 1950s when Hollywood saw itself as Broadway West. This course will feature Masterworks of (mostly) American Theatre and the performance of those works, with a focus on our master playwrights: 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 or final text is perhaps impossible for theatrical works. We will test these assumptions with close readings of individual works and their adaptations into performance, especially the alterations made for film versions.