CRW 4420r Gontarski Spring 2021

This course allows students to write, revise, and prepare for production a one to three-act play with playing time, roughly, not less than one hour. But it is not, strictly speaking, a playwriting course, although we will be writing a play; that is, it is not only a playwriting course, since it takes into account the performative nature of this third (or fourth, or fifth) genre of which the playwright is part, but only part, of a process of artistic realization. In fact, many directors function as playwrights themselves and put the production, the work of art, together in rehearsals. Even major playwrights like Tennessee Williams have worked through the rehearsal process, which opens up his creativity to multiple artists, and in that process the playwright is often not primary (unless you’re Samuel Beckett, that is). In the other direction, some playwrights have chosen to use rehearsals as part of the creative process by directing their own work and to cut out part of this collaborative process (Albee, Mamet, Beckett), but even then they work with designers and actors all of whom feed into the creative process, and they work with (or in) a restricted space, depending on the theater they’re working in/for.

As well as engaging techniques for the writing of dramatic texts, this is a course on writing for the theatre and so it takes on the historic issues of Literature versus Theatre, texts versus performance. The first matter we need to consider, then, is what or where is the artwork, in a script or in its performative realization, its staging?

This course is designated an “r” course, which means it is repeatable and so those students who want to continue working on a project for more than the 15 week limitation imposed by the semester system can do so.