Taught with G620


	(American Drama Since World War II)

10:10A-12:00P MW

American drama since World War II seems to have made a virtue of
adversity, ceding
mass entertainment to the smaller than life screens of tv sitcoms and
soaps, and leaving facile moralizing to the larger than life screens
of Hollywood motion pictures.  Using live actors physically present
before a live audience, American drama has taken up the dangerous,
subversive and experimental topics that movie and television studios,
with their corporate and mass market agendas, usually will not touch.
The American drama of the last several decades, therefore, has been an
unusually important, often bold vanguard force in the presentation of
moral and ethical issues in our land of plenty, the agendas of the
civil rights movement and afterwards the reclamation of
African-American history, the contemporary confrontation with death
and dying, the sober rather than sentimental contemplation of what the
Holocaust meant to modern society, the concerns of the feminist
revolution, gay and lesbian issues including those surrounding the
AIDS epidemic, and the issues of Latino and Asian-American
communities.  The decades after the war likewise saw the emergence of
important playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward
Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, David Mamet, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Sam
Shepard, Sherman, Wendy Wasserstein, Tony Kushner, August Wilson,
David Henry Hwang, Luis Valdez, and Susan-Lori Parks to name but a
few.  L672 will not cover all those topics or all those playwrights
but will attempt to provide a panorama of American drama, its writers
and its issues during the last 55 years.  We shall focus on the plays
of Miller and Williams, African-American playwriting, American drama's
role in the presentation of gender and sexual orientation issues, and
recent plays written by Latino and Asian-American playwrights.

In order to obtain an overview of major plays, playwrights and issues,
we shall often read two plays a week.  The term paper (8-10 pages),
and the essay format of the midterm and final examinations will offer
students the opportunity to look reflectively and comparatively at
works we have read and at others they may wish to consider.  We shall
supplement the readings on the syllabus by attending pertinent local
and regional performances and with videotaped performances.