01:00P-02:15P TR (30) 3 cr.
SPECIAL TOPIC: FOUR MAJOR PLAYWRIGHTS: SAMUEL BECKETT, ARTHUR MILLER, AUGUST WILSON, ATHOL FUGARD
L366 will be devoted to just four English-language playwrights--Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, and Athol Fugard--who have made singular contributions to the ways in which drama enables audiences to look at their lives, shape their values and ethics, and evaluate their heritage. There is a value in studying a few important authors in depth to see their development as writers, thinkers and theatre practitioners. That is what we shall do in L366. And we shall be looking at their plays both as literature and as theatre.
Samuel Beckett is perhaps the single most influential playwright of the past half century. His minimalist plays reduce and dramatize to its essentials the meaning of existence. Beckett tackles questions of immense magnitude employing only four actors or fewer, and using only minimal sets and a few simple props. Arthur Miller, by contrast, nearly always locates his plays squarely on American soil; and his plays address important and often peculiarly American questions of ethics and values. His Death of a Salesman is considered by many to be the single finest American play. It will, appropriately, be the first play to be offered at the Ruth Halls Theatre when the new IU theatre complex opens in February 2002. August Wilson is arguably the most talented young American playwright on the scene today. Since the lives and history of African Americans went largely unrecorded from the Civil War to Civil Rights, August Wilson, an African American, has been writing a series of plays meant to chart not only that history but the changing values and lives of African Americans during the twentieth century. South African playwright Athol Fugard is one of the great writers of our time. He is a consummate man of theatre who is not only a playwright but a talented director and actor as well. Fugard is much influenced by Samuel Beckett on the one hand and by Arthur Miller on the other; and like August Wilson, many of his plays concern questions of race and race relations, especially as those questions are played out in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. In 1999, Indiana purchased all of Athol Fugard's manuscripts and papers; and in 2000, the playwright spent two weeks on the Indiana campus teaching a class, delivering lectures and conducting an acting/directing workshop.
Each of the four playwrights covered in L366 has his own unique take on the world, society and important human questions. Each has a very singular writing and dramaturgical style. Yet despite the vast differences among them, there are also striking similarities. We shall have much to talk about in the course of 15 weeks as we discover the richness of Beckett's, Miller's, Wilson's and Fugard's plays as dramatic literature and as performance venues; and as we consider the important questions about life, values and culture raised and dramatized by these playwrights. We shall likely read some (by no means all) of the following: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Embers., Not I, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, and Catastrophe; Arthur Miller's All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, The Price, and Broken Glass; August Wilson's Jitney, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, and King Hedley II; and Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena, The Island, Sizwe Bansi is Dead, A Lesson from Aloes, Master Harold and the Boys, My Children! My Africa!, Valley Song, and Sorrows and Rejoicings. There will be two papers and a final.