(also offered as Theatre 438/538)

The twentieth century is the site of the greatest renaissance of dramatic writing after the European Renaissance. The writers in this course represented or created major tendencies and schools of modern thought. They also created classics of modern and contemporary theatre art, which we study for their own aesthetic and stylistic issues.

This survey begins in the late 19th century (Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw), includes major writers of the early and mid-century (Pirandello, Brecht, Lorca, O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Beckett, Pinter), and concludes with numerous plays from recent decades (Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Athol Fugard, August Wilson). The journey ends at Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, from the early 1990s. Along the way, the course deals with such social movements as feminism, Marxism, civil rights, and gay rights plus such intellectual movements as critical realism, absurdism, and multiculturalism.