DRAMA 441 A: Beginning Playwriting

Experimental writing pushes past the creative boundaries of existing traditional storytelling techniques to explore new ways of telling new stories. As a politicized aesthetic created in response to cultural crisis, it is all about breaking the rules and creating new ones! In this class, we will read and create work that offers alternative ways of experiencing drama, reconsidering history, and interpreting identity. We will focus on innovative storytelling techniques that are playful, bizarre, risky, or controversial. Works that alter conventions of space, theme, language, and other elements. Works that push against the assimilationist impulses of traditional theatre to create innovative ways of engaging with the audience as citizens. In this class, theatre becomes a laboratory for a radical re-envisioning of the world.