THEA 275
American Drama: Hidden Knowledge
Last Offered Spring 2016
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 224 / COMP 275 / AMST 275
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

The Buddha is said to have identified three things that cannot stay hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. What’s the secret? Who is lying? Who is breaking the rules? American drama abounds with hidden knowledge and false representations. (This is not surprising: theatre is always on some level a deceptive practice, a place where one person pretends to be another, and where what is spoken is always open to skeptical scrutiny. We might say theatre is always lying as much as lying is always theatre.) This tutorial course will examine what lies hidden in American plays from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. Beginning with excerpted critical and historical writings on secrecy and lying (The Adventures of Pinocchio, Machievelli’s The Prince, Thomas Carlson’s Lying and Deception: Theory and Practice, among others), we will proceed to a set of American plays from across a wide spectrum of playwrights, including Edward Albee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl, Sam Shepard, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Amy Herzog, and others. Student papers will explore how hidden knowledge structures dramatic action, how different characters create and respond to untruths, and what can we learn in particular from American drama about a national relationship to honesty and its opposites.
The Class: Format: tutorial
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 3818
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: weekly papers/response papers; weekly meeting with instructor and tutorial partner
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: Theatre majors, English majors
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: meets Division 1 requirement if registration is under THEA, COMP or ENGL; meets Division 2 requirement if registration is under AMST
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ENGL 224 Division I COMP 275 Division I THEA 275 Division I AMST 275 Division II
Attributes: AMST Arts in Context Electives

Class Grid

Updated 7:18 am

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