User:Nmyhillncf/course wizard/Course description

Course Description: This course will survey the major trends in British and American drama in the twentieth century, exploring the ways the theater in both countries worked with and against the conventions of both naturalistic drama and the utterly artificial well-made play. The drama of the last century is enormously varied in the issues it addresses, the types of characters it presents on the stage, the techniques it uses to do so, and the audiences it envisions. This variety reflects the consistent interest in the drama of the last hundred years in how people see the world around them, and how these ways of seeing can be changed. Realistic drama’s attempt to use what Bernard Shaw called the “problem play” to bring contemporary social issues to the attention of the public by representing them on stage was as much an experiment with vision as the absurdist drama of Beckett was in its suggestion that the forms of society are devoid of human meaning. The majority of the plays we read in this class explore the limitations of realism, and offer new ways of seeing the societies in which they participate.

The Wikipedia assignment involves either editing the wikipedia entry for one play by a major playwright or creating a new article for a play that does not yet have an article.

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