TH 302LEC—Theatre in the Modern World, 1700-Present

This course is an introduction to selected plays, aesthetic theories, and performance techniques from the eighteenth century to the present. While it operates as a stand-alone course, it picks up where TH 301 (a survey from antiquity to the eighteenth century) concluded. During this time, the modern world as we know it came into being, accompanied by social and political revolutions that shook the foundations of public and private life. We’ll watch theater artists around the world contend with the dominant philosophical ideas, aesthetic values, and socio-political realities of their time, as they attempt to create artworks capable of responding to - or even creating - a modern world. In doing so, they began to alter the molecular structure of theater, pulling apart traditional modes of understanding narrative, illusion, and character - destroying the old, to make way for the new.