American Theater

Twentieth-century American drama is the lens here for working through how the stage stages national identity — race, class, the American Dream, immigrant experience — and how theater negotiates with mass media, state funding, and the documentary impulse. You'll read plays from Treadwell and O'Neill through Miller, Hansberry, Valdez, and Kushner alongside reviews and criticism, then produce close readings in homework, an essay, and an oral presentation, with a midterm and final anchoring the rest. As a required third-year AMER course, it pairs with the literature and culture sequence to sharpen the skill of treating a text as both script and performance, which later seminars on contemporary American culture lean on heavily.