History of Theater III: 20th Century

THR 327 traces how 20th-century theatre kept reinventing what a stage is for, moving from Ibsen and Chekhov's realism through Brecht's politicized alienation, the Absurdists, Artaud's cruelty, and into performance art that dissolves the actor-audience boundary altogether. You'll read plays closely, sit through lecture-discussion, and deliver a presentation that argues for why a given playwright or movement still matters, with two exams checking that you can place texts inside their cultural moment. As the third installment of the theatre history sequence, it closes the historical arc and gives you the vocabulary you'll need for directing, dramaturgy, and contemporary practice courses upstream.