Textual Interpretation and Analysis I

This course trains you to read plays the way a dramaturg does, treating the script not as literature to admire but as a structural object you take apart to understand how it works on stage. You'll do sustained close readings of selected texts, working through Ball's and Fuchs's analytical frameworks alongside drama from the Greeks through Shakespeare and into early counter-Aristotelian territory, with homework, oral presentations, and a midterm and final built around your own interpretations. It's the first half of a two-semester sequence that grounds later directing, acting, and production work — once you can map a play's architecture, every other choice in the rehearsal room has somewhere to stand.