Advanced Undergraduate Playwriting: Experiments in Time

For centuries, from Pedro Calderón to Ntozake Shange and Caryl Churchill, playwrights have manipulated time to tell stories and create dynamic play-worlds. This class will challenge playwrights to build non-linear time into their plays and use specific approaches to “time-telling” to supercharge content. Students will read plays, essays and engage in time-based theater experiments to explore perspectives that challenge our human-ego-driven experience of time. How is time embodied? How are we programmed to experience time as a Western capitalist value system? How can we use non-linear time in our plays as a radical political act? Students will complete 3 short projects during the course, including two one-act plays and one piece of site-specific or performance art.