Urban Dramas: Theater, Performance and the City

Undergraduate / Graduate

How do urban landscapes, economies, collectives and communities influence the ecology of artistic practice? How does art - and theatre in particular - represent and reflect the eccentricities, anxieties and exultations of urban experience? In this course, we will examine the mutually constitutive relationship between theatre and the city through different perspectives, methodologies and approaches. We will consider how the city is represented in a range of dramatic works including Aristophanes' The Birds, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Ramu Ramanathan's Cotton 56, Polyester 84, and Anne Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles 1992. We will read these plays in conjunction with critical writings that illustrate the ways in which changing urban landscapes reshape the contours of theatre practice along economic, demographic and infrastructural lines. These include the scholarship of Marvin Carlson, Loren Kruger, Michael McKinnie, and Stanton B. Garner, among others. The course requires students to engage with the course themes both intellectually and experientially, through a dedicated set of readings and assignments that probe the entanglements between theatre and city life within the specific Chicago context. Students will have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the theatre culture of Chicago, and conduct ethnographic research on existing theatre spaces in the city.