History and Histrionics

Have you ever wondered where Arthur Miller got the idea to get inside Willy Loman’s head? Did you realize that it was only after August Strindberg went insane that he wrote some of his most famous and influential plays? Did you know that the comedies of Ancient Greece and the 17th century were far more sexually explicit than contemporary comedies? Did you know there’s a Nigerian play that is about the ancient Yoruban culture but uses ideas from Aristotle to tell its story? And that Aristotle’s ideas can also be found in plays by William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, and Tennessee Williams? Did you ever wonder what we really mean by “realistic”? Or “naturalistic”? And that there’s a difference? Did you ever consider that Godot may already have arrived? History and Histrionics answers these questions but asks many more. We read great plays from the last 2,500 hundred years—tragedy, comedy, social critique, realism, naturalism, expressionism, musical theatre, absurdism, existentialism, and much more—to try to figure what they’re about, why they were written as they were, and how they fit in the great constellation of our dramatic heritage. This course meets once a week.