Dramatic Literature

This is a course about language and dramatic literature, a course about how fun and astounding words can be, when well used. Our work and play together will focus on the many ways in which language helps us every day:

• to make sense of the world,
• to function in school and in our literate society,
• to think clearly and express ideas creatively,
• and to appreciate the subtle richness of our experience.

Plays are an especially good medium in which to study these skills. First, they are literature in action: the only way to read a play is to imagine how the words can be embodied. Reading plays helps us to build the habit of bringing dead words on the page to life.

Just as importantly, plays teach argument. Every great flowering of democracy and thought has been concurrent with a great age of drama. A play is how a society airs its dirty laundry, tries to come to terms with the hard questions it is facing, in effect, debates its issues publicly.

In class, we will practice using words well: we will read (mostly in class) great authors from the ancient Greek, Renaissance, and modern periods (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Williams, Miller, Wilson), we will think and speak and write in response to it, building on skills to prepare all students to meet Colorado language arts standards. The culminating project will consist of each student's original one-act play.