Drama

This class will serve as the Ensemble for plays being developed in Abe Koogler's Advanced New Play Development LAB.  Actors will become part of an ensemble focused on the process of supporting playwrights as they refine and edit drafts of new work they are developing.  Actors in the ensemble will be asked to read multiple roles from multiple new plays over the term

An actor honors and bears witness to humanity by embodying and giving voice to the human element in the landscape of theatrical collaboration. Investigating the impulses and intuitions that make us unique as individuals can also identify what constitutes our shared humanity. Through exploration of the fundamentals of performance, students address the actor’s body,

The dramaturg serves as a powerful medium in the theatre. They bridge the past and the present, the creative team and the audience, while providing critical generosity and historical and literary insight. Focusing upon the practical application of dramaturgy, this course will offer students a credited platform for dramaturgical work oriented toward production.

Three

This is an advanced scene study class which will explore the canon of work by Paula Vogel. Students will be assigned scenes and monologues from this canon, and the class as a whole will read all of the plays being worked on during the term. Rehearsal techniques, character development and sensory exploration of these plays will be a large part of the focus for the actors in

The course will be for sustained work on an animation or projection design project, and should be a space for both experimentation, ambition and consistent endeavor. The first half of the semester will be concerned with conceptualizing and framing the world of the animations or projections, by research, drawings, investigation, imagining. The second half will be creating the

The class will be concerned with animating inanimate objects by primarily stop motion.  Locations will be constructed, objects animated, and lighting explored in order to create the imaginary world. The worlds will be captured via Dragonframe® to create short animations, as well as creating stories by projections of

Students in this class will read a weekly selection of Pulitzer Prize winning plays and be required to analyze and explore these plays beat by beat in class discussion and weekly critical writing exercises. This is an in-depth script interpretation class in which theme, dramatic structure, arc, character development, tone, style and extensive study of the given playwrights

We will address the process of discerning a text’s dramatic potential and realizing that potential in performance by developing and implementing a directorial approach through analysis and rehearsal techniques. The term is divided between exercises and rehearsal of individual projects. The work of the course includes a midterm Director’s Approach Essay, a final Rehearsal Log

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of theatrical design with a focus on creating and interpreting scale drawings. Students will explore how scale functions as a means of communication between directors and designers, as a critical tool in scenic/lighting design, and stage management, allowing ideas to be translated from concept to construction to performance

In order to construct a historical costume accurately one often needs to start with the foundation garments of that period. This course will examine how corsets and their construction play a role in recreating period silhouettes. Students will learn how to reproduce period corset patterns as well as construct the corsets with

In this course, we will rehearse and perform a play: The Comeuppance by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. 

Synopsis: When a group of old classmates meet to pregame their 20th high school reunion, everyone is nervous for the night ahead. As alcohol and pot help the self-declared “Multi-Ethnic Reject Group” let their guards down, they begin to

The Dickensian Silhouette: Character, Construction, and the Victorian Line

(Intermediate to Advanced design & sewing)

In

This course offers an introduction to the history and development of world theater and drama. We will experience the dynamic pageant of theater history through an exploration of its conventions and aesthetics, as well as its social and cultural functions. We will study theater history from antiquity through the nineteenth century, reading

Our country is changing rapidly—can a play help us make sense of where we are (gulp), and where we’re headed? In this course, we will read ambitious, formally inventive plays written within the last fifty years that attempt to capture some fundamental truth about the United States: its violence and despair as well its beauty and possibility. Readings will likely include Tony

“If you are really doing it, you don’t have time to watch yourself doing it.” Sanford Meisner was an actor and founding member of the Group Theater. He went on to become a master teacher of acting who sought to give students an organized approach to the creation of truthful behavior on stage within the imaginary circumstances of a play. This class focuses on

At the center of almost every live performance is a single human being who quite literally runs the show: the stage manager. This course will explore the stage manager's role as both an artist and an administrator, using the SM's wide-ranging responsibilities as a roadmap to understanding the production process and all the people involved in it.

Through readings,

This is a course for playwrights (and others) who are interested in thinking about the relationship between architecture, character, and plot. We will read plays in which unusual buildings, specific rooms, and distinctive built environments of all kinds play a crucial role in the dramatic action.

Readings will likely include Michael Frayn’s Noises Off,