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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Faculty Performance Production — DRA4143.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Kirk Jackson Kerry Ryer-Parke
Credits: 4
A faculty directed production is to be determined. Mostly likely it will be a contemporary playwright and include live music either centrally or peripherally; music direction by Kerry Ryer-Parke and stage direction by Kirk Jackson, with a target performance date of early November. This course is for students cast or otherwise assigned production responsibilities and represents
Drama Music

Faculty Performance Production: Airline Highway by Lisa D’Amour — DRA4381.01, section 1) (days/times updated 5/5/2023

Fall 2023
Instructor: Dina Janis
Credits: 4
Airline Highway examines a tight knit community of “outsiders” over the course of a single, legendary day.  The Hummingbird Hotel is the figurative or literal home for a group of strippers, French Quarter service workers, hustlers, and poets who are bound together by their bad luck, bad decisions, and complete lack of pretense.  Presiding over them is Miss Ruby, a
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Airline Highway by Lisa D’Amour — DRA4381.02, section 2

Fall 2023
Instructor: Carly Rudzinski
Credits: 2
Airline Highway examines a tight knit community of “outsiders” over the course of a single, legendary day.  The Hummingbird Hotel is the figurative or literal home for a group of strippers, French Quarter service workers, hustlers, and poets who are bound together by their bad luck, bad decisions, and complete lack of pretense.  Presiding over them is Miss Ruby,
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull — DRA4141.01

Spring 2018
Instructor: Jean Randich
Credits: 4
Chekhov declared he was “flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage” in writing this comedy with “a view of a lake…little action, and five tons of love.” In the play’s openness, and its shunning of melodramatic plot in favor of the messiness of life, The Seagull feels as unconventional today as when it debuted. Our production of this ensemble-based play will also
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: August: Osage County — DRA4264.01

Fall 2016
Instructor: Kirk Jackson
Credits: 4
Chronicling the dissolution of three generations of an American family, August: Osage County (2008 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Best Play) has been called “a fusion of epic tragedy and black comedy”. Actor/playwright Tracy Letts sourced the darkly comedic and viciously nihilistic drama from his own family and tailored the characters for a
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Everybody — DRA4152.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Kirk Jackson
Credits: 4
Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a modern interpretation of the 15thC Morality play, Everyman, in which the character of Everyman is summoned by God to make account of his life before passing into the unknown afterlife. Everyman solicits entities such as Friendship, Kinship, and Love to accompany him, only to discover that few of these can be taken from this life into the
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Everything That Never Happened by Sarah Mantell — DRA4152.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Jean Randich
Credits: 4
"Jessica and Lorenzo are in love, but in order to be together they must plan an escape from her father’s house, the Venetian ghetto, and her entire culture. Taking place in the gaps between "The Merchant of Venice" and the realities of Jewish history, "Everything That Never Happened" is a play about a father, a daughter, disguise, assimilation, pomegranates, and everything
Dance Drama Music

Faculty Performance Production: Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — DRA4308.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Shawtane Bowen
Credits: 4
This funny, trenchant, and powerful play follows an ambitious group of editorial assistants at a notorious Manhattan magazine, each of whom hopes for a starry life of letters and a book deal before they turn thirty. But when an ordinary humdrum workday becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell their own story become higher than ever. "These are people you can
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Great Expectations — DRA4575.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Kirk Jackson
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
Long before the feel-good self-help industry gave us "pay it forward", Charles Dickens gave us Great Expectations. The story of orphan Pip's social, moral and educational coming-of-age serves as critique of the wages of progress and the eternal value of friendship and gratitude. Dickens' genius for creating memorable characters is robus, from young Pip, loyal Joe, his spiteful
Unknown

Faculty Performance Production: Phillip Christian Smith's 2017 political thriller, "The Chechens" — DRA4143.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Jean Randich
Credits: 4
This is a faculty performance production of a new play, “The Chechens,” by Phillip Christian Smith, Black playwright and 2020-2021 Playwrights Realm Writing Fellow. “In modern Chechnya homosexuals are rumored to be held in camps. Can one family protect their brother suspected of being gay, or will they honor kill him to protect the name of the family? What prevails in the end
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Sarah Gancher’s “The Place We Built” — DRA4160.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Jean Randich
Credits: 4
Sarah Gancher’s award-winning 2016 play, "The Place We Built": “In a deserted neighborhood in post-communist Budapest, young bohemians squat in an abandoned building and build a bar. Reclaiming the Jewish identity their parents’ generation abandoned after the Holocaust, they create a vibrant new subculture that combines big ideas and intense debates with wild parties.
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" — DRA4308.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Jean Randich
Credits: 4
“The course of true love never did run smooth.” Shakespeare weaves the rebellious lovers, rude mechanicals, and fairies into the woods and everyone is transformed. This production will cast a dada/surrealist light on this popular comedy of gender friction, identity confusion, and the push and pull of rationality and dream logic. In this multi-media production we will re
Drama Music

Faculty Performance Production: Sweat by Lynn Nottage — DRA4383.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Shawtane Bowen
Credits: 4
Filled with warm humor and tremendous heart, Sweat tells the story of a group of friends who have spent their lives sharing drinks, secrets, and laughs while working together on the factory floor. But the post Y2K economy is changing, NAFTA is a new reality and rumors fly about layoffs. Promotions and pride inevitably collide, forming cracks in decades-old friendships that
Black Studies Drama

Faculty Performance Production: The Christians Onstage Gospel Choir — MPF4224.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Kerry Ryer-Parke Kirk Jackson
Credits: 2
The Christians, by Lucas Hnath, explores difficult questions surrounding faith and revelation, community and personal responsibility. Set in a contemporary American mega-church, fractured by dispute over salvation and damnation, the play operates as a series of contradictory arguments with no single argument deemed the winner. Not unlike any family break-up, whether the family
Music

Faculty Performance Production: The Comeuppance by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins — DRA4395.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Shawtane Bowen
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4

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

Black Studies Drama

Faculty Performance Production: Unibeauty Her Wicked Daughters, a corporate fairy tale in process, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig — DRA4152.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Jean Randich
Credits: 4
In Spring 2023 Bennington students have the opportunity to collaborate with director/devisor Jean Randich, playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, and designer/video artist Sue Rees on the development of an in-progress script whose themes and form are situated in the crosshairs of Cowhig's teaching focus at Bennington: Crafting It-Narratives (stories centering non-human subjects
Drama

Faculty Performance Production: “H G, a great and terrible story,” by Anna Maria Hong, Jean Randich, Sue Rees, and Allen Shawn — DRA4407.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Jean Randich
Credits: 4
This is a faculty performance production of a new multimedia music theater piece freely inspired by Anna Maria Hong’s novella, “H G,” a cubistic re-envisioning of the Grimm’s tale of Hansel and Gretel as a surreal, feminist hero’s journey. Here abandonment, enchantment, and the fear of being consumed challenge the protagonists to imagine the unimaginable: how do you give birth
CAPA Drama Music

Failure — CS4129.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Andrew Cencini
Credits: 4
Why do systems fail? How do we determine what went wrong? How do we learn from failure to build better systems and prevent similar problems from occurring in the future? In this course we will examine a variety of ways that software and hardware systems can fail, their causes, impacts and (where applicable) remediation. We will learn about tools and techniques that can be used
Science and Mathematics

Faith in Literature — LIT2562.01) (cancelled 8/22/2024

Fall 2024
Instructor: Benjamin Anastas
Credits: 4
In his book The Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor writes about what he describes as a “widespread sense of loss … if not always of God, then at least of meaning.” This contemporary crisis of meaning has been well-considered by social scientists, journalists, and artists. In the wake of this, some wonder whether we are entering a “post-secular” age, with a
Literature

Fake Revolution: Media Culture and Hollywood's Insurrection Fantasy — FV4331.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Jen Liu
Credits: 2
In this course, we will explore Hollywood's fixation with fictional revolutions as depicted in big budget sci fi and fantasy TV and films throughout the 20th and 21st century, often unified by themes such as the triumph of the underdog, traumatic but narratively low-stakes sacrifices, and totalitarian overlords who bear superficial resemblance to real world geopolitical powers,
Visual Arts Society Culture and Thought

Families: Love and Power in the Domestic Sphere — ANT2120.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Miroslava Prazak
Credits: 4
Interpersonal relations constitute the cement of society. What does it mean to be a sibling, a friend, a spouse or a lover? We will examine relatedness as a fundamental aspect of society and social organization by looking at some of the classic and most recent anthropological findings on the topic of family, kinship, friendship, networking, and community. We will analyze how
Society Culture and Thought

Families: Love and Power in the Domestic Sphere — ANT2120.01

Spring 2020
Instructor: Miroslava Prazak
Credits: 4
Interpersonal relations constitute the cement of society. What does it mean to be a sibling, a friend, a spouse or a lover? We will examine relatedness as a fundamental aspect of society and social organization by looking at some of the classic and most recent anthropological findings on the topic of family, kinship, friendship, networking, and community. We will analyze how
Society Culture and Thought