The Grad Course: Metatheatre and Metadrama

In designing the graduate course I'm teaching this semester, I looked to the common themes of my favorite and most teachable plays, and the common theme is, almost invariably, texts that play formally and thematically with the boundaries between performance and reality. This is a theme that connects in an unexpected way with my research, on staged life-writing, and as a result, it's become a course in which the critical conversation is a fairly new topic of concerted study.

The curious thing is that this central idea is a fairly old one, with foundational books on the topic dating back to the 60s, but it's never been a particularly faddish scholarly line, which is to say that the history of metatheatrical criticism doesn't really feature a spike or a lull. The bad news about that is that the most ambitious students are not likely to find it professionally sexy on the front end, but since it's an MA level course (as opposed to a seminar), there are lots of ways in, in terms of the texts and the critical schools of thought that approach them.

The primary texts in the course could read like a (spotty) survey of (non-realistic drama, with a particular emphasis on the 20th c.:

• Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape
  
• Anonymous, Mankynde
• Medwall, Fulgens and Lucres
• Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
• Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy
  
• Shakespeare, The Tempest, Midsummer, Hamlet
• Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle
• Sheridan, The Critic
• Villiers, The Rehearsal
• Pirandello, Six Characters and the remainder of the theatre trilogy
• Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle
• Genet, The Balcony
• Weiss, Marat/Sade
• Gambaro, Information for Foreigners
• Handke, Offending the Audience
  
• The Performance Group, Dionysus in 69
• Stoppard, R&G, Travesties
  
• Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
• Walcott, Pantomime
• Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus
• Wertenbaker, Our Country's Good, Love of the Nightingale
• Valdez, Zoot Suit
• Churchill, Cloud 9
• Schenkar, The Universal Wolf

Ultimately, my hope is to use the framework of metadrama to introduce these students to a wider range of drama than they've perhaps been exposed to, and to raise a number of other theoretical concerns through this basically formal lens. And finally, this frame is designed to get students to think about these plays as both literature and performance, a double lens with which scholars on both side of the disciplinary aisle struggle.

So far, the class has been pretty game, willing to read and think historically, theoretically, and in one case already, physically. We'll see how the rest of the semester progresses, and whether my five weeks before the 20th century material is a success.