Syllabus: Unexpected Dramaturgy

LYNN NOTTAGE IN REHEARSAL FOR THIS IS READING (2017) AT THE FRANKLIN STREET RAILROAD STATION IN READING, PENNSYLVANIA, 2017.

In an interview in the Review‘s new Fall issue, the playwright Lynn Nottage describes the way one of her classes at Yale would open: with a trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. “Most academics and practitioners weren’t acknowledging the different forms of theater happening all over New York City, and how those forms were in conversation with the way we as playwrights make our work,” she tells Christina Anderson. Her class also visited vogue balls, megachurches, trials, and wrestling matches. “What I’ve witnessed is that, by the end of the course, all the students, even if they began as very naturalistic, structurally conservative writers, are making work that is more playful, inventive, and open,” she says. We asked Nottage to provide us with a syllabus of sorts—and she sent a reading list of plays that can also teach us to look at drama and narrative structure from a similarly wide range of vantage points.

 

As a playwright, I’m interested in what happens when I enter my craft from differing perspectives, as an anthropologist, an athlete, an activist, a con artist, a criminal, a prosecutor, an exhibitionist, an archivist, a visual artist, a musician, a mystic, or a healer. What can we learn about dramatic structure and storytelling from observing the way theater, and performance, occur outside of a traditional theatrical setting? I’ve gravitated toward the following plays for their ability to raise this question, to engage unexpected dramaturgy, and to bend and twist the architecture of narratives to arrive at a piercing truth.

Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker

Well By Lisa Kron

Forever by Dael Orlandersmith

Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moisés Kaufman

Indecent by Paula Vogel

The Christians by Lucas Hnath

Is God is by Aleshea Harris

School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play by Jocelyn Bioh

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Passion Play by Sarah Ruhl

Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks

The Whale by Samuel D. Hunter

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz

Saved by Edward Bond

The Lily’s Revenge by Taylor Mac

Art by Yasmina Reza

 

Lynn Nottage’s plays include Ruined, Intimate Apparel, Sweat, and Clyde’s. She is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.