What's Going on Here?

Hello and welcome to the ongoing class blog for the course "Staging America: Modern American Drama" at the Universität Potsdam. The goal of this blog is to present the work of my students, who will spend Summer Semester 2013 studying key works of modern and contemporary American drama. In order to enrich and expand our class discussions -- and to illustrate the unique opportunities and challenges of reading dramatic works as literature -- I have assigned my students to "be the director" for the plays that we are reading this term. They are to choose either a specific scene or a work as a whole and "adapt" it for a contemporary German audience. How would they update or alter the drama in order to "translate" the themes of the work to their audience? How would they stage (or film) it? How would they direct their actors to deliver lines or to interact?  Etc.

Ultimately, their assignment takes two forms: the creative and the analytic. They will present a description of their "directorial" choices -- being as creative as they would like -- and then they will explain why and how these choices help to express key ideas and themes to their audience.

I look forward to what is to come in the ensuing weeks and months. One of the great pleasures of teaching for me has always been how much I can also learn from my students, and I have high hopes that this project will offer me new glimpses into how German students perceive the sometimes very American values that have been expressed on the U.S. stage.

Enjoy!