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Course Description

Summary

"The theater is the place where we learn how to be. At its best, it is a rehearsal for the great moments of our life, including our happinesses. Love, death, we see it on stage and it prepares us for our life" -John Guare A play is a metaphoric and empathic art form that seduces us into imaginatively making choices and suffering consequences along with the characters on stage. Every day in the real world, we watch as people make choices whose consequences are truly ours to share - some global, some local, some only in our dreams. What if we could rewrite those choices? And change what happens to our lives, our world. We will spend a little time reading from the Alternative History canon, as well as novels and plays that reveal tragedies and comedies on page and stage. Students will then chose a person born since 1930, a public figure or a family member, research their life, identify a series of their choices and the resulting consequences, and then write a 20-45 minute play where a different choice is made, and the world, as defined by the world of the play, changes.