Modern and Contemporary Drama is a course that examines the development of Western dramatic conventions over the past 150 years. Students will track how playwrights have drawn upon and departed from prior works of drama, and will see how forces such as cultural and political context shaped the theatrical works of those playwrights. In addition to discussing and writing about the works under consideration, students will be expected to take part in performances and creative imitations, discovering how drama needs to be considered on its feet, rather than just from the classroom desk.  Authors may include Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen, Brecht, Pinter, Shaw, Beckett, Parks, Smith, Wilson, and Kushner.

This course attempts to probe human beings’ most brutish core. As we challenge our understandings of the terms “savage” and “civilized,” we consider what it means to be human on the most fundamental level. We’ll delve into the idea of “going native” as revealed in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” and William Shakespeare’s King Lear. We’ll contemplate the notion of the “noble savage” through the science fiction lenses of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We’ll explore the construction of “the other” in two versions of Medea: Euripides’s classical version, and Christa Wolf’s modern retelling. Finally, we’ll examine Blanche Dubois’s urge not to “hang back with the brutes” in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and question her dependence on such things as “poetry and music” and “tenderer feelings.” We’ll supplement our literary texts with theoretical readings by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Creative Writing is a course in which students will explore a variety of genres, creating their own work across those genres. This course supposes that writing creatively should be a little more like messing around with a chemistry set and a little less like playing by a set of rules. That ham-handed analogy is to say that Catlin Gabel's writing students should be free to sense the wide-open possibilities of creative prose, poetry, drama, and journalism; most of the great pieces of literature we read at Catlin Gabel came to be because an author decided to break convention, instead of abiding by it. That said, it’s always good to know what rules you’re breaking before you go ahead and break them. The class will spend some time reading, but we’ll mostly use our reading to see how published writers deal with all the possibilities they see before them, and the bulk of the class will be spent writing, usually from prompts to free up the students' imaginations. We’ll seek larger audiences beyond the Catlin Gabel community, and students should leave the class with a surprising bundle of their own work. Students may even find themselves published in various outlets by the end of the year.  Creative Writing is a half-credit class that meets twice a week all year long, and covers poetry, prose, drama, creative non-fiction, and maybe even some aural media (read: radio). Students should expect to get comfortable in a workshop setting, reading and then commenting honestly (but gently!) on the work of their peers. Creative Writing will be a lot of fun, and only as stressful as you would like it to be.