The comedian and storyteller Mike Birbiglia and the director Seth Barrish have collaborated on five shows Off and On Broadway, including Sleepwalk With Me and The New One. Their award-winning work has now been seen around the world. In this unique course, Mike and Seth will share the finer points of their groundbreaking approach to creating compelling long-form monologues. Each student in the class will develop a 6-minute monologue which they will share in an end of the semester presentation.

Dan Rothenberg and Josephine Decker team up to explore original fables for children, devised for theater and film. We will look at multiple versions of folktales familiar to American children such as Little Red Riding Hood; international folklore; 20th century masters such as Hiyao Miyazaki and Maurice Sendak; and contemporary storytellers such as Kelly Link and Sylvia V. Linsteadt. The class invites musicians, dancers, writers, and performers to "devise" short original creations inspired by the beating heart of fables but updated for our contemporary world of urban migration, technological change, and climate peril.

A course on works of dramatic literature whose comparative dimension is theatrical performance. We will consider four Shakespeare plays covering a range of theatrical genres; the emphasis will be on the ways in which Shakespearean meaning can be elucidated when the reader becomes a performer. Students will move from the reading/performing of individual speeches to the staging of scenes to the question of how an overall theatrical conception for a play might be a key to the fullest understanding of the text. Students will write papers about their readings and performances; grades will be based on both the writing and the performing.

The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. College is a unique time to question how we spend those days and develop tools for lifelong independent learning, creating, exploring, and centering. We will look at practice as both verb and noun, pay special attention to the ways in which we embody the work (and change) we want to see in the world. Through somatic activities, talks with invited guests, projects, and readings (across the arts, sciences, philosophy, religion, and activism), we'll revel in the interplay between process and product, solitude and community, structure and freedom, life and art.

In this studio course open to all, we'll dive into experiences in which body and language meet. We'll think about these from aesthetic, cultural, political, medical, personal, and philosophical perspectives. We'll explore language from, in, around, and about (our) bodies. We'll question hierarchies between body and language, use embodied approaches to examine pressing issues of our time. We'll play with the physicality of voice and the material qualities of words and sentences. We'lll find literary structures in movement. We'll move and create together with tools from dance, theater, visual art, improvisation, writing, and somatic practices.

In this class we study the relationships between performance-making, philanthropy and ethics. How are performing artists financing their work, and what does this mean in relationship to economic and social justice? How did we arrive to the current conditions of arts funding? What is the connection between wealth and giving and when are those ties inherently questionable? What is at stake in the debate of public versus private support? Does funding follow artists' concerns or delimit them?

The language of a play intermingles thought and dramatic action to epitomize an unreconciled social conflict, intended to manifest within and between human bodies in real time. What have English-language dramatists of African descent identified as the central conflicts of their plays? How have their relationships to race, power, and colonial structures influenced their works? In what ways have they shaped, subverted, and advanced theatrical forms? This course will survey plays written by Black playwrights in the 20th and 21st C. We will explore dramatic works of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This course will look at a range of British and American drama from the late twentieth century to the twenty-first, with an emphasis on the developments of the last twenty years. Questions will include the relevance of drama in a culture of mass entertainment, and drama as a response to history, place, and social trauma.

Contemporary French Theater will introduce students to the vibrant and diverse scene of contemporary theater in France. Every week we will read a new play by a celebrated or an emerging living playwright, and examine their shared topics of interest and writing styles. A great emphasis will be put on honing the students' speaking and writing skills through staged readings of excerpts of plays in class, and creative play-writing exercises. Some playwrights will join us virtually from France, as well as actors and directors specializing in the contemporary repertoire so as to share their experience creating it in the present times.

In Advanced French Theater Workshop, students will focus their work on three main French playwrights: one classical, one modern, and one contemporary. This year, students will rehearse and perform excerpts from the great works of Marivaux, Alfred de Musset, and Pascal Rambert. The course will place emphasis on refining and improving students' acting and speaking skills. It will culminate in the public presentation of the students' "Travaux" at the end of the semester.

Excavate/Illuminate will guide students' archival research and collaborative exploration of US history, journalism, and performance, focusing on the pivotal Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) as a case study. We will read several examples of documentary theater to see how artists create theater from the raw materials of history. For the first half of the semester, students will work in small groups, exploring online resources in order to develop and perform original scripts in the style of Federal Theatre Project Living Newspapers. During weeks 7-12, students will select collaborators and historical topics of interest to devise final performances.

This course will study the role that the arts can and do play in Trenton: a so-called invisible city, one of the poorest parts of the state, but intimately connected to Princeton. Examining the historical and contemporary racisms that have shaped Trenton, we will hear from activists, policy makers, artistic directors, politicians, and artists. Readings will include texts about urban invisibility, race, community theater, and public arts policy. The course will follow the development of a new play by Trenton's Passage Theater about desegregation in Trenton; students can also choose to assist in curating a show featuring Trenton artists.

This upper level musical theater writing course will delve into the creation of new musical works for the stage, with an emphasis on music as an essential dramatic language. In the first half of the course, students will explore the fundamentals of music composition, including song structure, melody, harmony, and vocal writing. In the second, students will create and workshop 15-minute musicals, harnessing music as a tool to tell stories, illuminate character, and express ideas with impact and resonance. The workshop will culminate in a presentation of these short musicals-in-progress.

An introduction to the craft of acting. Emphasis will be placed on honesty, spontaneity, and establishing a personal connection with the substance of the material.

This course introduces students to set and costume design for performance, exploring theater as a visual medium. Students will develop their ability to think about the physical environment (including clothing) as key components of story-telling and our understanding of human experience. Students will expand their vocabulary for discussing the visual world and work on their collaborative skills. We'll spend half the semester focusing on costuming and half focusing of the scenic environment, both in a practical, on your feet studio class taught by professional theater practitioners. Absolutely no experience required.

This course offers an intensive survey of ongoing efforts to revisit and revise the American theatrical canon and repertoire. Students will examine the economic, institutional and cultural forces shaping the landscape of new play production in the United States as they also read a broad selection of plays from the contemporary American theater. Working in partnership with McCarter Theatre's "Bard at the Gate" initiative, students will develop dramaturgical and other resources in response to this uniquely curated virtual platform for noteworthy but overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.

The Writers' Room will replicate the fast-paced environment of a Hollywood writers room. Students will be assigned to a writing team and will pen two complete scripts with their fellow writers. They will also be required to submit an original work for their final project that they have written solo. It can be a play, a short film, or a series pilot.

This course is an exploration of physical performance techniques that place the embodied actor at the center of the process of theatrical creation. In a progressive set of exercises, students investigate movement dynamics, and unlock creative pathways within their bodies, minds and imaginations. Preparatory techniques lay the foundation for improvisations which make use of theatrical masks as tools for deepening play. Through playfulness, students embark on a journey toward the core of their own bodies, in relationship to the movements of the life.

A hands-on approach to this interdisciplinary field. We will apply key readings in performance theory to space and time-based events, at sites ranging from theatre, experimental art, and film, to community celebrations, sport events, and restaurant dining. We will observe people's behavior in everyday life as performance and discuss the "self" through the performativity of one's gender, race, class, ability, and more. We will also practice ethnographic methods to collect stories to adapt for performance and address the role of the participant-observer, thinking about ethics and the social responsibilities of this work.

In this Princeton Challenge course, students will participate in building a relationship between a historically significant Black theater company, Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, and the university community. Co-taught by Sydne Mahone, Director of play development at Crossroads 1985-1997, students will research the theater through its people and its art, while making the role of women in Black art-making more visible. Students will consider their own role in movements for change, and the role of storytelling as a call to action. Our work will culminate in creative responses and roadmaps for continuing community relationship.

An exploration of theatrical sound design and engineering, this class will explore sound for both theater and music theater. We will investigate text from the point of view of sound, and learn how to communicate the ideas, palette and arc of a design to others. We will explore developing a creative process and turning our ideas into sounds that can be used onstage.

Every life delivers a story (or three) worth telling well. This workshop rehearses the writing and performance skills necessary to remake the raw material drawn from lived experience into compelling autobiographical storytelling. As we engage the thematic focus of "Princeton, History and Me," we will explore autobiographical storytelling as both a practice and a process as we also evince (and confront) the personal, moral, ethical and artistic dimensions of the stories we choose to tell about ourselves, about Princeton, and the stories that remain to be told about both.

What happens when there is a dead body on stage? Why do corpses star in so many movies? Reverence for the dead is one of the markers of humanity, bound up with the development of societies and cultures. But we also play with dead bodies, spinning stories around them that can be austere or grotesque, tragic or farcical, haunting or hilarious. Dramas and films use dead bodies to explore fear, sex, greed, guilt, innocence and grief. In this course, we contemplate corpses from Antigone to Alfred Hitchcock and from Shakespeare's tragedies to Stand By Me and Weekend at Bernie's and bring the dead to life.

This junior methods seminar will prepare you to create and co-produce theatrical projects for your senior year independent work in a changing landscape of theater making. We will address the development of theatrical literacy, creative processes, collaborative and leadership skills; incorporating practical exercises and professional guests. We will hold space for reflecting on art-making, individually and as a member of a collaborative cohort, and mentor you in developing an anti-racist theater practice. As a group, you'll be prepared to support each other in creating an exciting senior year theater season and into the future.

A workshop course designed to support advanced student theater and music theater writers in exploring possible performance of their writing. Students will investigate their writing with a focus on collaboration, performance and production. Individualized creative assignments will be suggested for each student. Students will be introduced to methodologies for producing new works and for theatrical collaboration, and will discuss the writer's point of view in the rehearsal room, physical staging, working with performers and character development, and exploring visual storytelling.

Why do some BIPOC dramatists (from the US and Canada) choose to adapt/revise/re-envision canonical texts from the Western theatrical tradition? While their choices might be accused of recentering and reinforcing "white" narratives that marginalize and/or exoticize racial and ethnic others, we might also see this venture as a useful strategy to write oneself into a tradition that is itself constantly being revised and reevaluated and to claim that tradition as one's own. What are the artistic, cultural, and economic "rewards" for deploying this method of playmaking? What are the risks?

This course is designed to encourage the development of directors for theater and musical theater, covering techniques and practices from both areas. The course will look at the practices of a small list of key figures in world theatre and how their work has influenced how directors approach the rehearsal room today. The course will incorporate a strong practical element, giving student directors the opportunity to explore and hone their own practices, developing useful and appropriate style and language as they move forward in their work as young directors.

Co-taught by design collective dots, the course aims to explore the world of visual storytelling, with an emphasis on collaboration as an essential part of the process of designing 3-dimensional space for narratives. The course will present narrative design processes as adaptable to many media including theater, film, installation and architecture and hopes to empower students with the ability to recognize their role as the designer of their own stories. Through individual research and a group project, we aim to encourage students to develop unique points of view within the context of a design that is worth more than the sum of its parts.

This course will be an exploration, rehearsals and performances of a production of the play Fuenteovejuna by Lope de Vega, to be performed partly or completely in the Spanish language. The project will be directed by professional director Estefania Fadul, and will lead to performances in the Berlind Theater. Rehearsals for this project will be several hours a week in addition to classtime. Students who missed the theater program's September 2021 Try On Theater days should reach out to earaoz@ for more information about remaining performing or production roles.

This studio class will explore a broad range of approaches to art-based performance: from instruction pieces and happenings, to the body as language and gesture, to performance as a form of archiving. We move through the history of performance to investigate techniques of narrative, site, the audience, duration, voice, movement, installation, with a particular emphasis on documentation and how performance has engaged virtual spaces. Readings and critiques expand vocabulary in assessing performance art. Exercises explore different forms of performance building a foundation of techniques and positions for developing art-based performance work.