Courses for Spring 2025
| Title | Instructors | Location | Time | Description | Cross listings | Fulfills | Registration notes | Syllabus | Syllabus URL | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| THAR 0020-301 | Fundamentals of Acting: First-Year Seminar | Brooke K. O'Harra | W 1:45 PM-4:44 PM | Rooted in the system devised by Constantine Stanislavsky, but incorporating a wide variety of approaches, including improvisation, this course takes students step by step through the practical work an actor must do to live and behave truthfully on-stage. Beginning with relaxation and physical exercise, interactive games, and ensemble building, students then learn and put into practice basic acting techniques, including sensory work, the principles of action, objectives, given circumstances, etc. The semester culminates in the performance of a scene or scenes, most often from a play from the Realist tradition. This course strongly stresses a commitment to actor work and responsibility to one's fellow actors. Practical work is supplemented by readings from Stanislavsky and a variety of other acting theorists that may include Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Stella Adler, among others. Students are required to submit short essays over the course of the semester in response to the readings and in preparation for their final scene project. This First-Year Seminar covers the same material as THAR0120 Introduction to Acting, and a student may not receive credit for both courses. |
Humanties & Social Science Sector | ||||||
| THAR 0100-001 | Introduction to Theatre Arts | Margit Edwards | TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | This course is an introduction to theatre as a unique art form, in which we will pursue the following questions. What is theatre? For whom—and by whom—is it created and performed? What does it take to “make theatre?” What is the role of theatre in society and in our culture(s)? We will learn to read plays as scripts designed for performance, and one of our key goals will be to discover how to interpret and assess the experience of live performance itself. Among the things we will consider are the distinct roles of actors, directors, designers, playwrights, producers, spectators, and critics; we will also visit a variety of performance spaces in Philadelphia, where we will view live theatre together. The class will feature visits from professional artists, and may present opportunities for creative as well as analytical work. | Arts & Letters Sector | ||||||
| THAR 0102-401 | Theatre, History, Culture II: Romantics, Realists and Revolutionaries | Raymond Saraceni | TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM | This course investigates the history of theatre practice from the end of the Eighteenth-Century to the present, with an emphasis on interplay of mainstream practices with the newly emerging aesthetics of acting, scenography, and theatrical theory, and the interplay of popular entertainment and audiences with the self-defined aesthetic elitism of the Avant Garde. Among the aesthetics and phenomena we will examine are romanticism and melodrama; bourgeois realism and revolutionary naturalism; emotional-realist acting; the reaction against realism; political theatre; physical theatre; theatre and media; non-dramatic theatre; and theatre that challenges long-standing categories of national identity, empire, gender, and sexuality. | ENGL1875401 | Arts & Letters Sector | |||||
| THAR 0103-401 | The Play: Structure, Style, Meaning | Rosemary Malague | TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | How does one read a play? Theatre, as a discipline, focuses on the traditions of live performance. In those traditions, a play text must be read not only as a piece of literature, but as a kind of "blueprint" from which productions are built. This course will introduce students to a variety of approaches to reading plays and performance pieces. Drawing on a wide range of dramatic texts from different periods and places, we will examine how plays are made, considering issues such as structure, genre, style, character, and language, as well as the use of time, space, and theatrical effects. Although the course is devoted to the reading and analysis of plays, we will also view selected live and/or filmed versions of several of the scripts we study, assessing their translation from page to stage. | COML1859401, ENGL1859401 | ||||||
| THAR 0120-301 | Introduction to Acting | Sarah J Doherty | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Rooted in the system devised by Constantine Stanislavsky, but incorporating a wide variety of approaches, including improvisation, this course takes students step by step through the practical work an actor must do to live and behave truthfully on-stage. Beginning with relaxation and physical exercise, interactive games, and ensemble building, students then learn and put into practice basic acting techniques, including sensory work, the principles of action, objectives, given circumstances, etc. The semester culminates in the performance of a scene or scenes, most often from a play from the Realist tradition. This course strongly stresses a commitment to actor work and responsibility to one's fellow actors. Practical work is supplemented by readings from Stanislavsky and a variety of other acting theorists that may include Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Stella Adler, among others. Students are required to submit short essays over the course of the semester in response to the readings and in preparation for their final scene project. | Humanties & Social Science Sector | ||||||
| THAR 0120-302 | Introduction to Acting | Tai A Verley | MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Rooted in the system devised by Constantine Stanislavsky, but incorporating a wide variety of approaches, including improvisation, this course takes students step by step through the practical work an actor must do to live and behave truthfully on-stage. Beginning with relaxation and physical exercise, interactive games, and ensemble building, students then learn and put into practice basic acting techniques, including sensory work, the principles of action, objectives, given circumstances, etc. The semester culminates in the performance of a scene or scenes, most often from a play from the Realist tradition. This course strongly stresses a commitment to actor work and responsibility to one's fellow actors. Practical work is supplemented by readings from Stanislavsky and a variety of other acting theorists that may include Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Stella Adler, among others. Students are required to submit short essays over the course of the semester in response to the readings and in preparation for their final scene project. | Humanties & Social Science Sector | ||||||
| THAR 0120-303 | Introduction to Acting | Angela Trovato | TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM | Rooted in the system devised by Constantine Stanislavsky, but incorporating a wide variety of approaches, including improvisation, this course takes students step by step through the practical work an actor must do to live and behave truthfully on-stage. Beginning with relaxation and physical exercise, interactive games, and ensemble building, students then learn and put into practice basic acting techniques, including sensory work, the principles of action, objectives, given circumstances, etc. The semester culminates in the performance of a scene or scenes, most often from a play from the Realist tradition. This course strongly stresses a commitment to actor work and responsibility to one's fellow actors. Practical work is supplemented by readings from Stanislavsky and a variety of other acting theorists that may include Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Stella Adler, among others. Students are required to submit short essays over the course of the semester in response to the readings and in preparation for their final scene project. | Humanties & Social Science Sector | ||||||
| THAR 0120-304 | Introduction to Acting | Rosemary Malague | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | Rooted in the system devised by Constantine Stanislavsky, but incorporating a wide variety of approaches, including improvisation, this course takes students step by step through the practical work an actor must do to live and behave truthfully on-stage. Beginning with relaxation and physical exercise, interactive games, and ensemble building, students then learn and put into practice basic acting techniques, including sensory work, the principles of action, objectives, given circumstances, etc. The semester culminates in the performance of a scene or scenes, most often from a play from the Realist tradition. This course strongly stresses a commitment to actor work and responsibility to one's fellow actors. Practical work is supplemented by readings from Stanislavsky and a variety of other acting theorists that may include Uta Hagen, Robert Cohen, Stella Adler, among others. Students are required to submit short essays over the course of the semester in response to the readings and in preparation for their final scene project. | Humanties & Social Science Sector | ||||||
| THAR 1117-401 | Plague Lab: Writing through Infection and Affliction | Ann Seaton | W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | How do we write through a plague? In this creative writing class we will begin with the question of how plagues make and disrupt meaning. In addition to canonical examples, we’ll explore off-center, anti-colonial, and non-Western literary and popular culture works. Students will then produce across a number of genres including poetry, fiction, memoir, zines, double-blind studies, sculpture, installation, performance, or found object scavenging. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu. | ENGL3517401 | ||||||
| THAR 1272-401 | Broadway Musicals in the 21st Century | David Fox Cameron Kelsall |
MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM | Wicked, Spring Awakening, Dear Evan Hansen, Hadestown. And of course, Hamilton. The innovations we see in Broadway musicals since 2000 are particularly fascinating in that they, so to speak, boldly go where no musicals have gone before—while at the same time honoring and building on the long-standing traditions of this beloved form. From the powerfully romantic Light in the Piazza, which nods to roots in European operetta, to the boundary-defying Black queerness of A Strange Loop... and everything in between. In this course, we will go year by through musical theater from the quarter-century, to see where the form has gone recently… and where it’s headed. In addition to the works already mentioned, we’ll look at Caroline or Change, The Color Purple, In the Heights, Fun Home, and more. This course will also consider some recent “revisals,” like director Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!, and Marianne Elliott’s gender-reassigned Company: reinterpretations of classic American musicals that imagine them in more contemporary light. | CIMS1275401, ENGL1891401 | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=THAR1272401 | |||||
| THAR 1275-301 | Edinburgh Project | Margit Edwards | TR 5:15 PM-6:44 PM | This course will combine an intensive practical and intellectual investigation of some area of the making of theatre: performance techniques, theatrical styles, a particular period of theatre history. Please visit the Theatre Arts Program website for current topics for Thar 275 and other Theatre Arts Courses and special topics: https://theatre.sas.upenn.edu Please visit the Theatre Arts Program website each semester for information on the available THAR 275 special topics courses: https://theatre.sas.upenn.edu | |||||||
| THAR 1285-001 | Theatre Management | Tyler Dobrowsky | M 3:30 PM-6:29 PM | So you want to be a producer. But what does it take to run a theatre company? Or to get a show to Broadway? This course gives students an in-depth look at the business of making art. Theatre management is more than budgeting and HR. The theatre manager is responsible for shaping our interactions with theatre and creating relationships between artists, audiences, and the larger community. This course looks at the role of the theater manager as a driving force in the American theatrical landscape. We will cover practical topics like grant writing, budgeting, and board management, as well as big picture topics like the relationship between commercial and not for profit theatre, how theatre shapes communities, and how technology changes the role art plays in our lives. The course features visits by leading theatre managers and thinkers from Philadelphia and New York. | https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202510&c=THAR1285001 | ||||||
| THAR 2236-401 | Acting Shakespeare | Sarah J Doherty | MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM | All the world’s a stage and Shakespeare’s plays were written to be performed on it. In this open-level acting course we’ll explore the performance of three of Shakespeare’s greatest dramatic works (Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet). We’ll dive deep into the language, verse, rhetoric, and dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s texts to create performances that are passionate, spontaneous, and real. Through acting exercises, text analysis, scene study, and vocal training, we will develop the skills needed to bring Shakespeare’s dramatic works to their most impactful life. Students will leave the course not only with techniques to perform and appreciate Shakespeare’s work, but with expressive tools that will serve them in all kinds of performance or public speaking. | ENGL2879401 | Cross Cultural Analysis | |||||
| THAR 3130-201 | Theatre Design Lab: Applied Scenography | Cat Johnson | F 12:00 PM-2:59 PM | Theatre Design Lab: Applied Scenography provides students the opportunity to develop an applied scenography project into a portfolio-ready design deck. In this advanced level course, each student’s project will serve as the framework for honing their ability to transform written source materials into 3D live experiences and to articulate visual, spatial and temporal concepts to audience members, collaborators, and clients. Through coursework, students will examine how their design process evolves as co-collaborators and realities shape their ideas. Students will deepen their analysis of texts, broaden their research, expand their ideation process in order to fine-tune meaningful selections, practice model making- digital and/or physical, learn computer-aided drafting via Vectorworks, and solidify their virtual presentations. Under the guidance of the course instructor, each student will select their individual design project (in scenery, costumes, or lighting and sound) from the following three choices: a production they are working on outside of class; a production within Theatre Arts, if approved; or a large-scale musical, opera, or themed environment unrealized production. | |||||||
| THAR 3500-201 | Rehearsal and Performance: SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS | Rosemary Malague | TR 5:15 PM-8:14 PM | Theatre Rehearsal and Performance provides students with deep intellectual and artistic immersion in the theatrical process through intensive research, rehearsal, and performance of a full-length stage piece. Students may enroll in this course as actors (by audition only) or as assistant directors, stage managers, dramaturgs, or designers (by permission of the instructor). Each semester, the play will be featured in the Theatre Arts Program production season. This course does not follow a typical meeting pattern. Dr. Rosemary Malague will direct Small Mouth Sounds by Bess Wohl, in Spring 2025. Students may enroll as actors, stage managers, or assistant directors. Auditions are required before students can register as actors and will be held on Wednesday, October 30th and Tuesday, November 5th. Callbacks, if needed, will be held on Wednesday, November 6th. For more information and to sign-up for an audition time, please visit: https://tinyurl.com/PennSMSauditions . If you are interested in joining the course as a stage manager or assistant director, e-mail Dr. Rosemary Malague at rmalague@sas.upenn.edu |