Upper School Course Description

Semester-length class
Prerequisites: Successful completion of fall AP Language and Composition and departmental recommendation

This seminar examines how 20th-century American playwrights explored aspects of social identity, such as race, class, gender, regionality, religion, and sexuality. Each week, students read an American play that explores one identity group and an excerpt from a critical essay introducing a theatrical, social identity, or literary analysis concept that can be used as a tool for analyzing the text. Students will conduct a weekly online discussion of the play’s ideas and an interactive group annotation of the nonfiction text; these activities will become the building blocks for in-class discussions. As the semester progresses, students will make connections between the plays they read and explore the concept of intersectionality. For the final, students can choose either a comparative analytical essay or a creative project in which they braid moments from two plays together while interlacing their own scenes or interpretative commentary. In either project, the goal is to explore points of commonality and differences between the two plays and how American identity groups intersect.