Course Syllabus
Course: THEA 1713
Division: Fine Arts, Comm, and New Media
Department: Theater Arts
Title: Script Analysis
Semester Approved: Spring 2018
Five-Year Review Semester: Spring 2023
End Semester: Spring 2024
Catalog Description: How do you begin to interpret a play without seeing it performed? How do you do so with only the text? THEA 1713 introduces you to the study, structures, and application of dramatic text analysis and interpretation for the actor, designer, technician, and director. Giving you the tools to take a play from the page to the stage.
Semesters Offered: Fall
Credit/Time Requirement: Credit: 3; Lecture: 3; Lab: 0
Justification: This course is offered by most theatre departments throughout the state as a lower-division credit, holds the correct course number articulated with other USHE schools, and is a requirement for theatre majors.
Script Analysis is a fundamental skill for all theatrical professionals. All artistic and technical positions rely on examination and interpretation of a play text.
Student Learning Outcomes:
Articulate a system to organize the elements of a production using the script as your roadmap. Students will learn to see a play as a unique art form comprised of dramatic values that can be identified, organized, and artistically translated. They will demonstrate this understanding through participation in class discussions, short essays, exams, and a "Minor to Major Character" project where they will retell the events of a play through the eyes of one of its less significant characters. Additionally, each student will attend two Snow College Theatre Productions and write a formal response essay detailing the notable structural elements written into the play they observed and their relevance to the production.
Demonstrate fluency in historical/cultural content and context as applied to playwriting. Learners will demonstrate their understanding of the cultural and historical development of play structure through the lens of representative texts, primary sources, and academic discussion of contemporaneous attitudes/theories toward theatre. They will demonstrate understanding of an individual play's impact upon an audience, a society, and a culture through Socratic class discussions, group projects, quizzes, written assignments, and exams.
Demonstrate an ability to critically analyze a script's structure using appropriate techniques, vocabulary, and methodologies. Class discussions, exams, essays, and group projects allow students to demonstrate their ability to critically understand and explain the dramatic and rhetorical architecture in a play. Specifically, students will study a play's action, character, setting, images, themes, and style. Beyond the theoretical, learners will demonstrate the practical application of these ideas through individual design projects/performances.
Demonstrate an understanding of how analysis can be applied to artistic interpretation. Through the study of a representative selection of scripts and a variety of approaches to break them down, learners will discover how analysis can be applied to artistic endeavors in theatre. Students will demonstrate their ability to interrogate a text and explore interpretation through class discussions, exams and/or quizzes, written assignments, and group projects. The class will culminate with the "Minor to Major Character Project" (modeled after plays such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Fortinbras) where each student will step into the role of playwright and demonstrate their understanding of play creation, structure, and interpretation.
Content:
This course is intended to help students develop a system of analyzing and evaluating a script in terms of their theatrical requirements, their aesthetic qualities, and their interpretive potential. Students will explore the interdisciplinary nature of the production process, which includes analysis, interpretation and research.
Learners will discover how to search for playable dramatic values that reveal a central unifying pattern, which shapes a play. Playable dramatic values are defined as those features which motivate directors, designers, and actors in their work including action, character, setting, image, theme, and style. Formalist analysis uses a traditional system of classifications to break up a play into its parts in order to understand these values, their nature and relationship.
Students will also investigate a range of other forms of analysis including (but not limited to); textual, historical, psychological, mythological, biographical, moral and philosophical, archetypal, feminist, structuralism, and rhetorical, to grasp a play’s meaning and put it to use.
Learners will demonstrate their proficiency of their methods through quizzes, exams, and group projects throughout the semester.
Students will be required to read selected representative plays. Such plays could include but not be limited to:
• Antigone, by Sophocles
• Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
• The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
• Fences, by August Wilson
• Last Days of Judas Iscariot, by Stephen Adly Guirgis
Key Performance Indicators:
Attendance/Participation 15 to 20%
Reading and lecture quizzes 15 to 25%
Exams 25 to 40%
Group presentation 10 to 15%
Live performance critiques 5 to 10%
Research Projects 15 to 20%
Representative Text and/or Supplies:
Introduction to Play Analysis, by Cal Pritner and Scott Walters.
Backwards & Forwards, by David Ball.
Aristotle’s Poetics, translated by S. H. Butcher.
Pedagogy Statement:
Through lecture, Socratic discussions, research projects, quizzes, and examinations, this course will introduce students to the dramatic script as the primary source of information for a theatrical performance.
Instructional Mediums:
Lecture
Maximum Class Size: 25
Optimum Class Size: 20
