Curriculum

Playwriting Workshop (Instructor: Steven Dietz. Taught each Fall.)
An intensive exploration of the craft of playwriting and the art of rewriting — with a particular focus on active Narrative Strategies: what makes a play move and change? — push forward? — come to life? This rigorous writing workshop demands that playwrights interrogate not merely the chassis of their story (structure, arc, composition), but also the engine (motion, drive, the particular vigor of a living event) — with a particular emphasis on three primary creation/revision strategies: Motion, Status and Time. This course seeks to redirect the fundamental dramaturgical questions from “What's your play about?” and “How is the story structured?” to “What happens in your play?” and “What does your story need?”

Playwriting Workshop (Instructor: Suzan Zeder. Taught each Spring.)
This innovative playwriting workshop draws upon a variety of body/mind techniques and disciplines to encourage students to explore the multiple languages of visual, verbal and kinesthetic vocabularies in conceiving and developing their work. It also employs unorthodox feedback strategies preferring open-ended perceptual and generative response to evaluative criticism.

Narrative Strategies: Time (Instructor: Steven Dietz. Taught alt. Springs.)
This is a topics course — not a writing workshop — which focuses exclusively on the use of TIME as a narrative strategy in the plays of numerous contemporary playwrights. This course seeks to broaden a working playwrights' knowledge of “time” as one of the most powerful theatrical tools at their disposal; to explore concrete examples in the form of ten contemporary plays which bend time to their will; and to engage the participants in ways to directly apply these lessons to their own ongoing and future plays.

Collaboration (Instructor: Steven Dietz. Taught alt. Springs.)
This course — which brings together graduate candidates in Playwriting, Acting, Directing and Design — is designed to investigate the generative and collaborative process in a tangible, hands-on way. The focus of the work is two-fold: to develop practical skills (and exercise existing ones) designed to assist in the generation of new work with a group; and to create new, original, short pieces (driven by collaborators of various disciplines) that will be refined, revised and re-imagined.

Professional Development: Directing New Work (Various instructors including Daniel Alexander Jones, Kirk Lynn and Katie Pearl.)
Second-year M.F.A. students develop projects in preparation for a professional workshop with a guest director. Working closely with a dramaturg and a cadre of actors, playwrights explore, rehearse, revise and discuss plays in a variety of contexts in class and in a 3 to 5 day workshop with a guest director experienced in new play development.

Monday Night Lab (Various instructors including Suzan Zeder and Kirk Lynn.)
This course provides a structured meeting once a week on Monday nights for Departmental and Michener Center playwrights to explore, share, and develop their work through readings or carefully crafted experiments focusing upon a specific area of inquiry. Each playwright has access to one class meeting and individual writers determine how best to use this time. Labs range from concert readings to mini-workshops to discussions to any combination of the three. Classes often meet off campus in venues the playwrights find most appropriate for exploring their work.

Playwriting Pedagogy (Instructor: Suzan Zeder. Taught alt. Falls.)
During the course of their careers, most playwrights will eventually find themselves teaching playwriting in some context. Whether it is in the formal structure of a college or university theatre program, or in a community workshop, or in a drama of language arts curriculum in a high school, elementary or middle school classroom, or as a guest artist leading the obligatory master class, sooner or later, most playwrights will face a room full of young, or not so young, writers clamoring for guidance. The purpose of this course is to provide playwrights with a variety of techniques, strategies, activities, exercises and resources to help develop their own approaches to teaching the art and craft of playwriting.

Guest Playwriting Seminar
In semesters when the Michener Center brings in a guest playwright, there will usually be a playwriting readings courses offered through the MCW. Topics vary with the choice of playwright. Some past examples include:

• Alice Tuan: Toward the 21st Century
• Naomi Iizuka: Political Theatre
• Sherry Kramer: The Perception Shift
• Denis Johnson: Favorite Plays

Thesis
In the third year, students will focus on one or more projects/productions and will write a process essay that will accompany their written thesis document. In most cases students will be involved in some form of production of the play or plays in either the Departmental production season, UT New Theatre Program (created specifically to showcase the work of Third Year playwrights), the biennial University Co-op presents Cohen New Works Festival, in collaboration with a local producing theatre or new play development program. The process essay is intended to be an opportunity to reflect on some aspect of the thesis play(s) in greater depth and detail. It may contextualize a common theme or issue over the course of several plays or it may focus on a single work.