Theatre of the Real
THEA_UT 801.003 ~4 credits
TUESDAYS 2:00-4:45 P.M
Professor Carol Martin
cm7@nyu.edu
In our post-truth era, theatre-makers create work that both assumes and challenges theatre’s ability to represent and interpret events. They aim is to interrogate political convictions and legal determinations and study the relationship between aesthetic preferences and ethical choices. They developed provocative representational strategies in relation to complex and challenging subjects. The plays and performances in this course illuminate and incriminate today's violence, politics, despair, and hope through the provocative staging, writing, and casting.
Methods of representation have become even more important given the circulation of “deepfakes” that purport to document explosions, bombings, plane crashes, fires, and naked people variously engaged. With each passing second, these can become our reality. So what can theatre do, if anything, to stage reality in terms that rightfully demand out attention and point us in the right directions? We will study plays, online performances, and essays about some of the most important issues of our time: terrorism, the Holocaust, racial clashes, corruption in the Catholic Church, the murder of Mathew Sheppard, Lebanese suicide bombers, and the cover-up of industrial accidents in Poland. Authors include Richard Norton-Taylor, Milo Rau, Sophie Treadwell, Griselda Gambaro, Moises Kaufman, Rabih Mroué, Peter Weiss, Emily Mann, and Michael Murphy among others. Questions: Can theatre effectively critique social and political life? Are there boundaries between "fiction" and "nonfiction?" Can theatre’s representation of real events help us understand the circulation of “deepfakes” and the collapse of the distinctions between the real, the simulated, and the virtual?