Theatre Courses

Program—Year | 24 credits

THEA 7999

Note: Restricted to Second Years.

In their second year, students advance toward their embodied and written thesis, integrating research, practice, and performance. Students take Performance Lab (THEA 7662), Critical Performance Writing I (THEA 7445), Critical Performance Writing II (THEA 7555), Embodied Thesis I  (THEA 7473), Embodied Thesis II (THEA 7573) and one or two practicums—Practicum I (THEA 7390) and/or Practicum II (THEA 7392)—alongside components in theatre, dance, and music each semester. With 12 credits per semester, totaling 24 credits for the year, the focus is on creating original work, refining research and writing, field study in New York City with contemporary theatre/performance makers, and developing collaborative and leadership skills. Students emerge prepared to situate their practice within the contemporary field and discourse. 

Faculty

• Caden Manson

Program—Year | 24 credits

THEA 7998

Note: Restricted to First Years.

In their first year, students build a foundation in interdisciplinary practice, collaboration, and research. Required courses include Performance Lab (THEA 7662), Performance Research (THEA 7669), Creative Practice Studio (THEA 7667), and one of two practicums—Practicum I (THEA 7390) and/or Practicum II (THEA 7392)—linked to productions or residencies. Students also select components in theatre, dance, and music each semester, completing 12 credits per semester for a total of 24 credits for the year. The year emphasizes embodied practice, ensemble collaboration, field study in New York City with contemporary theatre/performance makers, and the articulation of artistic questions that inform future research and performance. 

Faculty

• Caden Manson

Component—Year

THEA 7346

In this advanced studio course, we will explore scenes and monologues from contemporary playwrights, focusing on deepening each actor's understanding of character, story structure, and text analysis. Students will engage in intensive scene study and monologue work, guided by the instructor in collaboration with each performer. The course will emphasize advanced acting techniques designed to foster spontaneity, looseness, and authenticity in performance. Through rigorous practice, students will develop a versatile set of tools to bring contemporary characters to life with truth and vitality.

Course outcomes will include completing the course with refined scene and monologue performances, sharpened acting techniques, and a deeper mastery of contemporary theatrical texts.

Faculty

• K. Lorrel Manning

Component—Fall | 3 credits

THEA 7445

Note: Required for Second Years.

This course will provide an opportunity to cultivate scholarship and written engagement within the field of theater and performance. Over the course of the year, students will explore particular points of interest and further develop skills of analytical discourse, research techniques, and clear expression necessary for critical writing. This course will be an extension of the work begun in Performance Research (THEA 7669), with an intentional overlap of ideas, questions, and responses focusing on each student's own writing practice. Our goal will be an integration of practice and theory, culminating in a final written thesis which will use a theoretical lens to talk about theater and performance.

Faculty

• Lisa Clair

Component—Fall | 3 credits

THEA 7473

Note: Required for Second Years.

This course will provide a critical and supportive forum for developing new works of original theatre and performance, focusing on researching in multiple formats, including historical and artistic research, showings, improvisations, experiments, and conversation. Each student will have the opportunity to create a solo, duo, or group project. We will share our research, respond to developmental prompts, keep a practice journal, loosely develop a structure/content for the projects, refine our performances through showings, and support and give feedback to the cohort.

The course will cultivate technical skills and nurture a deep understanding of the integral relationship between research and embodiment in performance practice. By delving into an intentional and elongated creation process, students will embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery. Students will leave the course equipped with an original work that authentically reflects their artistic voice and demonstrates their growth as innovative practitioners.

Faculty

• Lauren Reinhard

Component—Year

THEA 7662

Note: Required for First and Second Years.

Taught by a rotating series of Sarah Lawrence faculty and guest artists, this course will focus on developing the skills needed for a wide variety of techniques for the creation and development of new work in theatre. Ensemble acting, movement, design and fabrication, playwriting, devised work, and music performance will all be explored. The course will be a forum for workshops, master classes, and open rehearsals, with a focus on the development of critical skills. In addition, students will be expected to generate a new piece of theatre to be performed each month for the Sarah Lawrence community. These performances may include graduate and undergraduate students alike.

Faculty

• Caden Manson

Component—Year

THEA 7667

Note: Required for First Years.

This component will focus on developing a sustainable, research-driven artistic practice. The fall semester will build studio infrastructure through experimentation, process mapping, notebook work, and reflective practice. Students will clarify the core questions, methods, and habits that support their creative work. The spring semester will focus on field positioning and professional formation. Students will develop artist statements, bios, CVs, resumes, and websites while examining digital presence, networking, resource mapping, fundraising, and self-producing strategies. Professional materials will be approached as extensions of artistic clarity rather than administrative tasks. Across the year, students will maintain a weekly process journal and participate in structured feedback. The course will support artists in connecting studio inquiry, public communication, and long-term sustainability within contemporary performance and related fields.

Faculty

• Caden Manson

Component—Year

THEA 7669

Note: Required for First Years.

This course will provide students with a rigorous grounding in both the academic research of performance and the use of performance as a tool for creative research. How do scholars study performance and theater? How do artists use performance and theater to study the world? Over the course of the year, students will become well-versed in the various scholarly debates that constitute the academic fields of performance studies, theater studies, and media studies, as well as investigate how academic research methods inform creative practices. Students will have a chance to practice multiple genres of academic writing (conference presentations, literature reviews, review essays) and professional writing (artist statements, project proposals), as well as engage in a series of creative research projects.

Faculty

• Ethan Philbrick

Component—Spring | 3 credits

THEA 7555

Note: Required for Second Years.

This course will provide an opportunity to cultivate scholarship and written engagement within the field of theater and performance. Over the course of the year, students will explore particular points of interest and further develop skills of analytical discourse, research techniques, and clear expression necessary for critical writing. This course will be an extension of the work begun in Performance Research (THEA 7669), with with an intentional overlap of ideas, questions, and responses focusing on each student's own writing practice. Our goal will be an integration of practice and theory, culminating in a final written thesis which will use a theoretical lens to talk about theater and performance.

Faculty

• Lisa Clair

Component—Spring | 3 credits

THEA 7573

Note: Required for Second Years.

This course will provide a critical and supportive forum for developing new works of original theatre and performance, focusing on researching in multiple formats, including historical and artistic research, showings, improvisations, experiments, and conversation. Each student will have the opportunity to create a solo, duo, or group project. We will share our research, respond to developmental prompts, keep a practice journal, loosely develop a structure/content for the projects, refine our performances through showings, and support and give feedback to the cohort.

This course will cultivate technical skills and nurture a deep understanding of the integral relationship between research and embodiment in performance practice. By delving into an intentional and elongated creation process, students will embark on a transformative journey of self-discovery. Students will leave the course equipped with an original work that authentically reflects their artistic voice and demonstrates their growth as innovative practitioners.

Faculty

• Lauren Reinhard

Component—Year

THEA 7123

This advanced directing studio will offer a comprehensive, text-based training environment for directors at various stages of their craft. The course will focus on assembling a personal toolbox of directorial techniques suitable for theater across different styles and scales. Students will use classic American plays as the material for expanding and refining their directing practice. Students will engage in hands-on learning through readings, exercises, and in-class projects that cover text analysis, stage composition, production conception, and collaboration. The course will emphasize practical experience, including individualizing actor adjustments, managing rehearsal environments, and helping actors activate text. All participants will be expected to perform in each other’s projects since understanding the actor’s challenges is essential to sensitive and effective directing. By the end of the studio, directors will be well-equipped with the skills necessary to bring their directorial visions to life.

Faculty

• Kathleen Amshoff

Component—Year

THEA 7143

This course will focus on pedagogy and the theory of teaching theatre in higher education. Students will prepare to work as a theatre artist and educator in universities and colleges. Students will learn the practical skills of developing materials necessary to secure a position teaching theatre such as a teaching CV, pedagogical statement, artist statement, and diversity statement. Students will also learn the practical skills they will need once they have landed a teaching position, such as developing a syllabus and other documents to track student progress.

We will discuss different perspectives on arts pedagogy and learn what is new and on the cutting edge of developing culturally competent, anti-racist, trauma-informed, consent-based, and inclusive teaching practices. Students will learn that “inclusive teaching” is a foundational framework for teaching in an increasingly diverse and globally connected society—one that recognizes and affirms the myriad backgrounds, perspectives, and identities individuals bring to learning environments. We will grapple with this in each class as students will be encouraged to design their teaching materials to be welcoming, accessible, inclusive, and explicitly centralizing of a broad range of students.

Students will learn how to identify their teaching goals for a course and then how to develop curricula that will work toward those goals with each lesson. They will learn how to design exercises with multiple entrance points and how to design both summative and formative assessments. In addition to this in-class work together, students will gain hands-on experience executing lessons and exercises by assisting a professor in the the Sarah Lawrence theatre program.

In this course we will discuss the ideas of thinkers including bell hooks, James P. Comer, Bettina Love, Kim Solga, Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire, Gada Mahrouse, Chanelle Wilson, Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, and Heidi Safia Mirza, among others.

Faculty

• Lauren Reinhard

Component—Year

THEA 7114

In this studio course, the vectors of pure creative impulse will hold sway over the process of writing for the stage, as we write ourselves into unknown territory. Students will be encouraged to set aside received and preconceived notions of what it means to write plays or to be a writer, along with ideas of what a play is “supposed to” or “should” look like in order to locate their own authentic ways of seeing and making. In other words, disarming the rational, the judgmental thinking, that is rooted in a concept of a final product and empowering the chaotic, spatial, associative processes that put us in immediate formal contact with our direct experience, impressions, and perceptions of reality. Emphasis on detail, texture, and contiguity will be favored over the more widely accepted, reliable, yet sometimes limiting Aristotelian virtues of structure and continuity in the making of meaningful live performance. Readings will be tailored to fit the thinking of the class. We will likely look at theoretical and creative writings of Gertrude Stein, George Steiner, Mac Wellman, María Irene Fornés, Adrienne Kennedy, Mircea Eliade, Kristen Kosmas, Richard Maxwell, and Roland Barthes, as well as work that crosses into visual art realms and radical scientific thought from physicists David Bohm and F. David Peat. The course will be conducted in workshop fashion, with strong emphasis on the tracking and documenting of process.

Faculty

• Lisa Clair

Component—Year

THEA 7392

Practicum is designed for hands-on graduate work.

Faculty

• Caden Manson

Component—Year

THEA 7390

Note: Required for First and Second Years.

Practicum is designed for hands-on graduate work.

Faculty

• Caden Manson

Component—Year

THEA 7112

This studio course will turn to theories and practices of erotic and antagonistic collaboration as a way to expand and sharpen students’ approach to performance making. Students will engage with the work of performance artists (e.g. Linda Montano, Tehching Hsieh, Adrian Piper, Julie Tolentino, Wu Tsang, and Autumn Knight) and theorists (e.g. Sigmund Freud, Audre Lorde, Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman, and Fred Moten) to investigate the political dynamism of collaborative artmaking while also creating performances across a sequence of four units that will increase in scale over the course of the year: “duo,” “collective,” “group,” and “party.” Students will read critical texts in preparation for most course sessions; all assignments will be creative and consist in making and showing interdisciplinary performances.

Faculty

• Ethan Philbrick

Component—Year

THEA 7615

This course will introduce students to the theory, history, and applications of dramaturgy, an approach to analyzing and working within collaborative, performance-, script- and time-based artistic practices across media. As a field, dramaturgy is analytical and practical, critical, collaborative, and creative. The dramaturg is often the only member of a creative team valued principally for their ability to feed back into the process of making rather than by what they have made themselves; they are expected to adapt from project to project and to embed themselves within any given process. At the same time, vestiges of the discipline’s origins in the Enlightenment persist in the expectation that the dramaturg maintains “objectivity”: they are responsible for fact-checking and verifying an artwork’s claims, correcting its contradictions, and elevating it to some standard of quality that often concatenates moral, aesthetic, and institutional values.

This course will aim to teach the pragmatic applications of dramaturgy alongside its internal tensions and potential problematics, as well as the philosophical underpinnings of the field and its applications in theater, dance, performance art, installation, and screen-based performance. Across the four parts of the course, Dramaturg as Interpreter/Respondent, Dramaturg as Researcher, Dramaturg as Critic, and Dramaturg as Collaborative Artist, students will be asked to both debate works of art and criticism in seminar-based discussions, as well as generate and respond to each other’s work in collaborative exercises. Issues of taste and objectivity, process versus product, the relationship of aesthetic, moral, and political values, liveness and mediation, and the role of the critic, as well as artistic research and autotheory as dramaturgical approaches, will be explored in readings/viewings that place artists' works and statements in conversation with dramaturgical responses from contemporary critics and collaborators. Rather than attempt to pin down a fluid discipline, the course will aim to provide tools for students to define, according to their experiences and artistic values, their philosophy and practice of dramaturgy.

Faculty

• Ariel Sibert