Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Dana Yeaton has been teaching a playwriting class at the College since 1999.
"That makes it about 13 years now," said Yeaton, a seasoned playwright himself. Yeaton has high expectations for his class this semester. "I want them to understand and be able to create dramatic action," he said. "P.S., I've been trying to figure it out myself, and I still don't know; it's the Holy Grail."
In this writing-intensive course, students write four ten-minute plays, revise their two favorites and then write a thirty-minute long play to culminate the course. Surprisingly, Yeaton's favorite assignment in the course is the first one: the bad play.
For this assignment, the students write a bad play filled with their biggest pet peeves with theater: gratuitous smoking, unnecessary obscenities, etc.
"I think pound-for-pound writing the bad play frees you up," he said. "I think [writing a bad play] is a critical first step toward writing a good one."
While Playwriting I mainly attracts more creatively inclined students, it also offers a break for others who badly need an imaginative, yet academic, outlet.
"I took this class because I've been interested in playwriting for a while, but never actually finished a play," said Chelsea Melone '15.
Melone's comment may ring true for many other members of the class. Writer's block is a common problem among creative writers, and working in an academic setting helps provide a solution by forcing every student to complete works-in-progress.
The bad play festival, which took place this past Sunday, was the student's first real taste of playwriting. Most students saw their own work performed for the first time.
From another perspective, Michael Bernstein '15 took Playwriting "because at Middlebury I don't use my creative side."
"I'm excited to use the non-analytical part of my brain," said Bernstein.
Distribution Requirements: Playwriting I
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