MFA Program in Playwriting
The MFA in Playwriting
Brown is a chief and storied site for the formation of playwrights, established to grant broad inventive license while offering close mentorship and profound resources (in the department, the university, and the greater community, locally to internationally). Alumni distinguish themselves by their professional credits, and by their collegial élan. Brown’s resources are deep – gorgeous stores of intellectual and artistic capacity, a deep history, a will to innovate and collaborate, outstanding libraries, a substantial array of interdisciplinary opportunities, and students who are rightly and well authorized to formulate and execute their own experiments.
This is a promising hour for the arts, and writing in particular. There are new, global drives to form social groups that center on ideals (this, at the heart of performance). After years of innovation in media technology, there is a sharp hunger for immediacy (again, at the heart of live performance). There is a reordering of public space, physically and virtually. After decades of important skepticism there is a new search for ways of making meaning (and the words are expression and capture of comprehension).
Our MFA in playwriting is now a 3-year program. We are looking for students who are committed to: the athletic development of their craft; the deep interrogation of the forms and purposes of their art, and of the place of art in the larger world; a leaning into faithful transformation of society through theatrical action.
Students take a strong hand in designing their own course of study; they are given opportunities to teach as well (the process of constructing and executing syllabi so useful to the articulation of mission).
We aim to afford an environment in which the student’s signal, personal voice can be explored on its own merits, and freely offered in an atmosphere of critical trust and exchange. Peace is the permission to be, to be in the moment. Drama, as the social moment, is learned through the establishment of a moment’s peace assured through the granting of meaningful permissions.
Art, particularly performance, maintains that the live moment is collective, and bears history forward. In every creative act, the question is: how may this be held common? Theater grounds itself in the avowal that our reality is social, and that our excellence achieves its quality in the give-away.
Our curriculum is:
Civic
Chaotic
Strange
Queer
Here are some of the many ways we might think of these words. You may offer others:
Civic
Globalized is to global what leatherette is to leather. There is a community that forms opportunistically, when individual countries don’t want to avoid acknowledging something they’ve done, or when they want to divide the spoils of belated virtue (credit for something they haven’t).
To gather our strength, theatrical strength, we need distinctive local behavior that can be moved without displacing it or making a copy of it. Rather than simply “international” with its absolving sense of no-place in patriarchal suspense: we want to graduate students who are civic, urban (in the sense of ecological); students who see their actions linked through chaos to worldwide principles, anarchists who recognize that anarchy, and chaos, and a forest are highly organized. Work is not objective, privileged, isolated or immortal, it is not personal, held apart, or inviolably bordered. It moves. It navigates landscapes without conquering them.
Chaotic
Just as we’re post national – we’re also post disciplinary. This was once understood to be post dramatic, in the sense of post authorship/post-text. But the total loss of disciplines, like the total loss of self, is disastrous. The world we are trying to describe now is so richly detailed and complex that it must be viewed from all angles at once.
We study and work in chaos: networks infinitely deep, beyond completion or full mastery.
Strange
The language of experiment in physics has for a long time now taken up the fuzzy, hairy, strange and tangled. Art likewise must pursue strangeness. The chief strangeness that we can inflict, the balance to the pace and breadth of the world (the world we must take part in), is stillness and silence. Our impractical process slows things down, so that time is in imitation of eternity, of beautiful nothing.
Queer
Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius Loyola took architectural, geographic, and military patterns inward, creating spiritual schema on the basis of observed structures. This is the shift we face: network is the manifest pattern; we must spiritualize it and then make the internal a public and hospitable space. Spirituality is the set of values by which one shares/distributes.
Queer can mean: A personal and demonstrated identity in contravention of logic or domination. Art must queer the system. Even critiquing the systematic self – at core – as with mystical thinking: we are ourselves and shared selves, selves for others at the same time.
Admission:
For online MFA application please check the Graduate School website (link at right).
The deadline for the MFA application is January 11, 2010.
Submission Requirements: Broad Strokes
a) Two writing samples. The first should be a complete piece of any length in dramatic form (“dramatic” understood liberally). The second may be a part of a whole, and in any medium; if writing, no more than fifteen pages, if visual no more than fifteen images, if sound/video, no more than 15 minutes. If you have trouble uploading a second sample, or if it cannot be uploaded, please send it directly to the Graduate School.
b) Statement of purpose. What are your writing goals over the next few years, and how can Brown's program serve them?
c) Two recommendations, at least one of which speaks directly to your work as a theater artist.
GRE is not required. TOEFL test results are required for applicants coming from non-English speaking countries.
Please send all materials, clearly marked MFA Playwriting Application, to the Graduate School at:
47 George St., Box 1867, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912
Additional inquiries should be addressed to Erik Ehn, Head of the MFA in Playwriting in the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Box 1897, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912; e-mail: Erik_Ehn @brown.edu.
Financial Support:
MFA playwriting students are guaranteed three years of full tuition support as well as an admirable stipend and health benefits. The first year is an awarded Fellowship, meaning that a student does not have any requirements beyond coursework and writing. In the second and third years, students are awarded Teaching or Research Assistantships.
The Program of Study:
MFA students are required to take the graduate playwriting workshop in each semester of their residency. Other classes are electives, and there is no set number required. Electives can be culled from a wide range of classes in playwriting, theatre studies, performance studies and the offerings of many Departments beyond the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies. For the full list of courses in the Department, follow the “courses” link on this website. Courses are selected by the student, in consultation with advisors from playwriting faculty. Other faculty in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies are also happy to advise playwrights when desired.
MFA playwrights are provided continuous collaborative opportunity, in and beyond the bounds of theater, to bring their text into space and time. If you operating within the conventions of a play as classically understood, your script is produced at least once while at Brown. This is realized in cooperation with Brown/Trinity MFA actors and directors, as well as actors, directors and dramaturgs in other parts of the Consortium of Theatre Programs at Brown. Productions along these lines occur during the New Plays/Writing is Live Festival. Also available: readings, self-and-peer produced events, conceptual collaborations with designers, means to work with musicians, programmers, poets, scholars, public health workers… We encourage you to define “play” and “production” as liberally as your impulses direct, and we will help you to your vision.
Sample Electives:
Guhahamuka – Writing and Trauma (Ehn)
Performance Dimensions of Text; Foreign Home; John Cage Seminar (Field)
Russian Theatre and Drama; Advanced Performance; Mise en scene; Wittgenstein, Writing and Performance; Abstraction and Resistance; Revolution As A Work of Art (Golub)
Screenwriting; Reading and Writing and Thinking for the Stage - A workshop/seminar; What Moves at the Margin – A workshop seminar on Marginalized Drama and Fiction (Rahman)
Performance Theory; Performance, Art and Everyday Life; Performativity and the Body; Performance and Photography (Schneider)
21st Century American Drama; Political Theatre of the Americas; Historiography (Ybarra)