Freshman and Sophomore Programs

Learning Theater: From Audience to Critic at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Instructor(s): Alice Rayner Linda Paulson Prerequisites: None
Who doesn’t love going to a play: sitting in the darkened theater, an anonymous member of the audience waiting to be entertained, charmed, and challenged? But how many of us know enough about the details of the plays, their interpretation, their production, and acting itself, to allow us to appreciate fully the theatrical experience? In this seminar, we will spend 13 days in Ashland, Oregon, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), where we will attend these plays: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, All’s Well that Ends Well, Henry VIII, and Much Ado About Nothing; Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man; Bill Cain’s Equivocation; Clifford Odets’ Paradise Lost; Carlo Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters; and Octavio Solis’ adaptation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. We will also spend time backstage, meeting with actors, designers, and artistic and administrative directors of OSF. Students will read the plays before the seminar begins. In Ashland, they will produce staged readings and design a final paper based on one of the productions. These reviews will be delivered to the group and turned in on Friday, September 18. Note: This seminar will convene in Ashland on Monday, August 31, and will adjourn to Stanford on Sunday, September 13. Students must arrive in Ashland by 4:00 pm. on August 31. Room and board in Ashland and transportation to Stanford will be provided and paid for by the program.

Alice Rayner teaches dramatic literature and theory in the drama department. Her interests include the phenomenology of theater, as well as comedy, genre theory, and rhetoric. She has taught freshman seminars on Shakespeare as interpreted on stage and in film. Her published books include Comic Persuasion; To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action; and Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre.
Linda Paulson received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from UCLA. She has taught at Stanford since 1985. Her research focuses on the Victorian social novel and on the development of a British woman’s novel from Jane Austen to Doris Lessing. In 1989, she received Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education. She frequently lectures for Stanford Travel/Study groups in England and France. She has been taking Stanford undergraduates to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since 1995.