The American stage has seen an explosion of black playwrights since the 1990s. From the verbatim theater of Anna Deavere Smith to the cagey narrators of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, these playwrights have reimagined and reworked American drama’s conventions of form and mood. Performers like Ralph Lemon and Jennifer Kidwell are devising work at theater's intersection with dance, media, and visual art, and playwright Adrienne Kennedy has returned after a decade-long hiatus. This course surveys the landscape of contemporary back theater-makers and performance artists (and includes, where relevant, the historical predecessors they explicitly invoke or work against). What forces animate works of contemporary black theater and performance? What tropes or conventions do they jettison, and which do they keep? Is there enough uniting these works that an underlying coherence prevails, or does studying them alongside one another instead reveal the dissolution of a racial center? (Drama)