Sherry Engle, an Associate professor in the Department of Speech, Communications, and Theatre Arts, teaches Modern American Drama, from melodrama to drama.
Engle, who originally came from Oregon, says she’s always wanted to be a woman dramatist, and took her first step toward reaching her goal by receiving her doctorate at the University of Texas, in Austin, researching women dramatists.
“But by then,” she says, “I was an older student and I was kind of burned out on school and academics, so I decided that because I had been researching women dramatists that I would come to New York and become one. I had been writing scripts as well. So for a couple of years this was a big adventure for me.”
“Eventually, being a starving artist, was not what it’s cracked up to be,” so she eased back into teaching, first at St. Johns teaching speech and then at BMCC.
The genesis of teaching modern American drama at BMCC
As Engle tells it, after teaching speech for a while, she noticed that there was a course on the books, called “Modern American Drama,” and noticed it wasn’t being offered. So she spoke to the then department chair and received encouragement to proceed in developing a new course. But she wanted the course to be fresh and include women, men and women of color, gay and lesbian authors, and ethnic playwrights who she calls a “must.”
Her dissertation was on women dramatists, which evolved into a book, New Women Dramatists in America, 1890-1920. Engle believes that it is important to rediscover some of these women, like Martha Morton and Rida Johnson Young, who, she says, contributed so much to American drama.
“I don’t go back very far in the course, but I wanted to include men and women of color, like August Wilson, the African-American playwright whose literary legacy is The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer prizes; Lorraine Hansberry, whose Raisin in the Sun, was inspired by her family’s legal battle against racially segregated housing laws of Chicago in the 1950s; and Asian writers like, Henry David Hwang, whose M.Butterfly, won the1988 Tony Award.”
From melodrama to drama
Engle says she likes to begin each course with the melodrama “for fun as an icebreaker.” She wants her students to see that modern drama was preceded by melodrama, with its juxtaposition of hero and villain.
“I use the analogy of the Bruce Willis movie Die Hard, as a perfect melodrama. You have the extreme villain and then you have this hero who is protecting his wife who is also heroin in her own right. Early film was melodramatic. They played music to heighten the emotion and a lot of these elements are still used in movies.”
“When writers such as Eugene O’Neill, who was among the first to introduce the technique of realism to American drama, and Susan Glasspell, whose novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, and other writers began to become more realistic in terms of characters, the playwrights built an American genre.”
Off to the theatre
One of the goals in this course, says Engle, is to get students to see more plays. One of their requirements is to write a critique of a play. She doesn’t care if the play is off off/Broadway or Broadway. She, in fact, urges students to be an usher at a play and thereby see it for free. Students receive extra credit for seeing several plays and they are required to do a paper and discuss a playwright or a play in depth and write an analysis.
