Each year, the School of Drama invites regionally, nationally, and internationally recognized guest artists to share their artistic, collaborative, and philosophical approaches to theatre making. This semester, Charlotte Brathwaite leads this studio-based course toward the development of Douglass Speaks: A Requiem for Democracy as a living laboratory for exploring performance as historical inquiry, civic practice, and embodied research. Students will investigate how performance shifts when it enters civic space, how audiences become participants, and how artists can hold contradiction, disagreement, and urgency in real time. Centered on Frederick Douglass as a figure of contradiction, visibility, and unfinished struggle, students explore devising practices that blend archival research, movement, sound, writing, and direct audience address. A central component of the course will be a series of public open rehearsals and town hall–style exchanges presented in three spaces across New York City in the lead-up to the November 2026 primary elections developed in collaboration with community partners across New York City. Class guests include Douglass Speaks collaborators June Cross (filmmaker/historian), Nia O. Witherspoon (writer), and members of Impact Repertory Theater.