A play is a thesis about how the world works: a model of how and why change happens in our lives, our relationships, and our society. Our stories encode our values, our history, our struggles, and our beliefs. Change the stories, and you may change the world. This class considers the relationship between form and content, narrative and plot, story and structure in the Western dramatic tradition. Beginning with a survey of stories that are performed (either through storytelling, drama, music, or dance) worldwide, we will then move on to an examination of Greek drama, centering Aristotle’s Poetics. Students will learn how the three act structure evolved and came to dominate mainstream plays and movies in the United States. Students will analyze various “well-made” movies, plays, and musicals, becoming familiar with terms like dramatic action, conflict, inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, catharsis, reversal, resolution, and more. We will learn how to work within forms like half hour sitcom, hour long drama, horror, farce, romantic comedy, etc by outlining great examples of each genre. We will also consider how to examine the structure of dramatic works that do not follow “the rules.” Students will write and workshop outlines for full-length plays and movies in order to learn how to “break” stories together in class. For their final project, students will adapt a single story (such as a fairy tale, news story, or historical incident) into three different outlines, in five different genres.