One of my favorite classes in my Wesleyan career is the August Wilson class. Prior to taking this class, I was very familiar with August Wilson’s works because I had taken the Introduction to Theatre course. I had no idea that there was such a class about August Wilson here at Wesleyan. Once I was able to navigate through the portal and get help from my advisors, I saw that there was an opening for the course so Along with the register, I emailed the professor right away and expressed how passionate I was about August Wilson, and how prior to Wesleyan I read part of his work.
A few days later, the notification came through that I was enrolled in the course, and for some reason I knew right away that this would be one of my favorite courses for the semester as a freshman., my first day of class was just a thrill, even though you have to go through all of that syllabus stuff. I showed up to class super early, which started at 8:50 am, Tuesday’s and Thursday’s. Wesleyan has some odd start times to courses here. However, there was another student there present as we chatted with Professor McMahon until other students arrived.
As I stated earlier, we had to get through all of that syllabus stuff out the way, before the excitement began. The course entailed that we read all ten plays with 30 second responses t in video form, along with four papers throughout the semester. All ten plays we read were not in chronological order to the time Mr. Wilson wrote, but rather by the time period of the plays in that order by the decade. The reason why the class read out of order to chronologically time was because we could follow along with the plays according to the historical events within the play. This process actually helped to navigate the characters.
I have to admit that the play Fences was really the only work I read from August Wilson, even though I heard of the Piano Lesson, which just led to more excitement and joy of reading each play every week. Another fun part of the class was at the end of the semester we had to record our top three plays and share it with the class for fun. It was interesting to see all the responses.
