Transcultural Playwriting

Playwrights around the world often learn to write plays using models that have little to do with their own cultural and racial realities. This chapter addresses the decolonizing force of writing plays across cultures by decentering Eurocentric aesthetics in favor of transcultural interactions facilitated with a lens of equity and restorative aesthetic justice. Drawing upon years of research on how playwriting is taught, this essay traces the limitations of the field and then offers examples of more inclusive and effective practices. Specifically, the submission focuses on a playwriting class with students from the University of Basrah in Iraq and at Amherst College in the U.S. during the fall of 2019, when severe protests erupted in Iraq, and fall of 2020, at the height of the global COVID pandemic. This chapter traces the impact of transcultural playwriting encounters using students’ drawings, interviews, journals, and collaboratively written plays as resources. It discusses how playwriting classes can help students understand the pressing issues of our times, from war, trauma, and Islamophobia to cultural imperialism and female oppression.