Class Description

Instructor: Pandora Scooter Semester: Spring 2026 Sessions: 10 Sessions/10 Weeks New Students: $400 Returning PlayPenn or DGI Students: $350 Foundry or Entrepreneur Members: $320 DGI Certificate Students: $320 Do you need a sure-fire way to analyze your plays, so that you can figure out what to do with your next draft? In this course, you will discover the story of the play and how it works, the main driving action of the characters, the acting relationships between the characters, and the ways in which the play moves forward through moment-to-moment analysis. Students will emerge from this class with the skills (based in Pandora Scooter's Bunseki Method) to discern what their current draft needs so they know how to develop it further. You will be expected to read one play per week and to apply script analysis tools (introduced during the course) to our in-class discussions. The plays for this 10-week course are: "Desdemona" by Paul Vogel "Oleanna" by David Mamet "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" by Tennessee Williams "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen "Dead Man's Cell Phone" by Sarah Ruhl "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" by Rajiv Joseph "Doubt" by John Patrick Shanley "Disgraced" by Ayad Akhtar "Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World" by Suzan-Lori Parks "And Baby Makes Seven" by Paula Vogel Upon completing the course, you will have a toolbox of comprehensive, practical ways to break down your scripts, and those of other playwrights, in order to assess the character development, plot structure, and overall strength of the writing. Pandora Scooter is an award-winning playwright, performer, and producer who has dedicated the last 25 years to producing new plays by marginalized playwrights. She is the founder of Playwright’s Circle @ Speranza, The American Theatre Group’s BIPOC PlayLab, and a co-founder of the Hallie Flanigan Women’s Play Series, which she created with the late Rosemary McLaughlin (1999–2002). For 30+ years, Pandora has been teaching script analysis, theatre history, playwriting, along with other writing courses. She has taught for Terry Knickerbocker Studio, Maggie Flanagan Studio, AMDA, Rider University, Drew University, and Rutgers University, the Dramatists Guild Institute, PlayPenn, and NYU. In 2021, she finished writing a book on her script analysis methodology called “The Bunsenki Method.”