Instructor Spotlight: Rob Grace

Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course

I’m a living and breathing example of someone with a really weird, non-linear career path. The undergrad version of myself would be absolutely shocked to find out what I currently do for work, much of which entails policy research and writing on protecting civilians during armed conflict. Back in college I studied theater, and after graduating I devoted myself to playwriting and acting. I had no interest in war, international relations, or history at all. But somehow, as the years went by, I slowly found myself drawn to studying why it is that the most horrible atrocities of humankind during wartime occur and what we might do, at best, to stop them, or at the very least, to mitigate their effects. I began writing plays that entailed doing background research: about pacifists during the American Revolution, or about the Moscow theater hostage crisis in 2002. My passion for the research took over, leading to a career jackknife from theater to political science. For the past decade and a half or so, theater has slipped further and further away in the rearview mirror of my career path, as I plunged myself deeper and deeper into studying civilian protection during war. With this course on “Dramatizing War,” for the first time, I am experimenting with closing the circle, looping back to exploring artistic expression of armed conflict and colliding this with social scientific approaches to understanding war.

How are cultural and creative depictions of war still valuable when people have such an increased access to the news and social media, where they can see coverage of war in real time?

There are truths that nonfiction cannot so easily show to you. Step into the shoes of an accused war criminal. Plunge your brain into how war brings forth a landscape of altered morals and skewed incentives via the story of a woman embedded in the economy of a war that destroys her family. See, hear, and imagine the horror of lives, families, communities, and cultures decimated by war. News stories absolutely seek to touch your brains and hearts in these ways. But plays and films—like Breaker Morant, Mother Courage, and The Trojan Women, all of which we’re engaging with in this course—strive to reach right into your guts, to lay bare the human dimensions that aren’t as easy to access via other mediums of communication.

How do cultural depictions of war disseminate information, and how do they play into the 21st-century fear of disinformation?

I see a total parallel between what a playwright does and what someone does when they are disseminating information—but the key tool is different. For the playwright, the tool is to draw you in with your empathy and take you along for a narrative journey. This can be a powerful and empowering exercise but also could be misleading and even harmful. In this course, we are always asking: Whose story is being told in this play? Whose stories are not being told? What does the playwright accomplish by centering certain voices and decentering or even omitting others? Just as we need to cultivate a critical eye for taking in information, we need to do the same with the narratives that we let touch our hearts. The pluck of a heartstring often comes at the expense of leaving key perspectives out of a story.

What do you hope to see for the future of war depictions on stage?

The theater that I want to highlight here, that is already happening, that is what I think is the most important theater, is not the usual theater. It’s theater in refugee camps, in prisons, it’s performance being used as a tool of peacebuilding, or a tool for veterans to process trauma, it’s The Trojan Women performed by Syrian refugees, it’s site-specific plays performed in locations that have been beset by tragedy. I hope that one day, when we think of theater and war, these are the types of things that will immediately come to mind.

What do you hope that students will take away from your course?

Really with any course I teach, for me, the key takeaways are about skills rather than substance. How do you digest complex information in a short amount of time and get your brain to a place where you can make sense of it in a group discussion setting and through analytical writing? How do you function as effectively as possible while working in a group on a project that requires intellectual rigor, creativity, and persuasive speaking and writing? In fifteen years, the students might not remember the plot details of Breaker Morant. But it is incredibly likely that they will be working in a job that will require these skills.

What is something coming up in your course that you are excited about?

I absolutely can’t wait to see what the students create for their final projects. They are working in groups to plan a season of theater consisting of plays that tell stories about war. Their job is to articulate a clear vision for what they want to say to the world about war and curate plays that will allow them to show whatever that is to the world. We’ve had such wonderful, stimulating discussions in the classroom. I’m so excited to see what they come up with upon putting their heads together in groups on this assignment.

Rob Grace is a playwright and a researcher who specializes in humanitarian response during armed conflict. He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at various institutions, including Brown University, Boston University, Brandeis University, and the University of San Diego. He has also written plays that have been produced Off Broadway and at various venues across the United States. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Brown University.