Dramaturgy Analyses, Part 2

 

[After my internship with the StageArts Theater Company concluded with the end of the Spring 1984 term at NYU, Cynthia Jenner, the instructor for Production Dramaturgy, the course I was taking in the Department of Performance Studies; the two StageArts artistic directors, Ruth Ann Norris and Nell Robinson; and I worked out a plan to continue my work as literary manager through the summer (21 May-31 August 1984, NYU’s Summer Term) as a Supervised Research. 

[As with the spring internship, the subject of “Dramaturgy Analyses, Part 1,” I was obligated to keep a journal.  At the end of the term, I turned in the journal, copies of all my work product from the project, and a “Summary and Evaluation” (dated 9 January 1985).  As I did with Part 1, I’m posting the final document from that Supervised Research.

[It isn’t strictly necessary for ROTters to gave read Part 1 before reading Part 2 below, but it’s probably a good idea.  I use some jargon terms and some individual expressions that I define and explain in the first post that I take the liberty of not re-defining here.  (Theater may be a somewhat commonly-understood  field, especially to readers of Rick On Theater, but dramaturgy is still an esoteric subject even among theater professionals.) 

[I have also identified StageArts, the co-artistic directors, and Cynthia Jenner in the first installment for ROTters.  “Dramaturgy Analyses, Part 1” was posted on ROT on Sunday, 22 January.  Earlier postings that are relevant to this one are “Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater” (30 December 2009), “A History of Dramaturgy” (31 December 2022 and 3 January 2023), and my short series, “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers: A Dramaturg's View” (8, 11, 14, and 17 January).]

SUMMARY AND EVALUATION
StageArts Theater Company
New York City
9 January 1985 

I’ll start off with my conclusion: StageArts doesn’t really want a literary manager. 

First of all, neither Nell Robinson nor Ruth Ann Norris knows how to make full use of the services a good literary manager can provide.  That’s not an insuperable difficulty—they could be educated.  A persevering dramaturg could discuss with them what they need, suggest ways he/she could help, and demonstrate his/her abilities.

Norris, and particularly Robinson, both profess an interest in this.  They did seem to want to know what I can do, what a dramaturg’s area of operation can cover; they asked about this several times during the spring and summer period I worked with them.

The fact is that StageArts can use, even needs a full-fledged literary manager.  They have a woefully inadequate process of evaluating scripts, a haphazard Christopher-Columbus method of discovering material, and no organized system of getting scripts through the reading process. 

[The “Christopher-Columbus method” is actually a colloquial typing term.  Touch-typists know instinctively where all the keys on a typewriter are because they’ve learned the keyboard from hours of practice and experience.  Non-touch-typists use the Columbus method of finding the right key: they discover it and land on it.  A synonymous, perhaps more familiar expression is the “hunt-and-peck” method.]

The smallness of the StageArts operation means that Norris and Robinson shoulder the whole burden of running the company.  They desperately need a member of the staff who can take part of the burden away and organize the whole process of seeking, evaluating, testing, and returning scripts. 

This was what I tried to begin over the summer on the assumption that if I could work with them full time for an extended period, I could get a working literary department started.

I began by contacting literary agents on behalf of the theater to introduce StageArts and its artistic policy to these sources of new scripts and playwrights.  I also contacted some other sources I thought might pay off in the long run. 

I tried to forge a system of reading and evaluating the scripts that came in so that it would be a routine path.  I proposed a prototype workshop program for testing new material “on the ground” after it was accepted from reading.

All of this I did with an eye to creating a literary management program that could be taken over by anyone hired to do the job.  Norris and Robinson seemed enthusiastic and receptive to the ideas and plans I discussed with them.  They made all the indications that they valued my ideas, suggestions, knowledge, and opinions.  They always seemed genuinely interested in what I had to offer.

The problem was that I didn’t really seem to be getting anything accomplished.  I was reading a great number of scripts, most from the sources I had begun to cultivate, and sending off reams of seriously considered evaluations, in a new format I devised to make them detailed and complete for both present use and future reference.

[In “A History of Dramaturgy: The Modern Era” (on Rick On Theater on 3 January), I wrote about John Corbin, the first U.S. literary manager employed at a professional theater (New Theatre, 1908-10).  He resigned in frustration after only two years because he’d found himself “doing a lot of play reading”: five scripts a day, every day of the year for his entire tenure.  It’s the lot of most play-readers, lit managers, and dramaturgs the world over.

[In her marginalia, Cynthia wrote: “Solution: recruit a battery of 1st level readers so the process goes more rapidly.”  That’s fine advice—and rather obvious, since I did several gigs as a first reader myself, as a glance at the various postings of my script reports on this blog will attest.  But I wasn’t an actual staff member at StageArts, even if the internship had morphed into a Supervised Research project.  I didn’t have the authority to hire anyone on my own initiative, and StageArts didn’t have the money to hire readers. 

[As a newbie in the field, too, I wasn’t really in a position to recruit a bunch of readers to work for free—what could I offer them as recompense?  The next StageArts production wasn’t scheduled until February 1985, so I couldn’t even offer potential readers Annie Oakleys.]

Norris and Robinson both frequently asked for my estimation of a particular script they had received from one of their own sources, and they seemed to agree with my reports.  I thought I was beginning to understand their taste better, and was being more successful at finding scripts they would like and could consider.

I was also trying to convince them to broaden their sights a little in two ways: to consider some less-known older plays to compliment the originals they wanted to produce, and to consider some slightly less conventional plays to attract the attention of critics and producers who would be less likely to see a showcase that was predictably conventional.

Both artistic directors expressed interest in these two ideas, especially the former.  But in the end, little of what I was saying was resulting in any real action.

At first this was all just frustrating.  I kept thinking that I should just have to ease them into really listening to me.  I thought it was all a matter of getting them to hear what I was saying.  It wasn’t until the end of the summer that I realized what was really operating here.  They didn’t trust me.  They trusted my intelligence, experience, and reliability.  But they didn’t trust me. 

It wasn’t personal—they didn’t trust anyone from the outside to get into the inside.  They paid lip-service to the idea of having a trusted colleague to share the load, but they are so jealous of their control over the company, they won’t let anyone else’s ideas in.

[Concerning Ruth Ann and Nell, Cynthia remarked:

I think this is only partly right.  I think they also feel intimidated by more refined intellects against whose sensibility they are forced to examine preconceived prejudices and dated tastes they are loathe to part with.  People hate to change what they are comfortable with, as a general rule.

[She agreed with me, however, that they were “jealous of their control” of StageArts.]

All of this became clear to me when they began planning the opening of a show on which they were collaborating with another producer.  The production had run into a snag, and it jeopardized not only its production, but the production of StageArts’ own first show of the season.

They never told me what the problem was (it was no more than some problem with finding a suitable theater), and wouldn’t even confide the titles of the co-production or their own first show.  I was literally frozen out of the whole matter.

I wasn’t even enough of an insider to be troubled with the names of the shows being produced until they were announced to the general public.

Another indication of StageArts’ inability to trust me is in the shows they have chosen to produce this season.  Aside from the co-production, which was outside the StageArts’ season, they have selected three plays so far.  (They may expand to a four-play season this year.)

Two of the scripts were never passed to me at all, and the third is one the artistic directors asked me to read after they had read it, and to which I reacted somewhat coolly.  They are producing it anyway.  (The play is Don Nigro’s November.)

Only one play that I recommended was given an evaluation reading; none of the others received further action.  Some of these may still be under consideration, and may be included in future seasons, but no action has been taken since I passed along the recommendations and the scripts.

Some of the playwrights and agents are becoming understandably anxious, and I have received several phone calls and letters of inquiry about a few scripts we have in limbo.

None of this indicates that StageArts should not continue to produce.  Their work is usually high-quality, though often unexciting.  They produce good showcases for actors—the kind of show an agent can see and judge the quality of a performer in the best light.

This is a valuable service to the acting community.  Whether they are contributing to the artistic life of the theatergoing public, I can’t say. 

[Cynthia: “I can.  No, they aren’t.]

Their ultimate goal is to produce these same kinds of shows, both old and new, with stars.  It seems unlikely that they will reach that goal, and I doubt they will ever develop a program of introducing new plays of any real consequence. 

That being the case, I doubt they have any real need for a literary manager in the full sense of that title.  All they need, and all they want, is a full-time script-reader.

My experience with StageArts indicates that whoever fills such a position for them ought not to have ambitions beyond a literate go-fer.  Norris and Robinson don’t really want anything else, and they won’t accept anything more.

[As I reported in the earlier post, I took two dramaturgy courses at NYU.  The first was Directing and Dramaturgy (Fall 1983), taught by Carl Weber (1925-2016), who’d been an actor and dramaturg at the Berliner Ensemble (1952-57), and assistant director to Bertoit Brecht (1898-1956). 

[The term project for that class was to make a stage adaptation from non-dramatic material, a frequent assignment for dramaturgs.  My partner and I did a mash-up of Molière’s Tartuffe and John Henry Faulk’s Fear on Trial (book, 1964; CBS television movie, 1975).

[As I also explained, I took Cynthia’s class twice.  (I also audited it once as well.)  In the first class, the one during which I interned at StageArts, we had a term assignment of making a complete work-up of dramaturgical materials to accompany the rehearsal and production of a play.  I chose one of my greatest favorites, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. 

[While I was doing my lit management for the internship, I was also assembling useful information of Godot for the cast and director; an annotated bibliography on the play, its genre (Absurdism), and the author; proposals for the lobby display; articles for the program; and a students’ study guide.  There was also a breakdown of the play’s structure and a production history.  (I’ve posted parts of this project on ROT.)

[The second time I took Cynthia’s course was in the spring of 1985, and my internship was with Cynthia herself.  She was in the earliest stages of forming Theatre Junction, an incipient playwrights’ company she wanted to be run by dramaturgs and focus on both new plays and new performance forms.  This encompassed new adaptations of non-dramatic material and translations.

[TJ was ultimately never realized. (At the same time as Cynthia was trying to launch TJ, she was also a principal participant in starting Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America [LMDA, now called Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas].  LMDA was established in April 1985 and I served as Vice President for Communications in 1986-87.) 

[Cynthia enlisted me to be her assistant after we’d become acquainted during the first Production Dramaturgy course I took from her and I did a number of jobs for her, including scouting new writers and plays.  I also read some scripts and other material to determine their potential suitability for TJ.  I’ve posted some of the results of the work I did for TJ on this blog from time to time.

[In Spring 1986, I audited Cynthia’s course and did an internship with the Theatre Communications Group, the service organization that promotes professional, non-profit theater in the U.S.  Among its many services, TCG publishes American Theatre, a monthly magazine; Plays in Process, a series of scripts of new plays produced in its member theaters; and the annual Dramatists Sourcebook (1981-2010). 

[During my internship with TCG, the literary services section was in the midst of preparing the 1986-87 edition of the Dramatists Sourcebook.  It was my principal assignment to assist editor M. Elizabeth Osborn (1939-93) and her staff with that task.

[The Sourcebook was updated annually, with detailed questionnaires sent to all member theaters at the beginning of the process (before I arrived on the scene in February) and the staff was in the midst of collating the information from the returns. 

[The end result was a reference book for playwrights about when and how to submit plays and musicals to producing theaters—the Sourcebook listed only TCG members—and for festivals and contests.  The Sourcebook listed theaters that are looking for new scripts (and which ones accept unsolicited submissions), and their typical submission criteria, time frames, and contact information.  

[It was a massive undertaking and included helpful advice from the field—i.e., dramaturgs and literary managers—about how to submit scripts, the best formats for typescripts, tips on making adaptations and translations (a sideline for many playwrights), and other issues facing working dramatists.

[In fact, the term project for this iteration of Production Dramaturgy was to make an adaptation or translation.  I paired up with a classmate who spoke and read Russian (his mother taught in the NYU Department of Slavic Languages).  He had obtained a microfilm copy of a 1910 stage script adapted by Fyodor Sologub  (pseudonym of F. K. [Fyodor Kuzmich] Teternikov, 1863-1927) of his Decadent and Symbolist novel The Petty Demon (romanized Russian: Melkiy bes, 1905).

[The novel had been translated into English four times (most recent: translated by S. D. Cioran; Ardis Publishers, 1983), but the script, popularly produced by a theater in Moscow, had never been translated into any language or published (even in Russian).  My partner had made a photocopy from the microfilm of the typescript from a Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) library. 

[We translated a chunk of the play—one act, I recall—and then selected a scene to refine and polish as a sample to turn in.  We used the published English translation as a trot and my partner did the literal translation (his Russian was better than mine, plus the text was typed in the pre-revolutionary alphabet, with which I was not familiar) and I put it into actable American English and form (and did the typing—I had a word processor by this time).

[At TCG, I did a little (copy) editing, but mostly my job was collating the returned questionnaires and calling theaters that hadn’t sent theirs in yet.  (If you think that’s a simple job, remember that TCG’s membership covers not only the three time zones of the continental U.S.—so, when we get to work at 9 a.m. in New York City, it’s only 6 in the morning in California—but also Alaska—where it’s 5 a.m. when we start work—and Hawaii—4 a.m.) 

[As that effort was in progress, the data from the questionnaires had to be entered into the word processor (this was pre-Internet) and each theater’s entry had to be printed out and proofread so it was ready to be sent to the printer (which was still working from paper copy). 

[The TCG internship was demonstrably different from the StageArts placement, but I got a real overview of the variations among the regional theaters in the United States.  (I also got to speak to a lot of lit managers, dramaturgs, and artistic directors at theaters that work with new plays.) 

[I also learned quite a bit about editing, particularly for a book (as opposed to, say, a journal article) that came in handy later.  I had remarked in one of my StageArts journals that some response I’d made to a situation was like being a teacher, a position I was in at NYU at that time as a ”preceptor” in the undergraduate Expository Writing Program.  Cynthia added in the margin that it was also like an editor, which is an aspect of a dramaturg’s work along with being a critic.

[The term project for this class, by the way, was, like with Carl Weber’s Directing and Dramaturgy class, to make an adaptation from non-dramatic material.  Because I was auditing the class, I was assigned to work with a classmate taking the course for credit.  My partner and I decided to draw on the aphorisms and other sayings of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) to compile an “illustrated lecture” of Wilde’s visit to the United States (1881-82).

[Our concept was that while Wilde was lecturing, the “slides” would be brought to life by a small cast speaking the writer’s words in brief scenes, the dialogue for which was taken from his occasional comments about America. The performance was to be fashioned in the style of a Victorian music hall entertainment.  (I posted this snippet of “Nothing But My Genius” on ROT on 12 May 2011.)

[Later, I did other work that bore on my qualifications as a dramaturg and literary advisor.  I said above that I served as LMDA’s VP of Communications.  My main responsibility in that position was to serve ex officio as the editor of the members’ newsletter, which I titled Program Notes during my tenure.  I also hired on as editor of the newsletter of the now-defunct American Directors Institute, a service organization for stage directors and artistic directors.  I started this quarterly publication, which I named Directors Notes, and edited it from 1986 to 1988.

[(Incidentally, the similarity in the titles of the two newsletters was coincidental.  They both refer to a kind of writing of which the members of the two organizations did a lot.  The simpler newsletter title Notes was in use at the time by a musicians’ publication.)]

Dramaturgy Analyses, Part 1

 

[When I was a grad student in New York University’s Department of Performance Studies, I took two courses in dramaturgy, plus a Supervised Research in the field.  I took one of the classes twice: Production Dramaturgy (Spring 1984 and Spring 1985); it was taught by Cynthia Jenner, who also oversaw my Supervised Research in the summer of 1984.

[Cynthia (b. 1939) went by C. Lee Jenner professionally; she’d written for the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, the Villager, the London Guardian, Theatre Crafts, Stages, Other Stages, Performing Arts Journal, and New York Theatre Review.

[Cynthia’d been a literary manager or dramaturg for New York City’s American Place Theatre (1981-84) and the Interart Theatre of the Women’s Interart Center before teaching at DPS in 1984-85.  She also taught at Brooklyn College, City College of the City University of New York, and Brown University.

[The Spring ’84 dramaturgy class included an internship at a theater company and Cynthia placed me with the small Off-Off-Broadway showcase troupe StageArts Theater Company.  That semester-long internship (18 February-2 May 1984) converted into the Supervised Research of the following summer.  In both assignments, I was required to keep a journal; at the end of the gigs, I also wrote up a summary of my work and my conclusions about the experience.

[Since I started this extended series on dramaturgy and literary management with my two-part “History of Dramaturgy” (31 December 2022 and 3 January 2023), I’ve decided to continue the effort by posting the concluding documents of the StageArts placements.

[(I followed “A History of Dramaturgy” with a four-part series, “Leonardo Shapiro’s Strangers: A Dramaturg's View” [8, 11, 14, and 17 January].  Before the current extended dramaturgy series, I posted “Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater” on 30 December 2009.)

[StageArts was founded in 1977 by co-artistic directors Nell Robinson, a director, and Ruth Ann Norris, an actress.  (I was a few years shy of 40 in 1984, and I’d say Robinson and Norris were at least a half decade older than I was.)

[Created originally with the goal of producing plays that portray human nature in a positive, glowing manner, the company had presented such classics as Blithe Spirit (Noël Coward, 1941) in 1977, The Winslow Boy (Terence Rattigan, 1946) in 1978, Cap & Bells (Luigi Pirandello, 1916) in 1984, and Ira Levin’s first play, Interlock (1958).

[After 1982, StageArts began concentrating on the development of new plays and had premièred such works as Thirteen by Lynda Myles (1983), Zoology (a trilogy of plays) by Martin Jones (1983), Pigeons on the Walk by Andrew Johns (1984), Sullivan & Gilbert by Ken Ludwig (1984), and Jones’s Snow Leopards (1985).  (The company ceased producing at the end of 1987.)

[My responsibilities at StageArts included, among other things, establishing a script-soliciting, -reading, and ‑evaluating process, creating a reporting format, and advising and assisting the artistic directors in matters of script selection. 

[The company had reached a certain level of success in its seven years of producing, but it wasn’t attracting the kind of attention the artistic directors wanted—and needed if the company was going to advance in the competitive and crowded field of professional theater in New York. 

[The artistic directors wanted my help to find the kinds of scripts that would attract critical and funding interest.  One way to accomplish this, they observed from the theaters like theirs in the city, was to present new plays.  Towards this end, they wanted me to help them start a program for finding and evaluating new scripts.

[At the end of the internship, I handed in to Cynthia an “Internship Report,” concluding with a “Profile of Artistic Policy” for StageArts and an “Analysis of Literary Department and Recommendations for Improvement.”  Below are the last two documents, dated 15 May 1984.]

PROFILE OF ARTISTIC POLICY
StageArts Theater Company
New York City
15 May 1984

The StageArts Theater Company is an Off-Off-Broadway producer primarily of Showcases and Tiered Non-Profit Theatre Code productions, using a show-to-show rented space at The Actors’ Outlet, 120 W. 28th Street [in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan].  As described by co-artistic directors Nell Robinson and Ruth Ann Norris, the artistic policy of the company is to produce plays that deal with problems of the individual.  StageArts’ own statement of their “artistic goal” specifies their interest in

The production of beautifully crafted plays that speak to the best in us.  We believe that the qualities most absent on plays of the last few decades are a positive view of human beings and a respect for dramatic structure.  We want to give a chance to plays that strive for integration of plot, characterization, ideas, language and spectacle into that unique artistic whole which makes unforgettable drama or comedy.

The stress, according to Robinson and Norris, is on “beautifully crafted,” by which they mean the “well-made play.”  This translates into Realistic plays on a narrow scope and small scale, treating problems in a family or limited group.  Norris and Robinson offer as prime examples of this type of play, Terrence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy and William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker [1959], both primarily Realistic, optimistic melodramas.

[According to a New York Times article on the topic, “Showcases are nonprofit productions meant to display the talents of actors to agents, casting directors and producers in the hope that they will be chosen for roles in other shows or that the play will be picked up by a producer.  The actors receive no weekly salaries.” 

[Participants who are Actors’ Equity Association members are supposed to be compensated for transportation costs and expenses, however.  The union also restricts the size of the audience, number of performances, length of run, hours of rehearsal, and admission charge.

[“Showcases also present works by new playwrights and directors,” wrote Andrew L. Yarrow in the Times (“Showcase Theater, Outlet for Inspired Nobodies,” 25 November 1988).  “Many producers use showcases to win potential backers, but others consider them the only affordable way to stage experimental theater in New York.”

[Since showcase productions don’t operate under an Equity contract, shows that want to cast union actors or employ a union stage manager must abide by certain rules set down by Equity in the Showcase Code.  These are known as “Equity showcases” and casting notices usually say so to attract union actors to the auditions.  There are also many non-union showcases, in which Equity members are not supposed to perform.  StageArts, of course, produced union showcases.

[The Showcase Code governed one-time productions, not theaters that produced regular seasons.  The Tiered Non-Profit Theatre Code was a set of rules governing showcase productions at theaters presenting annual multiple-play seasons and operating under larger budgets, like the Public Theater or the Roundabout Theatre Company.  It was “tiered” because the obligations increased incrementally for theaters with increasingly larger budgets.

[A well-made play is a dramatic form that arose in France in the late 19th century (la pièce bien faite) involving a tight plot, a largely standardized structure, and a climax close to the end.  The story usually depends on a key piece of information kept from some characters, but not the audience, and moves forward in a chain of actions that use minor reversals of fortune to create suspense.

[The genre was common at the turn of the 20th century, but modern writers like Alan Ayckbourn (b. 1939) and Noël Coward (1899-1973) continued to use it.  Even greats like Shaw and Ibsen applied the form to their work.]

The only production StageArts presented during my internship was Pigeons on the Walk by Andrew Johns and directed by Nell Robinson [March 1984].  The play was a “Grand Hotel” set-up of a number of people who meet in a Manhattan OTB parlor during the course of nine races on one day.  Some are regulars and know one another well, thus making this a somewhat closed group, like an extended family.  There was no unifying crisis, but several small, separate ones, most of which were, indeed, family-oriented. 

[Off-Track Betting, with parlors all over the city, was legalized in New York City in 1970 and closed in 2010 due to lack of profitability.]

Pigeons seems an excellent sample of StageArts’ artistic interest.  Other plays produced in past seasons include Blithe Spirit, The Winslow Boy, The Hasty Heart [John Patrick, 1945], and The Heiress [Ruth and Augustus Goetz, 1947], all clear examples of this kind of material.

[In the margin of my typed profile, Cynthia wrote where I observed that the plays were examples of StageArts preferred style: “But so regularly done in community and/or stock [productions] that they wouldn’t interest reviewers.  Useful only in all-star revivals or to showcase actors.”  The company had stopped presenting standards like these, 30-35 years old and more, in the early ’80s in favor of new scripts.]

Clearly, StageArts is neither experimental nor particularly socially concerned, though their shows are well-produced in all respects.  In the past, they produced a mix of old and new material fitting their taste.  This season, however, they switched to a policy of producing solely new works with an eye to attracting critical attention which they need to get funding.  So far, this policy has not produced results, and Robinson and Norris and I have discussed looking at some older, but less frequently produced plays.  Robinson has expressed an interest in Edmond Rostand [French. 1868-1918].

[Again, Cynthia commented, regarding the lack of critical response: “Need aggressive press agent,” a conclusion to which I also came.  After I raised the name of Rostand, my teacher merely wrote: “Oy.”]

I have begun to suggest some plays a little afield of StageArts’ usual material.  Robinson has become interested in a new play I recommended that has a broader scope and deals with a topical problem.  She has also become intrigued with the works of Yevgenii Shvarts [Russian, 1896-1958], certainly no Realistic playwright.  In the future, StageArts may produce a mixture not only of old and new plays, but of Realistic and non-Realistic (however slightly) ones.  It is unlikely they will become truly experimental, but some variety may be in the offing.

[I posted my StageArts script reports on three of Shvarts’s plays on Rick On Theater in “Yevgenii Shvarts: Three Script Evaluations,” 9 March 2020.  Three Rostand play evaluations are also posted in “More Script Reports IV: Classics,” 14 December 2021.

[The “new play” in which Nell Robinson was interested was one I gave her, written by a neighbor, Ken Greenberg, whose earlier play, Comes the Happy Hour!, I had directed in an independent showcase in 1982.  The play in question here was Little Boy, Fat Man, set in the years just before, during, and just after World War II and is an exploration of the moral and psychological implications of working on the atom bomb.  All the men—two Americans, a Viennese Jew, and a Japanese—met while studying nuclear physics in Germany.]

*  *  *  *
ANALYSIS OF LITERARY DEPARTMENT
AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT
StageArts Theater Company
New York City
15 May 1984 

It is difficult—if not impossible—to analyze a department that virtually does not exist.  Although StageArts lists Holly Hill as Literary Manager, she does not function full time, and does not seem to have any regular, specific responsibilities.  In fact, I have had no contact with her, and when I suggested I talk with her about the program, neither Robinson nor Norris thought there was any need.  If there is a dramaturgical program extant, I do not know what it is.

[Holly Hill was a reviewer for the short-lived New York Theatre Review (1977-79), the Gannett Westchester (New York) papers, Other Stages, and the London Times.  She taught at John Jay College of the City University of New York and was considered an authority on British dramatist Terence Rattigan (1911-77).  When I noted in my internship journal that Norris and Robinson seemed to hold Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy up as “their ideal play,” Cynthia, who knew Hill, remarked, “Holly Hill’s influence.  Dissertation on Rattigan.”]

When I first interviewed with Robinson and Norris, it was clear they had no specific idea how to use me.  (They had two specific tasks for me to perform, but no general plan for me.)  My estimation is that there is no program, and that it will be my responsibility to create one, with the advice and consent of Robinson and Norris.

[When I made the comment in my journal that the artistic directors “don’t really know what to do with me,” Cynthia wrote, “That’s the wrong perspective.  Don’t worry if they know what to do with you.  Do you know what to do with or for them?” 

[My response to Cynthia would have been that: a) I do worry about their not knowing how to make use of me because this was an internship, not a job.  I could—and did—do many things for StageArts on my own initiative.  Sometimes I checked with the artistic directors beforehand and other times I informed them after the fact, but I had only limited autonomy since I wasn’t a true member of the theater’s staff.  I could only be a self-starter to a limited degree.

[Cynthia, of course, had been the lit manager at APT for three years and had established a working relationship with artistic director Wynn Handman (1922-2020).  She’d been hired for an existing post that was a valued member of the theater’s staff.  She knew what her boundaries were and where she could push the envelop some.  As an intern in a post that hadn’t existed in practice till then (Holly Hill was lit manager in name only, really), I wasn’t in that position.

[And b): if Robinson and Norris didn’t know how they could use me/my skills, they couldn’t ask for help or suggestions where I might be effective but didn’t know they needed support.  “Intern” and “dramaturg” aren’t synonyms for “mindreader,” after all.]

Based on the two responsibilities laid out at the start of my internship [that would be 1) organizing the multistep script-finding process and 2) researching a play-reading series], I plan to work up a format for reporting the evaluation of plays, and a workshop program of readings of works under consideration to nurture them into—and possibly through—production. 

[There really were two different reading programs.  One, the developmental or “evaluative” (as Cynthia called them) readings, didn’t exist at all yet.  These were strictly for the playwright and the theater, to test the script for viability as it made its way to production.  I called these “script-readings” because it concerned the working text, not a form of performance of a finished play.

[The other was the play-reading series, which StageArts already had, but it was ad hoc, randomly scheduled, and only minimally promoted.  These were staged readings with actors who’d rehearsed and an audience made up largely of StageArts subscribers and other theatergoers (i.e., the public).  It’s a public relations and audience-building exercise that could present both old and new plays.]

For the present—and immediately foreseeable future—StageArts should restrict its program to testing viable scripts and doing only minor rewriting to smooth out small problems.  Perhaps in a few seasons, with a strong production/dramaturgic background established, they can embark on a program of developing material from an earlier stage. 

[In my journal for the Summer ’84 Supervised Research, I reported that Norris and Robinson wanted to work with developing playwrights, Cynthia wrote: “But they are incompetent to do this task.”  I, myself, concluded, “I’m not sure R[uth] A[nn] & Nell are equipped to work with someone w[ith] so much to learn,” to which my teacher merely added, “Yes.”]

Specific projects I plan to start on include a systematized evaluation process, so organized that a new dramaturgical intern can inherit the system without a glitch, and readers can be recruited and, with a standardized format, be able to produce evaluation reports all containing the same useful information.  At present, there is no format, and practically no guidelines. 

(Robinson and Norris specified only a plot synopsis and a statement of the theme; I had to fill in the rest on my own.  They are satisfied, but I am not.)

[Cynthia gave me some feedback on this—she’d devised several reporting forms for theaters and other evaluation programs like the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships for American Playwrights Program—and I incorporated them in later reports.]

From the reading series Robinson and Norris wanted me to research, I plan to build a workshop program through which to take scripts selected from the evaluation process.  I would like to see a private, unrehearsed reading, leading to a semi-rehearsed private reading, and finally one (at least) staged reading before an invited audience.

In between, the literary manager will work with the playwright on changes and adjustments, with input from the director and the artistic directorship.

[Cynthia’s sole comment here was: “This game plan seems sound to use.”  A “private reading” would be before the artistic directors, the production director (if one is already hired), the lit manager, and the playwright.  The “invited audience” would include those people, plus a few specially selected knowledgeable friends and supporters—i.e., actors and directors, other theater artists, friends of the author but not subscribers or the public.

[An “unrehearsed reading” is one for which the cast would meet with the director (if no director has been assigned, the literary manager usually performs this task) and writer about two hours before the reading and read through the script to familiarize themselves with the words.  There’s no movement by the actors; someone reads the stage directions as necessary.  At a “semi-rehearsed reading,” the cast meets with the director and the playwright one time a day or so before the reading to put a little context (i.e., acting) into the reading.  There’s still no moving about the stage.

[In a “semi-staged reading,” the actors get up from their seats, scripts in hand, and face each other as they speak, perform some simple, sometimes mimed, movements, but there are no props or costumes and moving about the performing area is minimal and suggested. 

[The idea for all these readings is to put the emphasis on the words, not spotlight the actors’ skills.  The point is to reveal to the writer what works and what doesn’t and where potential problems might develop when the play goes into actual rehearsals.  It is a diagnostic tool, not a performance.]

Subsequent to these two developments, StageArts will eventually need someone to assume responsibility for production assistance in terms of program notes, subscriber information, and incidental projects such as lobby displays and intermission features.  Currently, Robinson and Norris do all this themselves, taking time away from directing and producing. 

[Nell Robinson directed most of StageArts’ productions. 

[Cynthia had what she labeled a “credo”: “I believe the experience of a play starts in the lobby.”  She also admonished me, “Research can help [a] dramaturg [with] support services designed to enrich the experience for theatergoers.”]

With an expanded and more complex program, the subsidiary duties will become far too time- and thought-consuming to be accomplished in stolen time.  When StageArts reaches that point, say after a season or two, I would like a system to have been worked out so a new literary manager can move in and the program will be self-perpetuating.

Until I have gone over all the particulars with Robinson and Norris, and begun to work out the steps, I cannot accurately predict the specifics of any of this; it would be premature to do so now.  Tentative plans have been made to begin the discussion stage shortly.  Based on the outcome of that, I will start making plans and working out details for the first trials.

[The “tentative plans” I spoke of above was, of course, the Supervised Research which continued the internship with StageArts through the summer of 1984,  There was a summing-up at the end of that stint as well, and I will post it next.  Come back to Rick On Theater on 25 January to see what I had to say at the conclusion of my gig as lit manager of the StageArts Theater Company.]

A History of Dramaturgy: The Modern Era

 

[This is the conclusion of “A History of Dramaturgy.”  “The Modern Era,” in addition to bringing the history up to the end of the 20th and into 21st century, shifts the focus from Europe to the United States.  It’s a relatively short period as histories go: once dramaturgy hit the last couple of decades of the 1900s, things remained pretty status quo. 

[Some predictions—well, better call them wishful thinking, I suppose—were made when I first looked into the field some 40 years ago, and they’re still valid . . . as wishes!  For a time, as you’ll read, things were looking pretty exciting.

[Sorry.  I’m getting a little wistful.  The point is, big changes in the field were about to happen—and some of them did, however quietly, and some of them didn’t.  Or haven’t.  Have a look and see what you think.]

Dramaturgy was in active practice by the end of the 19th century in theaters on the European continent, principally in Germany and Austria and in cities with large German-speaking populations such as Prague, Zürich, and Basel. 

In fact, by the first half of the 20th century, dramaturgs were part of the theater’s make-up almost exclusively in countries from Germany eastward—Poland, what then was still Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, plus the Scandinavian nations to the north.  In the theaters of Western Europe such as France, Spain, and Italy, dramaturgs and dramaturgy pretty much didn’t exist.

In England, where the title ‘literary manager’ gained cur­rency, the job developed from a concept put down in 1904 by Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), director, playwright, and manager, and William Archer (1856-1924), theater critic, in their Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre.

Granville-Barker and Archer were two of the many supporters of the idea of a British national theater.  At the time, the theater in the United Kingdom was dominated by the actor-manager system, which put one man in charge of all the decisions about the running of the theater.  Each theater was essentially a little autocracy, and the actor-manager’s main focus was profit, not artistic quality either in the selection of plays or the productions.

Archer in particular was impressed by the work of the German state-subsidized repertory theaters.  He and Granville-Barker both also responded to the productions of Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), who brought a number of shows to London between 1908 and 1912.  The German theaters became the models for their vision of a British national theater.

This vision included a staff position for a literary manager.  This literary manager would not only have a strong voice in decisions about repertoire and the cultivation of new playwrights and new works, but all artistic aspects of the administration of the theater.  Clearly, Granville-Barker’s and Archer’s paradigm was the German dramaturg.

They wrote in Scheme and Estimates:

The Literary Manager, an official answering to the German Dramaturg.  His job should be to weed out new plays before they are submitted to the Reading Committee; to suggest plays for revival and arrange them for the stage; to follow the dramatic movement in foreign countries, and to suggest foreign plays suitable for production; (to supervise the translation of such plays;) to consult with the scene painter, producers, etc., on questions of archaeology, costume and local colour.

There was a great deal of opposition to the notion of a national theater in the United Kingdom.  Further, Granville-Barker’s and Archer’s enthusiasm for the German model waned as World War I loomed and when it broke out.  Granville-Barker, whose directing began to be noticeably influenced by Reinhardt’s style, shifted his interest from Germany to the United States—where the guiding principle was commercialism and the idea of a subsidized theater was non-existent, and so was any interest in dramaturgy.

The movement to establish an English national theater went nowhere for the next 5½ decades, and so did the interest in the U.K. in literary management as a theatrical profession—except on paper.

No one served in such a position, however, until 1963, when Laurence Olivier (1907-89) became the first artistic director of the British National Theatre Company.  He hired Observer reviewer Kenneth Tynan (1927-80) as literary manager of the new company. 

Tynan was immensely influential in his role as literary manager for the National—he became, in many people’s estimation, one of the most important people in world theater.  He had a significant role in choosing what plays to present at the National and pushed Olivier to produce more adventurous work than he otherwise would have.

One battle he lost was over a proposed production of German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s (1931-2020) documentary play Soldiers in 1967.  The play posits that Britain’s World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was actively involved in the murder of General Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881-1943), Poland’s president-in-exile, and that he approved the saturation bombing of German cities that killed thousands of civilians.

The National Theatre’s board, at the chairman’s urging, voted unanimously to reject the production, but Tynan, a confirmed free-expression advocate, championed the production.  Olivier stood with the board and its chairman and the production was rejected.

The literary manager contemplated resigning over the interference of the board in artistic matters, but he ultimately stayed, remaining at his post for six more years. 

Tynan’s tenure as literary manager at the National Theatre came to an end in 1973.  Olivier was succeeded by Peter Hall (1930-2017) that year, and Tynan was essentially shunted aside.  He returned to writing and, in 1976, moved to Southern California for relief from his emphysema. The emphysema killed him four years later at 53.

Lit managers became a common staff position in British theaters after that, starting, logically enough, with the National and the Royal Shakespeare Company, the large, government-subsidized troupes, but soon including the smaller rep companies in London and around the U.K.  The job didn’t really expand into full-scale, German-style dramaturgy, however. 

(The Brits aren’t much inclined to emulate Continentals in almost any respect.  Witness their withdrawal from the European Union and their resistance to joining the Eurozone.  British stage artists have never taken to the theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky [1863-1938], the father of modern Western actor training—I don’t think they took to the earlier techniques of Frenchman François Delsarte (1811-71), either—and German dramaturgy wasn’t welcome, either.)

The atmosphere in the United States wasn’t much different.  As I mentioned in “The Origins,” the U.S. theater, in addition to being the domain of actor-managers, was commercially oriented.  The managers and producers were interested in booking hits rather than in developing a repertoire of superior dramatic art or supporting new plays that would advance American playwriting.  A marketing expert was of more use to the leaders of U.S. theaters than a literary manager/dramaturg on the German model.

In addition, American theater reviewing—drama critics being the chief source, along with dramatists, of dramaturgs and theatrical lit managers—was of the consumer-reporter variety.  Most American review-writers helicoptered in on opening night (now they go to “press previews” before opening), composed an “overnight” notice for the next day’s paper, and moved on to the next show. 

The American reviewer, for the most part, labeled the production a hit or a flop and then forgot about it.  There was no discussion of the issues, of the ideas of the plays; there was little understanding of the intentions of the production, either from the playwright’s or the director’s standpoint.   

European critics had an institutional memory: they not only stayed with a play through rehearsal and/or inception, they kept tabs on a theater’s whole season—and even its history and artistic continuity and development.  When these critics saw a performance, they evaluated it in context, relating it to the theater’s track record, its repertoire, its community.

There was analysis, a discussion of the play’s intent, its themes and how they meshed (or didn’t) with the way the dramatist and/or the director presented them.  Instead of viewing the production as a commodity to be recommended or rejected, European critics saw the art and the artists as important elements in their communities, and they discussed and analyzed them in relation to that.

This is really the difference between “reviewing” and “criticism.”  It wouldn’t occur to many thoughtful theater folk in the U.S. to see much use for a “reviewer,” a kind of salesman or tout, on the staff of a theater, while a “critic,” a knowledgeable thinker with a memory, could be seen as a potential collaborator and institutional resource.

A big change, however, was coming—not just around the corner, but soon in historical terms.  Meanwhile, there was Winthrop Ames (1870-1937) and the New Theatre.

Ames, a theater manager, producer, stage director, and playwright, was an important figure in New York theater for 30 years.  He was born into a wealthy and socially prominent Massachusetts manufacturing family and graduated from Harvard College.  He began a career in publishing because his family strongly opposed a life in the theater.  

Nonetheless, in 1904, he traveled to Europe to study the “new stagecraft,” a scenographic movement that used European modernist practices, and on his return became joint manager of the Castle Square Theatre in Boston.

In 1906, a group of 30 subscribers, including William Kissam Vanderbilt (1849-1920), J. P. Morgan (1837-1913), John Jacob Astor IV (1864-1912), and other members of New York’s high society, invested $1,700,000 (equal to about $60,300,000 today) to build the New Theatre, the largest theater in New York City, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in the area where Lincoln Center now stands about a mile north of the Theatre District. 

The sumptuous Beaux Arts theater, capable of seating 2,300 patrons, opened in 1909, and based on his work in Boston, the just-shy-of-39-year-old Ames was engaged to be its sole director.  It was intended to house a repertory troupe, the New Theatre Company, and in anticipation of that, in deliberate application of the Archer/Granville-Barker principles laid out in Scheme and Estimates, Ames hired John Corbin (1870-1959), a Chicago-born, Harvard-educated dramatic critic and author, as the new company’s Literary Director. 

Corbin’s Harvard B.A. was in English literature with an emphasis on Shakespeare and dramatic literature.  Eventually, he went to work as an assistant editor of Harper’s Magazine, and he wrote his first dramatic criticism there and at Harper’s Weekly.  He did other writing, including freelance work for the New York Times, Scribner’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and The Forum.

From 1902 to 1904 Corbin worked as a drama critic for the New York Times.  He left the position at the Times in December 1904 and went to work for the New York Sun.  He remained at the Sun until the summer of 1907.  Corbin worked on numerous freelance articles for the Saturday Evening Post, which Houghton Mifflin republished in book form in 1908 with the title Which College for the Boy?

Corbin began his tenure for Ames at the New Theatre in July 1908.  (The theater opened in 1909.)  It lasted for only two years because the New not only accepted unsolicited manuscripts, but announced that intention in the newspapers.  (On 5 August 1908, for instance, Ames was quoted in the New York Times as saying that “we shall always be anxious for new manuscripts.”) 

Clearing the flood of plays that came in even before the theater opened took a lot of time and attention—Corbin personally wrote a note with each script returned—and yielded little return.  Only three new plays—all of submitted by agents—were produced in the New’s first season.

Corbin got enervated from reading as many as 2,000 scripts a year, most of which he judged unstageable.  “At the New Theatre I have been doing a lot of play reading.  I think I have earned a rest from the work,” he wrote in the New-York Tribune and New York Herald to explain his resignation on 2 March 1910.

The New Theatre was not only expensive to build, but costly to maintain.  It was also hard to fill the 2,300 seats, even though the New’s productions were mostly adjudged high-quality.  The New Theatre Company went bankrupt and closed in 1911.  The theater was renamed the Century Theatre, which operated under various managers for another 19 years.  The building was demolished in 1930 and the Art Deco Century Apartments was built on the site.

Winthrop Ames went on to open the Little Theatre on West 44th Street in 1912.  At 300 seats, it was the smallest playhouse in New York City.  In 1913, he opened the Booth Theatre on West 45th Street with the Shubert Brothers (Lee, 1871-1953; Sam, 1878-1905; and Jacob, 1879-1963) and managed both houses into the 1930s.

Ames had many successes as a producer and was also the director of his own plays, demanding high standards for all aspects of each production.  He served on various committees and was respected in the theater world.  Poor health made him return to Massachusetts, where he died of pneumonia three weeks before his 67th birthday.

John Corbin returned to his career as a freelance writer, composing and producing plays as well.  He served as secretary of the Drama Society of New York, a producing organization, from 1913 until 1916.  In 1917 Corbin returned to the New York Times as a drama critic and remained there until 1925.  He and his wife died months apart at a convalescent home in Briarcliff Manor in suburban Westchester County, New York.  He was 89.

No one officially held the post of literary manager or dramaturg in a U.S. theater for another 57 years.  The rise of the profession here was largely prompted by another rise: that of the regional theaters across the country, starting at the end of the 1940s, following World War II. 

(Theatre ’47 in Dallas, started in 1947 by Margo Jones, is generally considered the first professional regional theater in the country.  This was followed that year in Houston by the Alley Theatre and then, in 1950, the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.)

All across the professional theater in the U.S., impresarios, producers, and theater managers (the precursor of artistic directors), whether on Broadway, Off-Broadway, or “on the road,” have always employed “play doctors,” the forebear of the dramaturg.  Most commonly another playwright (Neil Simon, 1927-2018, famously did this work), she or, more likely, he came in when a show was in trouble and endeavored to do a quick-fix in hopes of saving the production.

New plays, those most in need of the assistance of a dramaturg, had been almost entirely the province of Broadway and commercial producers.  By the middle of the 20th century, however, that phenomenon began to shift to the resident companies that had begun to blossom and thrive beyond New York City in the 1950s. 

As these companies began having success producing new plays, often sending them to Broadway—Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, for instance, premièred at Theatre ’47 in 1948—they saw a need for someone on their staffs to help find the plays, contact the authors, read and evaluate the scripts, and even help nursemaid the new plays through the preparation for presentation before a paying audience.  The literary manager or dramaturg was in demand.

(This same period saw the appearance of another significant theater position virtually unknown before: the artistic director.  He or she replaced the manager of the commercial theaters when the resident theaters began to develop an individual artistic vision.  This contrasted with the commercial aim of finding hits and merely filling the seats.

(With this development, the artistic directors found they needed someone with broad knowledge of theater literature beyond the Greeks and Shakespeare and the popular recent Broadway successes, someone who also could gauge the receptivity of the community the theater served and had ideas about how to reach them—and maybe even stretch their tastes a little from time to time.  Voilà!  The literary manager/dramaturg again.)

But first, there were some preliminary developments relating to the field.

In 1931, theater historian, editor, and critic John Gassner (1908-67) was hired as a play editor at the Theatre Guild (1919-96), a theatrical society founded in New York City to produce non-commercial works.  (It was a descendant of the Washington Square Players; see my post on Rick On Theater on 24 June 2012.)

At the end of his tenure at the Guild, Gassner became chairman of its play department (1934-1944) and, with Theresa Helburn (1887-1959), its Bureau of New Plays (1938-1944).  He discovered, nurtured, and mentored many young playwrights, a number of whom became well-known successes in American theater such as Arthur Miller (1915-2005), Norman Rosten (1913-95), and Tennessee Williams (1911-83).

(Francis Fergusson, 1924-86, teacher, critic, and drama theorist, filled a similar position at the American Laboratory Theatre, a New York drama school and theatrical company, from 1926 to 1930.  The Lab was founded by former Moscow Art Theater members Richard [Ryszard] Boleslavsky, 1889-1937, and Maria Ouspenskaya, 1876-1949, following Stanislavski’s system and ran until 1933.)

In 1964-65. New York City’s American Place Theatre emulated Winthrop Ames’s plan for the New Theatre and created the position of Reader.  The job title exactly denotes the responsibility of the job-holder.  APT, founded in 1963, committed itself exclusively to the production of new American plays, so there was a lot of script reading throughout the life of the company.  (APT may still be on the books, but I believe it stopped producing shows in 2000, when it lost its home on W. 46th Street in Manhattan.)

(When I was doing an internship and a supervised study as a lit advisor to a small, Off-Off-Broadway showcase company, my teacher was a former dramaturg at APT.  I had access to their script-report files, which the lit department was happy to grant because a play that’s not right for one theater may be just the thing for another—dramaturgs are like that: we share. 

(The files were bottomless, often containing multiple reports by different readers on the same play, all stapled together—with usually widely variant opinions.  I didn’t even get through more than about a hundred or fewer reports in the spring and summer of 1984, looking for scripts to bring to my artistic directors.)

In 1968, The Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, became the first known theatrical institution in the States to use the word ‘dramaturg’ in the sense employed here. 

Founded in 1964, the Center started to use theater professionals as production dramaturgs in 1969 at the National Playwrights Conference (established in 1965).  In the description of George C. White (b. 1935), the Center’s founder and a stage director, former actor, and co-chairman of the theater administration department at the Yale Drama School, dramaturgs

were theatre professionals assigned to specific plays—who were asked to read them, attend rehearsals and performances, and preside (with the director, playwright and artistic director) at a general Conference discussion held in the morning after the second performance.

Of course, dramaturging at the O’Neill wasn’t a permanent job.  At the end of the conference, the dramaturgs returned to their usual professions, in most cases, reviewing plays.

Then the dam broke.  The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles hired John Kearns as its first literary manager in 1967, the first in an American theater on record after John Corbin.  In 1968, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis hired John Lahr (b. 1941), recently longtime reviewer for the New Yorker, as literary manager.  The Guthrie later would have staff positions for both a literary manager and a dramaturg (though it doesn’t at present).  Lahr’s job expanded to include giving in-house critiques to the production’s director (shades of Lessing—though, of course, they weren’t published in the subscriber magazine), and he was in charge of all the Guthrie’s published written materials.

The next full-time dramaturg at a professional theater in the U.S. came aboard in 1970 when the Yale Repertory Theatre hired Michael Feingold (1945-2022), later the longtime head review-writer for the Village Voice. 

The list grows longer as more regional theaters take up the mantle of commissioning, developing, and presenting new plays.  As the 20th century drew to a close, residential theaters, including the Off-Broadway troupes in New York City, found challenges in adapting and reinterpreting classic plays; creating stage adaptations of non-dramatic material such as diaries and journals, oral histories, hearing transcripts, memoirs, and more; offering translations of foreign-language plays or retranslations of older foreign works whose standard versions have become dated or stilted.  These are all in the dramaturg’s wheelhouse.

In the mid-’80s, when many of the country’s residential companies were coming out of their infancy and toddlerhood into adolescence and early adulthood, the founding artistic directors, or even their first-generation successors, began to retire.  A number of their replacements were former dramaturgs or literary managers.  At the turn of the 21st century, a bunch of theater companies were being run by dramaturgs.

It's still only in the experimental stage, but other developments have spread the gospel of Lessing and Archer and Granville-Barker.  Dramaturgs, or some version of the professional, have set up shop in TV and film studios, opera houses, and—heavens to Betsy!—commercial producers' offices. 

(Jack Viertel, b. 1949, who just retired as Senior Vice President of Jujamcyn Theaters, was previously the theater reviewer for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 1980-85, and dramaturg at the Mark Taper Forum, 1985-87.  While he was on the senior staff of Jujamcyn, 1987-2021, he also served as artistic director of New York City Center Encores!, 2001-20, which presents concert versions of old Broadway musicals.)

While the profession was cautiously advancing in acceptance and significance in the U.S., academia was also getting into the act.  There are probably a dozen or more graduate-level university programs, both masters level and doctoral, in dramaturgy now, maybe more.  The first, and arguably the best known, is the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism program at Yale University’s David Geffen School of Drama (formerly the Yale School of Drama).

Offering both a Master of Fine Arts and a Doctor of Fine Arts, the dramaturg program was launched in 1974 to bridge the gap between academia, with which many dramaturgs are associated, and practical theater, where the real work of the theater art is done.  The first director was Rocco Landesman (b. 1947), a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, and Jack Viertel’s boss at Jujamcyn until he left to run the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009.

In 1975, the program was merged into the program in Dramatic Literature and Criticism, founded in 1966 when Robert Brustein (b. 1927) became dean of YSD, to become the program in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. 

Before the addition of the dramaturg program, DDC students had limited contact with Yale Rep, the professional troupe founded in the same year as the dramatic lit and crit program.  The students got their “practical” experience by working on yale/theatre (the predecessor to Theater magazine, also published by YSD and now the Geffen School), moderating critique sessions on productions of both YSD and Geffen, and now and then volunteering as actors, stage managers, or crew members.  On occasion, DDC students would serve as dramaturgs on YSD shows.

YRT found limited use for students in the lit and crit program; the students would occasionally contribute articles for the YRT program and some students volunteered as script-readers for the Rep.  Some YSD students were actually hired by the theater after they’d finished their three years of course work.

Soon, however, all the opportunities for practical work withered.  Students lost interest in working on school shows or doing the small jobs on Rep productions, yale/theatre started to sink from lack of interest, and even the low-level dramaturgical tasks students performed at YRT was shifted to the graduates hired by the theater.  Except for a few script-readers, no students had substantive contact with the Rep.

This was the impetus for launching the dramaturg program—to shore up the now-tenuous relationship between YSD students and the Rep.  The new leadership at YSD established what Jonathan Marks, b. ca. 1947, then the literary manager of Yale Rep, characterized as “a symbiotic relationship”: “the YDS [sic] is the conservatory of the YRT, and the YRT is the training-ground of the YDS.”

Whether other schools that followed in Yale’s path had similar difficulties with the academic-practical divide, I don’t know.  (Probably less so, if they did, since few schools have a professional theater co-located with their academic program and, at the same time, so integrally linked.)  

Among the other programs in dramaturgy are the Universities of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Southern California; International College in Los Angeles; and the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island (Suffolk County). 

(Peter Hay, b. 1944, asserted that

the best formal training in the United States does not mention dramaturgy in its title: the Stanford doctorate in directing, which aims to turn out director-scholars.  It has the explicit requirement for directors to be intellectually equipped with strong dramaturgical skills, with an implicit recognition that the most effective dramaturgs in the American theatre function as directors.

(Hay was the first dramaturg of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company in Canada and he was a dramaturg at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference and at the early Sundance Institute Playwrights Workshops in the early 1980s.  In Los Angeles, he co-founded First Stage, a Hollywood non-profit organization that helps writers develop new scripts for the stage and screen.  Born in Hungary, he first emigrated to Canada, and in 2008, he retired to British Columbia.)

In addition to an increasing number of schools offering degree-granting programs in dramaturgy, many theater and drama departments offer courses in dramaturgy and other classes that would be useful to incipient dramaturgs, such as theater history, which almost all theater programs offer and often require, dramatic theory and criticism, and text analysis. 

(I, myself, taught a class in the last subject, inculcating a technique I found immensely useful.  I describe it in “Theatrical Structure,” posted on ROT on 15 and 18 February 2011.  Another analytical method, intended for actors but useful for other theater pros, is in “An Actor’s Homework,” 19, 22, 25, and 28 April 2010.)

In April 1985, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (www.lmda.org), a national pro­fessional association, was established.  

(I was actually on the periphery of this happening because my dramaturgy prof at the time, Cynthia Jenner, b. 1939, was one of the founders of LMDA and she invited members of the class to attend meetings and lit managers’ luncheons.  

(Later, once LMDA was officially formed and I was interning with Cynthia when she was trying to launch a theater herself, she was president of the organization and appointed me to fill the seat of an executive committee member who’d had to step down.  I served as Vice President for Communications and edited the newsletter for about a year.)

In 1979, when the Theatre Communications Group held its first conference of literary managers and dramaturgs, only 14 people attended.  At the third conference in 1983, at which Robert Brustein, then artistic director of the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, spoke, there were over 100 participants, a 700% increase.

When LMDA (which now stands for Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas to reflect members from Canadian theaters) was established, it had a projected membership of between 150 and 200.  In 2013, the association listed an average of 400 members a year.  In 2004, LMDA leaders generated an international dialogue with playwrights and literary managers in Mexico, the U.K., and Continental Europe. 

I mentioned briefly that dramaturgs have been slowly making themselves useful in film and television and in opera.  (Peregrine Whittlesey, b. 1944, formerly literary manager at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre under Gregory Mosher, b. 1949, who became a literary agent, stated a number of years ago, “Theatrical talent is respected in both the television and motion picture industries,” and I suspect that if it was true then, it’s still true now.) 

Another area where the dramaturg has been encouraged to tread is the “Theater of Objects.”  That’s what John Bell, who was dramaturg of the Bread and Puppet Theater before he moved on, called it when he wrote of the “dramaturgy of image” or the “dramaturgy of performing objects.”

Robert Massa, 1957-94, in a discussion of dramaturgy in the modern theater for the Village Voice, also calls for dramaturgy for the “theater of images.”  Developing a competence in this field could lead to dramaturgs, such as Jonathan Marks and Anne Cattaneo, b. ca. 1956, who both worked with Robert Wilson, working with such movement theater people as Martha Clarke, Bill Irwin, and, even, dance companies. 

While many dramaturgs are also playwrights or critics—word people—a new dramaturgical arena is available for those with backgrounds and sensitivity in dance, mime, choreography and directing, the non-literary aspects of theatre.

Richard Schechner, b. 1934, a faculty member in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, has for thirty years made theatre that is increasingly liberated from the bounds of the text.  In an essay he called “Performaturgy,” he calls for a form of dramaturgy that “is concerned with performance possibilities more than literary history.”  He explains:

It seeks specific actions that express in the most concrete way possible the intent of various scenes.

It gives directors actions that they can “quote” or use in any way they want.

The performaturg’s research focuses on production rather than interpretation.  It seeks to find out how things were staged.  And it seeks in non-theatrical materials specific scenographic details that might contribute to a current staging.

(In 1990, experimental director Leonardo Shapiro, on whom I’ve written numerous times for ROT, asked me to work with him as dramaturg on a final, definitive production of Strangers, his company-built performance piece that had been workshopped with his Shaliko Company in 1989 [see “Shaliko’s Strangers,” 3 and 6 March 2014].

(The performance was assembled with four co-equal “tracks,” and I was going to be concerned with the action [physical enactment] and vocal [text] tracks with considerable focus on the visual [images].  The fourth track was the instrumental, or music.

(Shapiro had found that the action track was predominantly mimetic and he planned to bring in a dancer and choreographer to work specifically on making it more dance-like.  He also wanted to find ways of making the visual imagery more symbolic and less representational.  In effect, I was going to be practicing dramaturgy of performing objects, dramaturgy of images, and performaturgy.

(Unfortunately, the planned production of Strangers was never realized because Shapiro couldn’t find the funding.  The only work I had done was additional research on some of the factual events around which the piece was built.)

As far as I know, however, these fields haven’t been explored very much.  Given the growth of the profession, both in numbers and in esteem, I could go with what my former teacher said some time ago: “The outlook for dramaturgy in America is cautiously optimistic.”