[On
30 December 2009, I posted “Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater,” a look
at what was then still the newest profession in the theater, and little
prognostication about where the profession might be heading. That was almost exactly 13 years ago, and
though I’ve posted a few more pieces on Rick On Theater that touch on dramaturgy, I
haven’t posted another entire article on the topic.
[I figure it’s about time I did, and it strikes me that the most apt subject is the history of the profession. As it happens, that results in a two-fer, because the history of dramaturgy splits neatly into two parts. Below is the early history of the profession, which took place in Europe, mostly Germany, in the 18th and 19th centuries.
[Following “The Origins” will be “The Modern Era,” focusing on dramaturgy in the United States. As you’ll learn, that only began in the latter third of the 20th century. It’s recent enough that I was around to see the end of its beginning. (That’ll make sense when you read Part 2.) In fact, I was a close observer, as you’ll see.]
The profession of dramaturgy in the United States is still a relatively new idea; it has yet to be definitively described in either theory or practice. Even now, whatever definitions exist are ad hoc, each dramaturg often writing the job description as he or she goes along.
According to a survey taken by the American Theatre Association (ATA; 1936 [as the American Educational Theatre Association] – 1986), a dramaturg is a theater (and sometimes opera, film, and television) professional involved in play selection, casting decisions, research, directing showcases, attending out-of-town auditions, writing or translating plays, producing new-play series, supervising workshops and play readings, and editing support materials.
The dramaturg’s responsibilities are many, depending on the talents of the person holding the post, the needs of the theater, and the inventiveness of the artistic director. Dramaturgs may often also take on a number of quasi- or non-dramaturgical responsibilities such as public relations, teaching, fundraising or, even, acting.
They can be educators, adapters, translators, historians, researchers, editors, in-house critics, playwright’s advocates, conduits for new scripts, play doctors, and outside observers at rehearsals ready to set the artists back on track if they get diverted.
They can serve as resources for production directors and designers, and in a different context, for the company’s artistic director. They can assist publicity directors and press reps as well. Dramaturgs help keep everyone on the same page.
Though ‘dramaturgy’ is often used to mean ‘the craft of playwriting,’ I’ll be using it here exclusively to refer to the dramaturg’s profession. The variant spellings ‘dramaturge’ and ‘dramaturg’ are used interchangeably by many writers.
The former spelling, which is French (and consequently pronounced with a soft g) and is really a synonym for ‘dramatist,’ is less common; I’ll use the latter, German spelling, which, first, is closer in meaning to the function discussed here and, second, is the name used by the professional association, Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA, founded in 1985).
The terms ‘literary manager’ or ‘literary adviser,’ though sometimes defined slightly differently from ‘dramaturg,’ will generally be used as a synonym for it here. The staffs of few theaters include both a literary manager and a dramaturg—Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage lists both positions on its staff—and the work they perform frequently overlaps.
Dramaturgy in the United States first appeared in 1908, when director Winthrop Ames (1870-1937) of New York City’s New Theatre (62nd Street and Central Park West on Manhattan’s Upper West Side) recruited New York Sun drama reviewer John Corbin (1870-1959) as literary manager. His salary was a whopping $10,000 a year, equivalent to about $324,000 today!
In 1910, Corbin resigned in frustration over the strain of reading as many as 2,000 scripts a year—more than five plays every day over 365 days. The theater accepted unsolicited scripts—an announcement to that effect appeared in newspapers—and most of what he read, he affirmed, he declared “impossible,” and then he had to find a diplomatic way to phrase the rejection letter.
Even in his short tenure at the New Theatre, Corbin was credited with contributing to the troupe’s highly artistic productions, demonstrating the value of a literary manager in residence. The position of literary manager, however, was abolished, and Ames’s New Theatre Company ceased operations in 1911 as a result of financial failure, and the building was demolished in 1930. No other such position was established with any prominence in an American theater for over half a century.
It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early 1970s that the first full-time dramaturgs since Corbin were employed by professional U.S. theaters. Since that time, a large number of resident theaters have hired dramaturgs or literary managers; some even have small staffs and internships in the field.
Historically, the field of dramaturgy was initiated in the 18th century European theater. It was common practice for theater companies to have a resident dramatist who composed plays for the troupe, translated foreign plays, or edited classical works that had casts too large for the company.
The company playwright in the French-speaking troupes was called the dramaturge, and other European theaters used the French term as well. So, the dramaturge developed into the forebear of the modern dramaturg.
The German form of the word was first used in Hamburg, Germany. A consortium of 12 businessmen formed the Hamburg National Theater (Hamburger Nationaltheater) and the de facto director of the theatre was Abel Seyler (1730-1800), a Swiss-born theater director and former banker. They hired playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) as resident dramatist in January 1767.
Lessing demurred, explaining to the theater’s manager, Johann Friedrich Löwen (1727-71), who was also a stage director, that he couldn’t write plays on a schedule. Löwen devised a plan for Lessing to write criticism of the company’s productions to be published in a journal put out by the theater, a sort of precursor to the newsletters or subscriber magazines many U.S. theaters publish, with the idea that Lessing’s commentaries would draw theatergoers.
By 1767, Lessing had attained a reputation for both his criticism and his playwriting. Löwen believed that having the dramatist’s name on the theater’s staff, it could take advantage of his prestige and respect to attract audiences. Lessing, on the other hand, was in such impecunious straits that he was prepared to take any job that paid him a salary.
Of course, Löwen expected Lessing to pen laudatory descriptions of the National Theater’s work, but the playwright and critic expressed his honest opinions of what he saw. The new dramaturg, it seems, saw himself not as a tout or a shill, but an enlightener or aesthetic educator.
Lessing’s criticism was aimed not only at the prospective audience, the potential theatergoers of Hamburg, but at the artistic leadership of the Hamburg National Theater. In the epigraph to Joel Schechter’s essay “Lessing, Jugglers, and Dramaturgs,” the author quotes George Bernard Shaw:
It was Lessing, the most eminent of dramatic critics . . ., who was reproached by [German poet and literary critic Heinrich] Heine for not only cutting off his victims’ heads but holding them up afterwards to show that there were no brains in them.
Needless to say, the dramaturg’s efforts weren’t appreciated at the theater. He found that his advice was largely ignored, and he got into disputes with both actors, who didn’t welcome his critiques, and spectators, who found his efforts to criticize their taste and understanding insulting.
Both he and Löwen resigned in the summer of 1768, and the National Theater closed in 1769 due to financial failure.
While at the Hamburg theater, Lessing wrote a series of 104 essays on theater based on his work at the theater. The pieces were written between April 1767 and April 1769, continuing after he left the theater, and were published in 1769 as Hamburgische Dramaturgie or Hamburg Dramaturgy, which popularized both the word and the practice of dramaturgy. (An English translation was published in 1890, but it omits nearly 30% of the text. A new, complete rendering was issued in 2014.)
Over the ensuing 200 years, dramaturgy in Germany became an established and important theatrical function. Later German dramaturgs included writers and directors such as Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), who helped bring German literature out of Sturm und Drang into Romanticism; Otto Brahm (1856-1912), founder of Berlin’s Freie Bühne (Free Stage), and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), who served as dramaturg for Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) before developing his own plays and productions.
Lessing’s failure had little deterrent effect on the dawning of the profession of dramaturgy. After the publication of Hamburg Dramaturgy, several other volumes on the subject followed. In 1778/79, Otto Heinrich von Gemmingen (1755-1836; known as Heinrich while his father, with the same name, was called Otto), from an illustrious family—he was a baron, as was his father who was also a judge—published Mannheimer Dramaturgie (“Mannheim dramaturgy”).
Having started with amateur dramatics in Heilbronn, where he spent his childhood, at 19, von Gemmingen moved to Mannheim, the seat of the Elector of the Palatinate, and soon came to the Elector’s attention.
Appointed a chamberlain, a courtier responsible for maintaining a nobleman’s household, he took advantage of the expanded cultural scene in Mannheim and began to prepare himself for a literary career. He was introduced to the Enlightenment at this time as well.
Meanwhile, by 1777, von Gemmingen was appointed supervisor of educational institutions and the theaters, a post once offered to (and turned down by) Lessing. He also became friends with young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91), who was in Mannheim.
In 1778, the new Mannheim National Theater was opened and von Gemmingen was offered the post of dramaturg. He began translating plays into German and earned a reputation as a drama critic. In 1778 and ’79, he wrote criticism and essays on theatrical theory for a theater journal; the pieces were collected in 1780.
He moved on from translation to writing original plays, including one, now lost, which he co-wrote with Mozart. In 1779, von Gemmingen had his greatest stage success with Der deutsche Hausvater (“The German house father” or “The German father of the house”), in which the esteemed German actor Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744-1816), who later became a great friend of the author, starred. The play was highly praised by Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) and many critics and literary experts believe it influenced Schiller’s own Kabale und Liebe (Love and Intrigue; 1784).
Hausvater made von Gemmingen famous almost overnight; it played in German theaters all over Europe and remained in some companies’ repertoires for years. He went on to write several other successful plays, but he left Mannheim and moved on to other pursuits. He fell into heavy debt and died impoverished and almost forgotten. Today, his name is hardly known.
In 1788-89, Baron Adolph Knigge (1752-96) published the journal Dramaturgische Blätter (“Dramaturgical pages”). He had started an amateur theater in Hanau, Germany, in 1777. He wrote several plays (the titles of which I wasn’t able to track down!), published in a two-volume edition titled simply Theaterstücke (“Theater pieces” or, simply, “Plays”; 1779-80).
Knigge, who was born Adolph von Knigge, but as a staunch supporter of the French Revolution, dropped the aristocratic von after the nobility was abolished there (though it appears on some of his books depending on the editor and date of publication), was a prolific writer on topics social and political, until his early death—apparently from “nervous fever and gallstones”—at the age of 43.
Heinrich Christoph Albrecht (1762-1800) was a German philologist, someone who studies language in oral and written historical form and applies the methodologies of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics. With no apparent ties to the theater, in 1791, he published the journal Neue hamburgische Dramaturgie (“New Hamburg dramaturgy”). It only ran 16 issues.
Even after the demise of the Hamburg National Theater and the rejection of Lessing’s attempt to raise the artistic standards of both the theater’s repertoire and the Hamburg audience’s viewing habits—both of which are within a dramaturg’s job description, though a lot of tact and patience is generally required—the hiring of dramaturgs around the German-speaking world continued apace, except in Hamburg, which balked at a reprise of the experience.
(When I was doing a supervised research project for a
dramaturgy course in grad school in 1984, I proposed offering some discreet in-house
assessments of the work of the theater where I was serving as literary
advisor. My expectation was that this
would be much very informal and entirely private—no public consumption of my
opinions—but in the margin of my project journal, my teacher wrote: “Look, however,
what happened to poor Lessing when he tried it!
This takes the most acute diplomacy.”)
There was still prestige to be gained at theaters which had a man with Lessing’s reputation and stature on the staff, and it provided the theater with a source of knowledge of playwriting and dramatic theory that gave them not only access to new plays—playwrights attract other playwrights—but a person with the expertise to evaluate scripts and nurse them from the page to the stage.
Also, having a playwright on the staff, even if he couldn’t turn out producible new scripts on demand, he could supply the company, becoming less and less dependent on classics and popular standards, with new plays of quality. Even Löwen in Hamburg knew the value of that: in the dramatist’s brief stint as dramaturg, the National Theater produced four of Lessing’s plays, including the 1767 première of Minna von Barnhelm.
Far from permanently queering the pitch for dramaturgs in the German theater, Lessing seems to have stoked the eagerness for them. Not only were they being hired, but they were finding their advice heeded. (I suspect that the crop of dramaturgs that came behind Lessing knew not to come on like gangbusters and applied some finesse to their suggestions.)
By the turn of the 19th century, the dramaturg had become a permanent and vital member of the German theater’s staff. Many theaters have the split dramaturgical set-up to which I alluded briefly earlier, with a production dramaturg who works with the director and other artists in rehearsal and a literary dramaturg, what we’d call a literary manager or literary adviser, who deals with the selection of the repertoire, finding and evaluating scripts, and pretty much all text-based matters. The dramaturgy departments of these subsidized companies comprise staffs of up to 12 full-time dramaturgs.
Along with the new dramaturgs, a whole herd of new writers was getting their work done on German stages, including Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who made débuts in Dresden at the Court Theater courtesy of Tieck’s dramaturgy. Karl Immermann (1796-1840) brought classics by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-81) to Düsseldorf’s Stadttheater in 1835. At Berlin’s Freie Bühne (1889-94) and Deutsches Theater (1894-1903), Brahm premièred Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), August Strindberg (1849-1912), Émile Zola (1840-1902), and Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946) late in the 19th century.
Ironically, even with their new-found acceptance and influence in their theaters, these later dramaturgs often had the same disputes with actors and theatergoers that Lessing had and which, in part, scuttled his residency in Hamburg.
Brecht was so bold as to demand in 1925, when he was one of the literary advisers at Max Reinhardt’s (1873-1943) Deutsches Theater in Berlin (where Brahm before him had served as manager), that the theater management cede all decision-making authority to him so he could shape the company’s repertoire to suit his own theories—and exclude all but his own plays. The management rejected his demand.
Like Lessing, Brecht was more successful as a playwright that he was as a dramaturg. He did get to run his own theater, the renowned Berliner Ensemble, established in 1949, just a few weeks after the founding of the German Democratic Republic itself after World War II in what was then Soviet-controlled East Berlin, capital of the GDR.
At the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht himself, now the theater’s artistic director, used dramaturgs extensively. Indeed, my first dramaturgy professor at New York University was Carl Weber (1925-2016), an actor and dramaturg at the BE, and assistant director to Brecht. The great playwright and director made the dramaturg his closest conceptual collaborator, giving them a significant say in all artistic considerations.
Dramaturgs in Germany, following on the Lessing debacle, have become integral to the success of the rep theaters in a country where nearly every town of any size has at least a Stadttheater (municipal theater) and often also a Stadtoper (city opera) and a Städtisches Orchester (municipal orchestra). These aren’t community theaters, even in the small cities.
(I lived for two years in a city of 100,000 residents, and it had a theater, an opera company, and an orchestra of very high quality—Germans take their culture very seriously. The orchestra and the opera troupe were both bases for American artists to come and gain experience they couldn’t get in the States.)
[Thus endeth part one of “The History of Dramaturgy.” On Tuesday, 3 January 2023, I’ll post part two, “The Modern Era,” which picks up in the 1970s (with a few quick warm-up trips to the early 1900s and a little after).
[I’ll be focusing on the United States, but there’s a brief side-trip to Britain. So we not only jump from the end of the 19th century to the last quarter of the 20th, we hop over half of Europe and across the Atlantic Sea, as Claude sings in Hair..
[I don’t know why I did
that last reference. It has nothing to
do with anything. I just felt like it
was time for a song cue!]
No comments:
Post a Comment