[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.”
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