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.]

Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater

At a 1983 conference on dramaturgy sponsored by TCG, Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, told the assembled dramaturgs, “you help mold the esthetic of your institution, . . . you provide its intellectual identity, . . . you are its artistic conscience.” That may have been wishful thinking, given the actual condition of the dramaturgical profession in the United States today. Still a relatively new idea, American dramaturgy even now has yet to be defined in either theory or practice. At present, whatever definitions exist are ad hoc, each job-holder often writing the job description as he or she goes along. Part of the reason for the lack of consensus on what a dramaturg is stems from a similar disagreement on what one should be. If the present and future of American dramaturgy’s con­fused, however, its past’s in no doubt; in fact, that’s where the problem comes from. The concept of dramaturgy’s borrowed wholesale from the 18th-century German theater, and trying to fit it to a modern Anglo-Saxon theater’s like trying to fit Latin grammar to our Anglo-Saxon language: things keep flopping out around the edges. 

That is, nonetheless, what we’re trying to do. Historic­ally, dramaturgy was invented when playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) was appointed resident critic at the Hamburg National Theater in January 1767. While there, he wrote a series of essays on theater, published in 1769 as Hamburgische Dramaturgie or Hamburg Dramaturgy, which popularized both the word and the practice of dramaturgy. 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, and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), who served as dramaturg for Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) before developing his own plays and productions. 

(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 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. The term ‘literary manager’ and its like, 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--the Guthrie’s one that has--and the work they perform frequently overlaps. Any distinction, I find, is more intellectual than real.) 

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) and William Archer (1856-1924) in their Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre. No one served in such a position, however, until Laurence Olivier (1907-89) hired Observer reviewer Kenneth Tynan (1927-80) as literary manager of the new National Theatre in 1963. Before that, the first known American literary manager was hired in New York. In an attempt to follow the lead of Granville-Barker and Archer, the New Theatre was constructed in 1909. In antici­pation, director Winthrop Ames (1870-1937) recruited New York Sun drama reviewer John Corbin (1870-1959) as literary manager in 1908. Corbin resigned in frustration in 1910, and the position was abol­ished. No other such position was established with any prominence for over half a century. 

In 1969, two centuries after Lessing published his treatise on the subject, the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center began using professional reviewers as dramaturgs for the workshop productions of new plays during its annual playwrights’ conference, marking the start of modern American dramaturgy. In 1970, exactly 60 years after Corbin’s two-year stint at the New Theatre, Michael Feingold (b. 1945) was hired by the Yale Repertory Theatre as the second full-time dramaturg employed by a professional American theater. In 1974, the Yale School of Drama initiated the first academic program for training student dramaturgs. 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. 

The impetus for such a wave of hirings was the development of the regional theater movement in the 1960s and ’70s. The movement itself began shortly after World War II to bring professional theater that wasn’t dependent on the touring hits of Broadway or the amateur productions of the local community or college theater to communities beyond the reach of New York. A resurgence of the art theater movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it’s usually dated from the estab­lishment in 1947 of Margo Jones’s Theatre ‘47 in Dallas. These theaters proliferated in the next 20 years, but few offered new plays or unconventional productions of classics. Drawing their fare primarily from the popular contemporary repertoire, with a few classics in standardized presentations, there was little need for such a creature as a dramaturg. 

Most of these theaters were also dominated by directors who molded productions according to their own lights. Frequently, those “lights” were unfocused and productions were mounted with “no directorial concept, no reason for being, and no connection with the audience . . . ,” according to Peter Hay, first dramaturg at the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Feingold, paraphrasing an unidentified artistic director, writes that “too much of the American theater has consisted of a clever director fucking around with a script, and nothing more.” In such an autocratic theater, there was no place for a dramaturg, nor would the idea have been tolerated. (Eric Bentley, ever the iconoclast, once called dramaturgs “Ph.D. gofers” and said he’d fire them one day before he removed directors.) 

In the ’60s, however, an interest arose in a process-oriented theater in which all the participants had equal, or at least considerable, influence. Such developmental work peaked in the mid-1960s, most notably with the work of groups like the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and the Performance Group (succeeded by the long-running Wooster Group). The motivation for these companies was to form ensembles to create original theater works without pre-existing texts written by a playwright and developed by an authoritarian director. This experimental process eventually led to an interest in developing what Rosemarie K. Bank, a theater historian and critic, calls “an author-originated text, shaped and polished by a group in rehearsal . . . .” 

In the regional repertory theaters, this spawned an interest in new works. In 1965, Shakespeare was the most frequently produced writer in the regional theater while most new plays were presented on Broadway as commercial enterprises. With the production in 1967 of Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope by the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., the tide turned and the resident theaters became the dominant producers of new works. Now there was a need for someone who could work with new plays and playwrights and who could keep abreast of the material being created across the country and read all the new scripts that were being sent to these theaters. No longer an intellectual luxury, dramaturgy became a real necessity in the nation’s resident companies. 

Referring to this development, Hay insists, “Dramaturgy is much more a function of the public than the private theatre.” In Hay’s terms, the private theater’s the commercial theater of Broadway and its clones: road companies, summer stock, and community theaters that cater to a box office-oriented audience. The public theater Hay means is the theater that’s not only supported by public money--local, state, and federal--but is dedicated to serving its public as a distinct community. Hand-in-hand with the increased interest in pre­senting new plays comes an interest in producing a season of plays, whether new or old, that mean something to the community from which the theater’s audience is drawn. As Hay, and many other dramaturgs, states it, questions such as “Why are we doing this play? Why this season? Why here?” need to be asked. It’s the dramaturg, perched like Jiminy Cricket on the artistic director’s shoulder, who should constantly ask the questions. 

Furthermore, beyond questioning the raison d’être of an individual production, the theaters have to question their very existence. Again, Hay formulates the questions: “Why has theatre worked elsewhere or in the past? Why do our audiences come? Why does ninety to ninety-five percent of the local population stay away?” Slowly, it became apparent to artistic directors that more had to be considered than how a show’s mounted. The “why” had to be addressed, too. 

Asking “why” doesn’t only mean justifying the theater’s season to the public. Drawing on the European model, a theater has an obligation to educate its audience. That means both offering a range of artistic experience to the spectators that come and attracting the ones that stay away. A dramaturg who allows her or his theater to pander to its audience fails in this responsibility. The principle function of the dramaturg then is: To suit the theater to the audience, the audience to the theater. 

Before dramaturgs can pose the necessary questions, the theaters must develop artistic philosophies suited to their venues. Many theaters haven’t come to grips with this consid­eration. Not all non-profit theater is public theater in Hay’s terms. Many resident theater companies still rely on box-office appeal as the criterion for selecting plays for a season. Selling plays to a subscription audience, the administrations of these theaters put together seasons the same way a Broadway producer selects a property. Artistic interest or appropriate­ness for the community play little part in the decision. “This,” notes Hay, “goes a long way to explain why so few theatres have worked out a philosophy, or public policy, which might guide its selection of plays as well as their interpretation.” 

Without such a policy, the dramaturg’s often relegated to more mundane functions, which is the situation of many working dramaturgs and literary managers. According to a survey taken in the 1981-82 season, the jobs performed by dramaturgs across the country involve play selection, casting decisions, research, directing showcases, attending out-of-town auditions, writing or translating plays, producing new play series, supervising work­shops and playreadings, editing support materials, and a number of quasi- or non-dramaturgical responsibilities such as public relations, teaching, fundraising or, even, acting. The idea of working closely with the artistic director to define and imple­ment an artistic policy for the theater wasn’t even broached, and none of the respondents indicated that this was part of their jobs. Little seems to have changed in the ensuing decades and this contributes to be the state of dramaturgical affairs that Hay calls, with more than a touch of despair, “Hamburger Dramaturgy, the fast-food, mish-mash metaphor for the American quick-fix.” 

The explosion of theaters with dramaturgical staff positions is an encouragement, however. In 1979, when TCG held its first conference of literary managers and dramaturgs, only 14 people attended. At the third conference, at which Brustein made his remarks in 1983, there were over 100 participants, a 700% increase. In April 1985, a national pro­fessional association, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (www.lmda.org), was established with a projected membership between 150 and 200. (LMDA is now Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas to reflect members from Canadian theaters. Its membership’s now over 500, though it should be noted that all LMDA members and conference attendees aren’t necessarily dramaturgs or literary managers.) 

As the profession entered its adolescence in this country, a number of former dramaturgs became artistic directors of their own theaters. This trend included Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theatre and Jean Passanante of the New York Theatre Workshop. At Playwrights Horizons, literary manager André Bishop became artistic director in 1977 before moving on to the Lincoln Center Theater Company in 1992; he was succeeded at Playwrights Horizons by the subsequent literary manager, Tim Sanford. Russell Vandenbroucke, long the literary manager of Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, was named producing director of Northlight Theater in Skokie, Illinois, and Michael Zelanak and Rick Davis, two recent graduates of the YSD’s program in dramaturgy and criti­cism, founded Pittsburgh’s American Ibsen Theater on the belief that the dramaturg’s role is essential. 

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 can be educators, adapters, translators, historians, researchers, editors, 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, even the actors, 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. One dramaturg, Mark S. P. Turvin, who’s also a playwright and teacher, calls the dramaturg “the mischievous court jester” to the theater’s artistic director. Furthermore, dramaturgs and literary managers are natural networkers, more than directors, artistic directors, and business managers are. They’re in constant and regular contact with other dramaturgs around the country and even abroad, keeping tabs on new plays (which literary managers share almost compulsively--LMDA maintains an on-line database of new titles recommended by dramaturgs to their counterparts at other companies) and writers; they travel to festivals and visit one another’s theaters as often as budgets allow. LMDA not only has an annual convention in a major North American theater center, but in cities or regions where there are several producing theaters with literary staffs, there are mini-meetings or luncheons at which dramaturgs compare notes and share discoveries. An article in the Summer 2009 LMDA Review is titled “Dramaturgs Like to Talk”; almost no other theater artists or professionals do. American theater’s not only regionalized but each region, even each company, seems walled off from its sisters--with the exception of the literary staffs. (I edited the newsletter of the American Directors Institute, an association formed so that directors and artistic directors could network in this way, but it was short-lived. Directors, it seems, just don’t like to share.) With theater in the straits it’s in now, a networker and out-reacher on staff might just be a boon. 

With the increased interest in new playwriting, M. Louise McKay, a current LMDA VP, asserts, “Over the past three decades, the role of the dramaturg and literary manager has expanded in the United States and Canada . . . .” With this enlarged presence of the dramaturg on the American theater scene, what’s the future of the profession? The question cannot be answered without also predicting the future of American public theater. Certainly, more and more theaters around the country will be administered by dramaturgs either as artistic directors themselves or as part of ruling triumvirates made up of a dramaturg, an artistic director, and a managing director. As theaters become increasingly aware of their responsibility to their communities, both as respondent and as educator, the impor­tance of dramaturgs as their artistic consciences will grow. Bonnie Marranca, former literary manager at the American Place Theatre and now editor of the Performing Arts Journal, had a dream for the future of the American theater that includes “plays coming better prepared to meet their audiences, and a more enlightened repertoire.” This can only happen, Marranca asserted, “when the Literary Advisor is allowed to take his rightful place in the structure of the American theater . . . .” The complete integration of the dramaturg into the “collaborative process of the theatre” means for Arthur Ballet, former dramaturg of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, that there will no longer be a “search” for a play for the season, but that the play will “‘pop out of repertoire’ in response to . . . [the dramaturg’s] awareness of the factors around us and in our theater . . . .” This awareness, according to Ballet, should “make a specific play necessary and compelling for us to present, in this theater, in this town, now.” 

Possibly the most curious view of the future of dramaturgy was shared by Ballet and Martin Esslin, who was functioning as dramaturg of San Francisco’s Magic Theater when the two men attended the second TCG conference on dramaturgy and literary management in 1981. They saw an “urgent need for a collaborative relationship between theatre and television and for the dramaturg’s role in offering ideas about products that could be marketed by their theatre to TV.” This, of course, would be a special application of the idea of knowing the theater’s community and developing the theater’s audience within that community--which means reaching the vast local television audience, 90 to 95% of which, if Peter Hay’s estimate is to be credited, doesn’t attend the theater. Ballet and Esslin’s rationale was: 

We have a choice either to be a warehouse developing projects that are picked off, bound and packaged by someone else or to view television as an extension of our own theater and audience. . . . Our own company . . . should produce a script and then sell it to television. It should be our product and we should control its quality and its uniquely theatrical nature. By putting our work on film and television, and by offering it to the schools as teaching devices, we get a wider distribution for our product and, ultimately, extend the theater’s audience. 

The conventional wisdom has so long identified television as the natural and mortal enemy of theater, the prospect of an entente cordiale is both frightening and intriguing. By including the schools, which most resident theaters approach only timidly, Ballet and Esslin were proposing a powerful double entente. 

Since the foundation of LMDA, discussions of what the professions of dramaturg and literary manager are and where they might head have been regular. Some unusual advances have been made for the professions. In one uncommon arena, with more and more opera companies using supertitles to overcome the language barrier of most operas, the task of writing and coordinating these translations has fallen on the dramaturg who specializes in opera. The field’s small at present; according to Roger Pines, dramaturg of the Dallas Opera, “only a few companies have a dramaturg on staff.” Nonetheless, according to an article by director and dramaturg Andrew Eggert in the spring 2008 issue of Opera America, opera companies are turning to freelance dramaturgs when they develop new works. 

Selling your skills on the open market isn’t a new idea; neither is turning those skills into a business. Artists, however, seldom do this, least of all theater artists, actors’ production companies in the film world notwithstanding. Nevertheless, in the late 1980’s Steven J. Krementz, former literary assistant at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, formed HiText Ltd., a firm of “Theatre Arts Research Consultants.” As freelance dramaturgs, HiText did background research for non-profit theaters for a fee, digging into historical or cultural resources, past productions, and costume and set references, providing a service many theaters may not be able to afford and for which many directors may not have the time or resources. (I’m not certain this company still exists, but the concept’s still viable.) 

From traditional literary management to opera supertitles to dramaturgical research firms, most dramaturgy has been text-based. John Bell, who was dramaturg of the Bread and Puppet Theater before he moved on, wrote of the “dramaturgy of image” or the “dramaturgy of performing objects.” Dramaturgs working in the “Theater of Objects,” as Bell called it, may still work with texts, but they’re texts of images, not words, focusing on what Richard Schechner calls the performance text. The late Robert Massa, in his discussion of dramaturgy in the modern theater for the Village Voice, also called for dramaturgy for the “theater of images.” Developing a competence in this field could lead to dramaturgs, such as Jonathan Marks of San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre and Anne Cattaneo of New York’s Lincoln Center Theater Company, 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’s available for those with backgrounds and sensitivity in dance, mime, choreography, and directing, the non-literary aspects of theater. “The work is similar--we’re both telling stories,” says Brian Quirt, a past president of LMDA, “but the tools that we use can be somewhat different . . .”: 

Dramaturgs are different [from the other collaborators] in that their responsibility isn’t to a single aspect of the creation. Whether dealing with text on the page, a musical played at the piano or in action on the stage in front of you, the dramaturg is there to respond to the ideas that are being expressed and to help find the next step in the process. 

The dramaturg, composer Jake Heggie adds, provides a different perspective on the material when he’s gotten too immersed in it to see it clearly anymore. The dramaturg, says James Leverett, professor of theater at Yale and Columbia and a dramaturg who’s worked with Philip Glass, can act as the “first audience” for a work coming into existence. Quirt, who himself has worked in both opera and dance as well as theater, points out, “The dramaturg can ask the questions that no one else has asked because they are immersed in the process in a very particular way.” 

Schechner, a faculty member in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, has for 40 years made theater that’s 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. 

Since the performaturg seeks “theatrical actions,” the research Schechner needs goes beyond the “specific history of the dramatic text” and digs into “the scenic matrix out of which that text was precipitated.” Since the performaturg is looking “for scenes not scenery,” Schechner admonishes that the work must include “a social and political matrix” so that the performaturg can suggest “scenes and actions, the whole kinesthetic and aural tone of a possible production.” 

These specific individuals have been working in or suggesting areas into which dramaturgy can expand by changing the way dramaturgs work. There are still underexplored venues in which traditional dramaturgy can function, such as commercial theater, particularly Broadway, and film and television. In the first case, as a few producers have discovered, staff dramaturgs or literary advisors can function in much the same way they do for non-profit theaters. (In some histories of the profession, dramaturgs are considered to have descended from the old commercial theater function of play doctor.) The advent of Jack Viertel, a former literary manager, as Creative Director at Jujamcyn Theatres, promises further expansion of the dramaturg’s expertise into this part of the American theater. (I’m not sure what Viertel’s current position is since former Jujamcyn president Rocco Landesman left in August to become NEA chairman.) As for the film industry, the same skills used for theater producers or artistic directors can be placed at the service of movie producers in search of new materials. As for television, the PBS series American Playhouse (1982-93) was a series that broadcast stage productions of America’s regional theaters, one of whose producers, Lynn Holst, was a dramaturg (New York Shakespeare Festival). 

Regarding the electronic media, Peregrine Whittlesey, a former dramaturg (Goodman Theatre) who became a literary agent, states, “Theatrical talent is respected in both the television and motion picture industries, and there is a good chance in both for solid remunerative work . . .” as former literary managers Holst at PBS and Thomas McCormick, who transferred over to HBO, have demonstrated. In the same discussion in which he urged image dramaturgy, Village Voice editor and writer Massa talked of dramaturgy for television. In fact, in August 1986, at LMDA’s first annual conference, an entire panel was devoted to “Television Story Editing as Dramaturgy.” 

To my knowledge, all of these last venues have been explored only a little. Certainly, with arts organizations of all kinds in financial trouble because of the economy, new jobs in the field are hard to find. Still, with the other extensions of the dramaturg or literary manager’s opportunities, they present interesting possibilities. Traditional dramaturgy’s a relatively finite field--there are only so many theaters in the country (and each season there are fewer and fewer). The explorations by members of the professions are beginning to stretch the outside of the envelope a little and provide inspiration for others to find new ways to apply their talents. Because part of the dramaturg’s skill set is to connect the theater and its artists with their spectators and community, the value of the dramaturg in increasing the company’s potential audience may prove financially beneficial. 

[An early version of this essay was published in TheatreInsight (1.2 [Spring 1989]: 34-37).]