Teaching Pirates Dramaturgy

© 826 Valencia

“Everyone here knows what the fourth wall is, right?”

Stares. Heads shake side to side. “No.”

“That’s great!”

It is probably true of any profession. Any obsession. Anything one spends their time doing: it is easy to forget that not everyone knows the lingo. Why would writing tutors at the famed 826 Valencia know that the fourth wall is the invisible, nonexistent wall that separates actors onstage from the audience—that it is the line that separates the fictive from the real? They aren’t playwrights. That’s why I’m there, standing in front of them in a room designed to look like the hull of a pirate ship, stumbling through the basics of playwriting and dramaturgy in my allocated hour.

To forgo all suspense: it went great, and next Tuesday 20 freshly-minted new-play dramaturgs will enter the field. 826 Valencia is teaming up with A.C.T. and the project-based Downtown High School to help students “who have not experienced success in the district’s comprehensive high schools” craft monologues and 10-minute plays that will be published in a fully-designed book.

The experienced 826 tutors have taught fiction and essay writing, but never plays, so I was asked to come in and answer a few simple questions: “What are the differences between plays and other genres—especially film?” “What are the parts of a play?” “What are some tips you can give the tutors to pass on to their students on how to make their plays stronger?”

Wow. Great questions. And spending the past two weeks thinking about how to answer them strengthened my belief that if you want to do, you really should teach first. I learned academic writing by teaching freshman comp. for two years. I continue to learn how to write for dramaturgical publications by mentoring our yearly fellows. And now, for the first time, I was articulating for myself what a play is. What the role of the dramaturg is.

I said a lot of stuff yesterday morning. Theater is different from film because of proximity, focus, and language. Instead of going into Aristotle’s parts of a play—which I never really got behind—I talked about the loss of and search for stasis. I broke monologues down into categories. I explained how scripts are the beginning of a collaboration, not an end in and of themselves. Nothing surprising. But I was proud that I distilled new-play dramaturgy into a simple two-part formula:

“What are you trying to say?” —> “This is what I hear.”

We’re compared to consultants. Therapists. Editors. But really, dramaturgs are professional audience members—that talk back. It isn’t our place to make plays better: it is our place to help playwrights understand what they have so that they can craft their plays into what they want them to be.

© DC Comics

What I would have said if I could have afforded the ATHE conference

Argh. Money is tight in this business! As one with a salary, I have less right to complain than most, but when I have to choose between attending the ATHE conference to be on my dear friend’s awesomely named Guerrilla Turg Panel and paying for a ticket home for Thanksgiving, all the while battling Bank of America over a $20 monthly maintenance fee that they decided to start after their April audit and trying to plan a wedding that complies with our artistically limited budget, it can be frustrating.

These are the questions my buddy is asking:

1). How/Where did you learn how to be a dramaturg?
2). What qualifies a person to be a dramaturg?
3). What does a dramaturg do?
4). What texts, exercises, and/or experiences would you consider core to your dramaturgical training?
5). What is the minimum training required to be a dramaturg (coursework? experience? degree?)

And my answers if I had been there (I think she’s going to read them? Hopefully not verbatim):

1) I’m still learning to be a dramaturg, and I don’t say that to be glib or as a cop out. I think dramaturgy is very much a show by show, project by project, role that you have to figure it out in the room on your feet. That is why it is so enjoyable: it can’t get old because it’s reborn every gig. But I got a very good basis in college and only partially as part of the theater department or bumming around with the theater crew. I tell people that I accidentally majored in dramaturgy because I majored in English Lit and minored in psych, general art (which was really drawing and woodcut printing), and theater. All of that comes into play. Of course my playwriting courses with Carter Lewis were instrumental, as was the dramaturgy course with DJ Hopkins. And, honestly, waiting tables for five years at Blueberry Hill, helped me a lot. Serving trains you to be cater to the needs of someone else; humility is essential to dramaturgy because it is NEVER about you. It is less about you than anybody in the rehearsal room. Serving also
trains you to listen and know what people want before they even order. Every dramaturg should wait tables for at least a couple years. I’m sure most will have to anyway to pay rent.

2) Trust. Did you know that you do not need to have a law degree or to have been a judge to be on the Supreme Court. Anyone can, legally
speaking. Same with a dramaturg. Anyone can be a dramaturg, so long as you have the trust of a playwright or the trust of a director. How you
earn that trust, however, is the tricky part (just like earning the trust of whatever President nominates a Justice). I am not sure what
“qualifies” a person to be a dramaturg, but these are the skillsets I think are useful in order of priority: 1) communication. 2) humility.
3) adaptability. 4) creativity. 5) The ability to discern what is truly valuable (i.e. a damn good filter so you don’t dump all your
research or all your opinions on a director or a cast just to show how hard you’ve been working; see also humility). 6) research skills. 7)
writing skills. N) an understanding of theater, and this is not number 8 because how knowledgeable a dramaturg needs to be about theater–the
craft of writing plays, the history of drama, and what is currently happening in the theater world–depends on the project

3) A dramaturg does anything a director or playwright needs him/her to do to help articulate a play, to themselves, to an artistic team, to a
cast, and to an audience.

4) Ugh. I don’t know. I’m getting tired. I think who I AM is the core to how I dramaturg. Everything I have ever done and experienced
feeds into how I read a script, listen to a play, how I craft a note, what I say to a playwright. I can think of a few specifics that sound
good (e.g. helping EJC with the suicide play was huge; watching Liz Engelman work in the Hotchner festival; turging two shows in Chicago
simultaneously), but they are no more instrumental than teaching Writing 1 for 4 semesters, or taking Psych 100, or talking to this guy
named Jonathon at a bar when I was stuck on what to do after the first day of workshopping DEMONS.

5) None. Goes back to #2. It’s about trust, not about training.

Open letter to a high school student: a career in dramaturgy

I am a student at Crystal Lake South High School, and I am doing a career research project about dramaturgy. I was hoping I could ask you some questions about your career, and get some insight into being a dramaturg. Thank you for your time.

How Competitive is your field?

Well, that is a difficult question to answer for a couple reasons. A) Is there any field that is not competitive right now with the current economic turmoil and hyperbolic unemployment rates? I feel like I would have quite a bit of trouble getting any job right now if I were not in the very fortunate position of having one already. B) The “field” of dramaturgy has many permutations: there are a number of different jobs that all fall under the title of dramaturg, and there are a plethora of jobs that employ dramaturgical skills that are not normally considered jobs-in-dramaturgy.
Theaters sometimes (but not always) have resident dramaturgs who are responsible for a number of things: preparing research for the artistic team and cast of a show, attending rehearsals, organizing and leading events surrounding the production of the show. As part of the artistic team, they also help the artistic director choose a season. Sometimes, they spearhead new play development and work directly with playwrights; this depends on whether or not a theater also has a literary manager. A literary manager, by distinction (though this distinction is malleable and often useless), primarily reads scripts that are sent to a theater by playwrights and agents and makes decisions on whether the plays should proceed to the artistic director’s usually-overflowing desk for him/her to read. But moving outside of resident dramaturgy, often theaters will bring dramaturgs on for a single show. Their relationship, in this case, is much more one with the director rather than the theater. Likewise, sometimes playwrights will seek out freelance dramaturgs to work one-on-one on a script.
Sticking with this very basic understanding of dramaturgy, it is, like all artistically oriented theater professions, extremely competitive, maybe even the most competitive of all as dramaturgs are a bit of a luxury: it is very difficult to make theater without actors, designers, and a director, but many productions do without having someone in the room with the title “dramaturg.”

Do you make a living solely in theatre, or do you have a job on the side?

Well, yes and yes. But I should preface my answer by saying that, while I consider myself a dramaturg, my title at American Conservatory Theater is not “dramaturg” but rather “publications and literary associate.” Much of what I do I consider to be dramaturgical: reading scripts, assessing scripts, researching productions, creating writings that contextualize our productions, etc. But we have a resident dramaturg, and I am not he.

But, yes, I do support myself primarily though my employment in one specific theater, and I supplement that income by working (for considerably less money) with other theaters on various projects. When I was freelancing in Chicago, I dramaturged with some off-loop companies for free while supporting myself working non-dramaturgical odd-jobs at Goodman Theater.

How are you contracted?

I am not exactly sure what you mean. At my main job, I have a boring, ordinary contract that spells out the annual salary and the benefits. When I was working as a freelance dramaturg in Chicago, I didn’t charge anything so I didn’t use contracts: they trusted that I would show up, and I trusted that they would let me in the room. The paying gigs I have had over the last couple years have been reading scripts for a few different theaters, and they either paid by the script or by the festival. There was also one very random, very unique job in which I was hired to dramaturg/ghostwrite a play for a non-profit organization. That actually fell apart because neither one of us really knew how to create a contract for such a weird project, and miscommunication over ownership eventually led to me walking away. But there are some organizations that help dramaturgs and playwrights negotiate contracts. Be sure to check out LMDA.org

I am going to open this discussion up to the readers of my blog. Hopefully they will have other insights to add.

Best,
Dan