A Note from the Editor

I first began work as a professional dramaturg in 1993. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I got an internship at a small theatre company (it is much bigger now) in a second-tier theatre city. There was no other literary or dramaturgical staff at the theatre, so for $50 per week I did . . . a lot. I read and wrote reports for unsolicited manuscripts and corresponded with playwrights; I provided production dramaturgy on four out of five professional productions, one of which was a new play that entailed considerable pre-rehearsal development work with the playwright; I also provided administrative support for an active educational-outreach program. That I was overworked and underpaid goes without saying, even while the experiences and learning that I enjoyed that year were truly life-changing. Thus, my career began with both a sense of the excitement and possibility of dramaturgy and, as well, a sharp awareness of the economic precarity of working as a dramaturg.

The articles in this special issue of Theatre Topics explore from many perspectives that excitement and potential, while many of the authors writing here also consider the challenges faced in a profession whose practitioners are still often overworked and underpaid out of proportion with their colleagues in other areas of theatre practice and who are often the first to lose their jobs when an institution faces an economic challenge. Jules Odendahl-James is one of those authors, and her article “Blueprints, Informatics, Predictive Analytics” not only considers new tools for the twenty-first-century dramaturg, but addresses a concern for dramaturgs’ agency—agency in the process of making theatre, as well as in the context of the institution in which a dramaturg may work.

Looking at the makeup of institutions across North America, the number of dramaturgs in leadership roles has grown gradually though steadily—hardly a sweeping sea-change, but these established and new leaders are notable examples of the capacity of dramaturgs to project authority in an institutional context and to earn executive positions. Increasingly, the phrase “dramaturg as producer” has become a part of the discourse of professional dramaturgy. Odendahl-James mentions this role, as do Beth Blickers and Brian Quirt, sharing their perspectives on a range of topics in a coauthored state-of-the-field report on behalf of North America’s official professional dramaturgy organization, Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). Blickers and Quirt note that many literary managers and dramaturgs already work as producers of readings, festivals, special events, and various series, whether or not under the umbrella of a producing organization.

In the context of these glacial professional shifts, numerous colleagues have noted that a dramaturg was mentioned in the 2014 Tony awards: upon receiving the award for best play for All the Way, Robert Schenkkan thanked Oregon Shakespeare Festival dramaturg Tom Bryant. On social media, many celebrated this explicit mention of a dramaturg in an acceptance speech at the Tonys as a step toward acknowledging and normalizing the role of the dramaturg; others noted that this brief acknowledgment was a far cry from introducing a Tony Award for Best Dramaturgy; and still others reiterated a longstanding general dismissal of the Tonys as too limited in their representation of geography, economics, and gender, among other categories.

However, based on my work on this special issue, I can make an unscientific observation: of the numerous articles submitted, not one took as its subject anything like “justifying the existence of the dramaturg,” nor was there a single mention of the anti-dramaturg firebrands whose positions have been rebutted in the past. The journal last addressed the practice of dramaturgy and the work of dramaturgs more than ten years ago. In her introduction to that issue (volume 13, number 1 [2003]), editor Stacy Wolf captured the soul-searching that was prevalent in the field of dramaturgy throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium. Wolf asked all the key questions, including: “What is dramaturgy’s place in the American theatre? Should there be a separate person called a dramaturg as part of the production team? . . . How can a dramaturg be a creative theatre artist...