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108 6 Why This Play Now? Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. —Frank Zappa, “Packard Goose” Chapter 1 discussed how Mark Bly answers the question of “What does a dramaturg do?” with “I question.” The dramaturg asks a lot of questions, but these are really just derivations of one sort of master-question. That question is the dramaturg’s constant companion, and as shown in the final section of this book, it is the question that guides the dramaturg’s inquiries, lines of research, and relationships with the rest of the troupe and the audience. The question is a touchstone that can reliably be counted on to provide a clear focus. No, it’s not “Am I getting paid?” It is just this: Why this play now? In other words, why have we chosen this play to present at this moment in history in front of this audience? Why is it important? To what concerns of ours, and theirs, does it speak? For that matter, who is our audience? Who are we? What is it we wish to say? Why is this text the best way to say it? Do we have anything new to say, or are we recapitulating an older idea? How will we make it relevant? How will we make it work? What values do we wish to convey? What values do we actually convey? Why are we doing a play and not some other form of art or political action? Why are we doing this play and not some other play? Why are we doing theater at all? The clearer your response to this question is, the better you will know what you are doing and what kind of outcome you desire. This chapter looks at how the question “Why this play now?” (WTPN) guides your dramaturgical research and writing processes. Doing Preliminary Research (and a Web Warning!) Research is half of the dramaturg’s process; the other half is transforming the WHY THIS PLAY NOW? 109 research into useful ideas and integrating them into the production. Often, that means writing. Research and writing are the particular skills of the dramaturg —the better a dramaturg is at them, the more useful he or she will be to a production process. Like everything else one does, research and writing are processes and are guided by the WTPN question. Luckily, we are living in the information age, and it is not difficult to get access to all kinds of information, in libraries, bookstores , archives of various kinds, and, of course, the World Wide Web (which is the ultimate garden of forking paths). But therein lay our greatest obstacles as well, because, as Zappa said, information is not knowledge. Like any other specialized tool, the Internet can make our work significantly easier, but it notoriously has three characteristics that impede research: • First, it has no way of distinguishing between valuable information and total garbage. Unlike brick-and-mortar publishing, the Internet has very few gatekeepers, few experts on hand to evaluate the quality and utility of a piece of writing before it is presented to you. Not that brick-and-mortar publishing is perfect, but it is able to enforce some standards. Across most of the ’net, anyone can publish whatever, whenever, and change it without warning. Furthermore, although the Internet is very good at tracking information that is emerging right now, it’s weaker the further back in time you need to go. There’s an awful lot of uncredited copying going on; consume indiscriminately, and you may become guilty of abetting someone else’s plagiarism. The good news is that scholars use the Internet all the time, and more-scholarly Web sites that you can trust are coming into existence. Get familiar with them; see appendix E in the current volume for a list of some reliable sources. • Second, the Internet has a tendency to try very hard to distract you from whatever task you are trying to accomplish. It creates a lot of what information technologists call “noise,” which means information you don’t need or want, and it’s usually trying to sell you something. It is most effective when it can make you think that a bit of noise is actually information! • Third, the ease and speed of the Internet have dramatically cheapened the perceived value of information and communication. The upside of this convenience is that the ’net proliferates...

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