The Dramaturg as Professor: Riding the Roller Coaster of Authority in Linking a Seminar to a Production

As a dramaturg, I am usually called upon to serve the director, who is the auteur of any production in which I play a collaborative role. I have always attempted to champion both the play text and the director while serving as the liaison between the playwright's dramaturgy and the director's interpretive strategies. Often like a medium conducting séances, I attempt to call forth the playwright's spirit in order to help me lead the director and the entire design and technical team to a coherent concept that will speak to and challenge our audience. My role as part of the behind-the-scenes effort is to ensure that all of us are contributing to the director's vision of the play, while my program notes serve as the bridge between the audience and our production. After the success of the Spring 1999 course developed by a colleague around a workshop production of Naomi Iizuka's Polaroid Stories, however, the Department of Speech and Theatre asked me to try an experiment in team teaching with the faculty director. My specific job would be to teach a seminar to the members of the cast and several other students who would be assistant dramaturgs. The course would be linked to the Spring 2000 production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine and would continue beyond the run of the show to investigate the academic and theoretical questions about aesthetic choices, gender identity, and sexuality that the play raises. During the rehearsal process, I would be primarily responsible for training the students in the historical and dramaturgical investigation required of actors while my colleague would be responsible for evaluating their engagement with the development of characters and participation in weekly rehearsals.

The rationale was relatively straightforward once the department approved of the director's choice of script. The seminar would provide a concrete way to make each student performer accountable for the actor's requisite homework, something our small department (at a small liberal arts college) and nonconservatory approach to theatre sorely needed. It would also provide us with the vehicle for giving the students academic credit for what we knew would be hard work in preparing this particular show. For the most part, the seminar proved successful in terms of the department's rationale. Yet, the experiment with the production-linked seminar was not, however, without its pitfalls.

The suggestion that team teaching would be the best model for the course was predicated on several assumptions. First, the director could devote her energies to mounting the production and not have her creative authority confused in the students' minds with professorial authority. Second, my work as dramaturg on production would count as teaching credit, something always the case with directors. Third, the students would have practical experience with how historical background and script analysis--my field of expertise--serve the work of the actor. What the department had not considered sufficiently was what this linkage of a seminar taught by a faculty dramaturg to a production directed by a faculty director would do to the usual dramaturg/director power dynamic. Although my colleague and I had worked together in the past and were equally committed to working on Churchill's play, we had not chosen this way of collaborating on our own. We were entering into uncharted territory with less than an ideal amount of preparation time to work out the dynamics sufficiently. We weren't sure how to divide up teaching responsibility. We didn't perceive how devoting scheduled rehearsal time for the seminar would impact on the rehearsal process and potentially shortchange some of the performance goals. Finally, we hadn't accounted for the manner in which this teaching collaboration (where each professor would need a distinct zone of power) would hinder the more organic flow of ideas between us as dramaturg...