Editor's Comment: On Dramaturgy

I was in New York recently and saw Imaginary Friends, a new play about the renowned animosity between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. Starring Cherry Jones as McCarthy and Swoozie Kurtz as Hellman, the play was written by Nora Ephron, with music by Marvin Hamlisch. It was an amusing historical romp that used the format of a vaudeville show to explore the lives, careers, relationships, and traumas of these two fascinating, articulate, and brilliant women.

I also saw Medea with Fiona Shaw, directed by Deborah Warner. Set on a swimming pool deck of cement block and glass walls (a bit reminiscent of Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphosis), the production made Medea's dilemma utterly contemporary, a 21^st -century housewife betrayed by her husband and both supported and ridiculed by her friends.

Both productions were entirely engaging and highly theatrical—one a new quasi-historical/quasi-fictitious story shaped into an old entertainment structure; the other an ancient, classic story made new by way of set, costumes, and performance style. Both could provide excellent opportunities for a dramaturg; they typify case studies taught to dramaturgy students across the U.S. Yet neither of these productions listed a dramaturg on its artistic staff.

To a literary director who works in a regional theatre, or to a professor who teaches the skills and practices of dramaturgy, or to anyone who has worked as a production dramaturg or as a new play dramaturg, these absences won't come as a surprise. Broadway productions seldom use a person called a dramaturg to do the dramaturgical work necessary to any performance. But as Geoff Proehl writes in this issue, all plays require that someone do the dramaturg's work, whether or not that artist is named as such. (It seemed to me that Imaginary Friends could have benefited from another artist who wasn't the playwright or the composer or the director to help shape and prune the piece; Medea confirmed the thoroughness of the dramaturgical work of director Warner and her remarkable cast.)

As I sat in the theatre, I thought about the 26 articles that would soon appear in Theatre Topics, and I wondered how the authors would respond to these glaring absences of a dramaturg. I wondered how each author—with overlapping affiliations of playwright, professor, literary director, program head, freelance dramaturg, director, scholar—would imagine him or herself contributing to these recent Broadway productions.

What is dramaturgy's place in the American theatre? Should there be a separate person called a dramaturg as part of the production team? Is the dramaturg's role purely reactive? How can a dramaturg be a creative theatre artist? How does a dramaturg fit into the repertory model of theatre production on which many university theatre-training programs are based? Or, how might dramaturgy's investment in collaboration alter those models or create different ones? What are the effects of a production or a theatre committed to a process that includes a dramaturg? Do dramaturgs need to lobby for themselves and for their jobs?

My motivation to edit this special issue of Theatre Topics came from my own curiosity about these questions. I wanted to hear what other scholar-artists had to say about their work, about the state of the profession, about their concerns and their passions. Because I teach production dramaturgy to graduate students, I hoped to create a companion to the excellent but limited scholarship available on the practices of dramaturgy. (Virtually all of the previously published work is noted in various bibliographies of the essays in this issue, and some has appeared right here in Theatre Topics.) And because I have taught dramaturgy to undergraduates, I wanted Theatre Topics to continue to participate in growing discussions about dramaturgy's value to an undergraduate liberal arts education.

The essays gathered here grapple head on with these questions and others. Rather than define or defend dramaturgy, each of the authors considers dramaturgy a vital aspect of production and performance, and explores the role of the dramaturg as...