American Dramaturgy: A Critical Re-Appraisal

AMERICAN DRAMATURGY A Critical Re-Appraisal Peter Hay "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."-"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty , "which is to be master-that's all." Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland Ever since Stanislavski it has been accepted wisdom that an actor needs motivation. But if an actor requires a reason for crossing the stage, audiences want to know even more why they should come into the theatre and watch that actor cross the stage. Surprisingly little thought is expended within or outside our theatre on the chain of interrelated questions that need to be answered before the whole dramatic experience makes sense. Dramaturgy, I believe, is a process of making sense both for the production and the audience. A good dramaturg helps to articulate that sense. Dramaturgy is a term most frequently employed to describe the structure of drama. As such it tends to be regarded as a mortician's tool, because most structural analysis is done on dead plays in the study or in classrooms. The theatre employs its share of anti-intellectuals who stamp everything they are too lazy to understand as academic. On the other side there are just as many theatre people who get overwhelmed by academic theories and scholarship, because research is a more tangible form of activity-and more easily understood by actors-than thinking. People-on both sides often forget that the purpose of dissecting a corpse is to learn what to do with the live body. 7 There seems to be a problem of finding an adequate definition in the English-language theatre for dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg. When I was the first "dramaturge" at a major regional theatre in Canada in the late sixties I spent a good deal of my time explaining what the term meant. Ten years later while working at the O'Neill Playwrights Conference I was continually ambushed by actors and visitors who seemed alternately exhilarated or troubled at finding out just what a dramaturg does. In the brief Bibliography of Dramaturgy recently published by the American Theatre Association, Gunter Skopnik is cited for an article in World Theatre (1960) with the title, "An Unusual Person: Der Dramaturg"; twenty years later, there is my little piece called "What is a Dramaturg?", and a year later Lloyd Richards asks the same question in another program note at Yale. Also in 1981, James Leverett wrote a summary of the first TCG conference on "Dramaturgs and Literary Managers: A Major Conference to Define the Role." It had small attendance compared to the nearly one hundred and fifty who came to the second TCG conference this summer, many of whom were artistic directors. The New York Times headlined the event (23 June 1983): "Stage Conference Asks What Is a Dramaturge?" After many years of readily supplying etymological explanations from the Greek, I have concluded that this apparent inability to understand a relatively simple word that has been in the English language at least since 18592 is not due to an unusual obtuseness in theatre people, who after all can master the intricacies of a computerized lighting board and have no difficulties using other Greek words like "telephone." Nor does the whole answer lie with insecure (artistic) directors protecting their turf, as Tom Walsh, dramaturg at the Syracuse Stage, is reported arguing at the TCG conference: "I've sensed general resistance throughout the world of directors to working with us. There's the idea that we're going to be meddlesome and superfluous, and that somehow things could roll on more strongly without us." 3 Some believe that the problem is not with directors but stems from trying to graft some foreign concept on to the English-language stage, which it does not need since it has evolved from a different historical tradition than the resident theatres of Central Europe. But the presupposition that the American theatre in its various transformations is doing well enough without dramaturgs, has not been, in my opinion, critically examined. If it were true, why has there been such a proliferation of dramaturgs and other literary types in the past few years...