From the issue dated June 29, 2001
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A Good Director Doesn't Need a DramaturgBy TERRY MCCABEA generation or so ago, the dramaturg had virtually no place in the American theater. Nowadays it seems you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. The dramaturg's emergence has been contemporaneous with -- and, I submit, caused by -- the growing decadence of the director's art. Dramaturgy is an unappealing word but a vital idea. Its general definition encompasses almost the whole of theatrical activity, but in the context of what dramaturgs do, dramaturgy is a comprehensive exploration of the contexts in which the play resides. The dramaturg is the resident expert on the physical, social, political, and economic milieus in which the action takes place, the psychological underpinnings of the characters, and the various metaphorical expressions in the play of thematic concerns, as well as on technical consideration of the play as a piece of writing: structure, rhythm, flow, even individual word choices. There are different sorts of dramaturgs, with varying responsibilities, though few are of a pure type; most overlap categories. The institutional dramaturg helps find and select plays to be produced, while the education dramaturg prepares activities and materials for school groups and leads audience discussions. It is the production dramaturg -- considered increasingly as a member of the artistic team that puts a show together -- whose duties concern us here. The production dramaturg is intended to be a kind of ombudsman for the play, someone with no direct stake in the production who can be an effective advocate for the script's protection during the bruising production process as well as being a devil's advocate for the director's vision, helping shape it and then helping keep it true to itself. The dramaturg is steeped in theater history, literature, and criticism, and is there to help the director formulate an approach to the play that takes advantage of these disciplines. He or she is also there as an information resource for the other artists working on the play, and to act as a gadfly throughout the process, speaking up to the director (in private) should the production begin to lose sight of the play, or, in the case of a new play, pushing the playwright (also in private) toward script improvements. The concerns that a dramaturg addresses have always existed, so in this sense dramaturgy is as old as theater itself. It has always mattered that a play be as well written as possible, just as it has always mattered that it be designed and staged in a way that makes sense, and that the actors know what their characters are talking about. But the people in the theater who have traditionally worried about these dramaturgical matters have been the playwright, the actor, the designer, and, since 1875 or so, the director. The dramaturg as a distinct person in American theater is a new phenomenon. It has roots in European theater as far back as the 18th century, but the profession had no foothold in this country until the 1970's. Now most large theaters here, and many small and medium-sized ones, have a dramaturg. Well and good, one might say, art forms evolve as they need to evolve, and, after all, it was as recently as the 19th century that the director's job was brand-new. True enough, but the director's job was created because the theater had evolved a new task to be performed. The rise of realism required a greater attention to rehearsal and production details than the old actor-manager star system could accommodate, thus the need for an independent eye to exercise careful control over all the elements of a production was born. The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, the first director, organized his productions around a comprehensive approach to the play. To realize this approach, he insisted on painstaking rehearsals in which he paid as much attention to crowd scenes and bit parts as to the lead roles, and carefully orchestrated the entire stage picture as it evolved moment to moment. Shakespeare and Molière, as playwrights, and Joseph Jefferson and Edwin Booth, as actors, supervised the productions in which they were involved, but Saxe-Meiningen performed a task that none of them had imagined. Art, imitating nature as it does, abhors a vacuum. As the contemporary director has focused his or her energy on becoming an auteur, someone else -- the dramaturg -- has been brought in to do the textual work and outside research necessary to come to a profound understanding of the play. Today's dramaturg does not perform a new task. All the fundamental issues of dramaturgy are the same today as when Aeschylus sat down to figure out which characters from the Iliad might make for a good play. Giving a production dramaturg something to do is a zero-sum game, and the way to play it is to take duties away from the director. A playwright I know points out another disadvantage to having a dramaturg around during rehearsals of a new play. This playwright wants to hear the widest range of feedback he can get from as many people as possible during the process, and he has found that the pool tends to dry up when there's a dramaturg. The actors and the others see the dramaturg as the official giver of feedback to the playwright (a role dramaturgs tend to promote for themselves) and feel they're expected to keep their own opinions to themselves. This restricts the ideas available for the playwright's consideration to those of one person, and any one person's ideas are limited. (In an elegant theater joke, Sophocles meets with his dramaturg, who says to him, "With his own mother? No one's going to buy that.") The presence of a dramaturg inhibits cross-fertilization and helps to distance the playwright from the production. The Yale School of Drama seems to have been the beachhead for the profession's arrival in this country. The school describes "preproduction and rehearsal work on issues of design, direction, and performance" as an important part of its degree program in dramaturgy. Would-be dramaturgs are trained to meet with the director of a play to help shape the production's approach to the play, with designers to explore visual imagery and the use of the performance space, and with actors to help them explore questions of characterization and motivation. The Dramaturgy Pages (http://www.dramaturgy.net/dramaturgy), a Web site for working dramaturgs as well as students, spells out the job this way: "During rehearsals, a dramaturg's task is often to help the production remain in line with the vision for the production. ... Many directors find it helpful to have a dramaturg on board who only keeps an eye on the story. ... If a new play is still considered 'in development' during the rehearsal process... , the dramaturg is often an intermediary between the playwright and the director," translating what each has to say into terms with which the other can work. For any play, new or old, the Dramaturgy Pages continue, in order to "help those involved in the production better understand the piece," the dramaturg might chart out for them "the progression of the action, the activity of individual characters, the events of the play, or other elements of the action." Arthur Ballet, one of the pioneers in the field, was dramaturg at the Guthrie Theater in the 1980's when he summed up the role of the dramaturg with what has become the profession's best-known sentence: "The dramaturg should be a resident conscience of the theater." The phrase conscience of the theater has become enough of an embarrassment to dramaturgs over the years that nowadays it is difficult to ascertain its origin. The earliest use of it I've been able to document is Ballet's, in remarks to a 1981 conference on dramaturgy. But even by the mid-80's, at which point it was the buzz-phrase of the profession, Ballet told an interviewer, "It's a phrase I have never used, thank God." Robert Brustein, founder of the dramaturgy program at Yale, used the phrase at around the same time as Ballet in his essay "The Future of an Un-American Activity," and to his credit has not, as far as I know, disclaimed it. Winston D. Neutel, editor of the Dramaturgy Pages Web site, wrote this response to my e-mail inquiry: "I don't know if the author would want to be identified, as every dramaturg I have heard from hates the phrase." But it pops up again in the theater essayist Martin Esslin's 1997 article "Towards an American Dramaturg": "... the dramaturg must be the critical and artistic conscience of the theater; it is he/she who must apply the most rigorous yardsticks to the texts, the performance of directors, actors, and designers, and to the policy of the organization in general." Hate the phrase or not, dramaturgs tend to subscribe to the self-righteousness behind it. When asked for his job description, one leading dramaturg says simply, "I question." Another says, "My work as dramaturg (consists of) the destruction of illusionary knowledge." A third says she drops "depth charges into the psyche," while a fourth says the dramaturg "embodies the presence of consciousness ... with which all theatermakers must come to terms." Not even Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Calvinist best remembered for his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," could have put it better. Where on earth is the director in all this? Why is staging a play thought to be distinct from understanding it and explaining it? How did the director come to be considered conscienceless, in need of a Jiminy Cricket to keep the production true to the play? Oscar Gross Brockett, the great theater historian, argues that dramaturgs are needed because directors lack not only the depth of training in history, literature, and criticism that dramaturgs typically have, but also the time in a busy production schedule to discover all they need to know that might be pertinent to the play. But it's a chicken-and-egg argument. If directors are not taking the time to research the physical, social, economic, and political worlds of the play, are not carefully defining their vision of the play so that it is rigorously true to the play's story, are not in intimate conversation with the playwright of a new play about the possibilities of the evolving text, and are not busy breaking down the play's action on paper, perhaps it's because they have been brought to believe that all of that is someone else's job. And if their undergraduate and graduate theater programs have not given them the background to do these tasks well, perhaps the inadequacy of director training is the problem to be addressed. Certainly even a busy director can do a complete job. Alan Schneider, in many regards my beau ideal of a theater director, was famous for the meticulousness of his preparation. Best known for his work with Samuel Beckett, he directed steadily during four decades on Broadway, off-Broadway, and at regional theaters and universities across the country. For each production he spent weeks or months -- in the case of some of Beckett's plays he directed repeatedly, years -- coming to a comprehensive understanding of the play and all the various worlds in which it exists. One searches his career in vain for an instance in which he appeared to be the kind of director Brockett has in mind. Schneider was known as a playwright's director, not as an actor's director. He was the favorite director of such exacting writers as Beckett and Edward Albee because of his unwavering commitment to their dramatic intentions. He was less beloved by actors, among some of whom he had an unfortunate reputation for harshness. Schneider was no genius and no mutant. He was a talented director who understood what his job was and worked hard at it. Any director with talent and a work ethic can do what he did. One argument I have heard for the presence of dramaturgs, specifically on revivals of classic plays, is that they can provide protection from directorial excess. The theory is that when a director goes overboard on a concept, the dramaturg can argue on behalf of the absent playwright and perhaps prevent the director from going too far. This function of the dramaturg has a certain appeal, but unfortunately it is to the theater what socialism is to economics: an interesting theory with a certain surface plausibility but no track record that suggests it actually works. The real-life hitch is that dramaturgs work for directors. The professional dramaturg is a creature of the not-for-profit resident theater; producers who are in business to make money have by and large not seen the wisdom of hiring someone who neither writes the play, nor directs it, nor designs it, nor acts in it, nor stage-manages it, nor works as a technician on it. Dramaturgs are hired by not-for-profit theaters run by artistic directors who each want an artistic staff that will work to support, not contradict, the type of theater the artistic director wishes to pursue. The La Jolla Playhouse employed a dramaturg on the production of Twelfth Night that subordinated Shakespeare's comedy to the director's visual diatribe on the National Endowment for the Arts's financing problems. If that dramaturg protested at all, it was to no apparent avail. The American Repertory Theatre employed a dramaturg on a production of Endgame that so blatantly violated the playwright's intentions that he sought an injunction against the theater. There is no record of the dramaturg's campaign to rein in the director of that production. Nowhere in Dramaturgy in American Theater, a 500-page anthology of mostly self-congratulatory articles, interviews, and panel-discussion transcripts by dramaturgs explaining their value to the theater, is there a single anecdote about a dramaturg's preventing a director from screwing up a play. If Trotsky had been this ineffective, Stalin would have let him live. The argument for having a dramaturg working on the premiere of a new play doesn't even cohere in theory. Dramaturgs say their importance to a production is that they have "access to the director's ear and try to see through his or her eyes." That is to say, the dramaturg strives to achieve an intuitive sense of the director's vision of the play and to serve that vision by offering a complementary perspective on it. But dramaturgs also say that they are "an advocate for the playwright," and that their job is to stand up for the integrity of the script. In a given production situation, either the director and the playwright have successfully forged a common vision of the play in production, in which case the dramaturg's perspective is merely redundant and the dramaturg's advocacy is not needed, or they haven't done so, in which case the dramaturg's twin missions are at odds with each other. How do you further the vision of a production that conflicts with the play you're supposed to protect? In this context the dramaturg is a professional fifth wheel: not needed when the car is rolling smoothly, and not in a position to help when the alignment is out of whack. Even the dramaturg's least controversial function, provider of research information, is a bad idea. Production research should be done by the director; handing over this task to someone else reduces its value. Ask someone to look up a word in a dictionary for you and he or she will bring you the definition you requested. Look it up yourself and your eye will be caught by other words and their definitions as well. You will come away having absorbed more than you went looking for. The first method is more efficient; the second is better. When a dramaturg hands a director a stack of already vetted research material, similar opportunities for random discoveries are lost. The very process of deciding which research is pertinent and which is not provides an insight into the play being researched, and the director who hands that process over to a dramaturg has diminished his or her own expertise of the play. The penalty for this will be paid in the rehearsal room when an actor's question to the director about the world of the play will have to be referred to the dramaturg for an answer. If you aspire to do the work that the director's art requires, the presence of a production dramaturg, though intended to aid you, damages your ability to do your job well. Your natural authority, in design conferences and the rehearsal room -- if it is to exist at all -- derives from your mastery of the play at hand. To be sure, your technical expertise as a stager of action also plays a part, but even it will not confer authority on you unless it is clearly in the service of a broad and deep understanding of the play. This authority is inevitably weakened if someone else is seen as the master of the play. If the involvement of another is considered necessary to keep the production true to the play, the director has become the person against whom the play must be protected. If the director needs an intermediary to a playwright who is right there in the rehearsal room, the director is clearly not the person the playwright trusts most with the play. Worst of all, if the cast looks elsewhere for help in understanding the text, the director has become distanced from the very task of directing. The situation is not one of usurpation, it is one of abdication. Frequently the play should be protected from some god-awful directorial concept, and the playwright does need an intermediary, and the actors can't rely on the director to make the play clear. The dramaturg cannot be blamed for these crises, and my argument is not really an attack on dramaturgs. There are many excellent dramaturgs, just as there are many excellent designated hitters in the American League. But the designated-hitter rule, because it creates an unnecessary team member, is a disservice to baseball, and the emergence of the dramaturg as a distinct position is likewise a disservice to the theater. Independent of the performance of individual dramaturgs, it has this harmful effect: It puts distance between the director and the play. The person to be blamed is, of course, the director. If by dramaturgy we mean a coherent approach to understanding all the various worlds of the play, certainly it is work that must be done. As the contemporary director has concentrated on the physical elements of production, concern with these elements has come closer and closer to defining for many people what directing is. But this definition ignores many necessary directorial functions. And so into the void have come talented dramaturgs to do what must be done. This development, if unarrested, will leave the director a craftsman and not an artist. The director's job is to understand the play and to communicate it to others. If that job is handed over to another -- and, bit by bit, that is exactly what is happening -- the director becomes little more than Aristotle's stage machinist, responsible only for putting striking effects onstage. If you, as a director, help this development along by participating in this abdication, you will have sold your profession's birthright for a mess of pottage. Terry McCabe has directed plays professionally in Chicago for more than 20 years and teaches directing and other theater classes at Columbia College there. This essay is excerpted from Mis-directing the Play: An Argument Against Contemporary Theatre, just published by Ivan R. Dee. Copyright ©2001 by Terry McCabe. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B10
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education