Today I am happy to present an interview with my colleague and friend Hannah Hessel. Since dramaturgs typically collaborate with artists in other disciplines, we do not always have a chance to work together, but I am blessed to work with Hannah often. Whether we work together on something large...
What IS a dramaturg? As a professional dramaturg and literary manager, this is the question I’m asked most often. Today, my answer is far different from what it was when I first started practicing, and I assume that it will continue to evolve and transform as the nature of theatre...
Every time someone asks me to explain what I do I get flummoxed. Though I could probably avoid the word, I feel obligated to inform them that I am a dramaturg. The desire for avoidance and obligation are somewhat related. I know that mentioning the word “dramaturg” will lead to...
I’m currently writing a play called The Secret of the Biological Clock, about a former girl detective who is turning 37 and wants to solve the mystery of what makes a family. I have spent the past two months flipping out about stage directions. Stage directions. The play itself is...
I’ve been thinking more and more about my responsibility as an artist. And just typing that feels a little weird—the idea that artists have responsibilities other than to their art. But our work does more than just sit there in our heads. It wanders out of our skulls and into...
An exuberant conversation, hosted by Peter Marks and Howard Sherman, broke out on Twitter yesterday about Shakespeare; many good ideas were debated and discussed. I am writing this post to delve more deeply into one of the fundamental questions about Shakespeare in performance, which is, after all, his native habitat. ...
When Jim Leonard was an English major at Hanover College in the late seventies, where I was running a one man theatre department, he responded to a request I issued for “extras” to swell a scene in a play I was staging. He had one line and seemed to be...
Previously in this column: The members of Bright Alchemy Theatre, a very young devised theatre company based in Washington, DC, have spent the last nine months working on its new project which began with the question: Why do we as a species feel the need to tell stories about our...
