Sorry, Mtgman, I had somehow missed your post before – this sounds like a fascinating career, and one that’s right up my alley. If I weren’t already 33k in debt from my first Master’s degree, I would definitely look into this. 
Dramaturgists theoretically have a role in every stage of a show. They work with authors to ensure things like the striking clocks either aren’t done or aren’t done without direct author intent. They work with directors to ensure people are using the right accents and types of language the characters would have. They work with choreographers to help discover the styles of dance these characters would have been exposed to and find examples to help inspire time and place-appropriate choreography. They work with scenic designers for the type of buildings or interiors which would have been time and place appropriate(don’t use marble for feudal Japan, etc.) Set dressers call on them to verify if a type of dressing might be appropriate for the setting(i.e. don’t hang a Persian rug from 1400 in King Arthur’s castle). I gave examples for costumers and lyricists in my previous post.
But the main thing a Dramaturgist has to have is the ability to effectively research. There may be times when you have to try to get inside a playwright’s head and figure out why they wrote a particular line as they did, so specific direction can be given to a performer. This requires pulling yourself out of your time and experience and putting yourself into the playwrights time, the kind of upbringing and influences they might have had, and probably even the current events of the time of the writing. A lot of Shakespere was “ripped from the headlines” of his day, although most don’t know that now.
The field comes with a huge caveat though. It’s even harder to get work as a Dramaturgist than it is to get work as most of the other fields in the theatre. And that’s really saying something. Many producers, and I have to include myself in this, may agree with the value a Dramaturgist would bring to a production, but that doesn’t mean we’re willing to foot the cost. Expect to have to juggle a lot of productions/playwrights and always be trying to line up the next one for once you answer all the questions from one of your current clients.
Enjoy,
Steven
This sounds so cool. But…
Well, there goes that career dream… I couldn’t handle that kind of job insecurity, I don’t think. And I’m guessing that with the demands of the theatre, you couldn’t really be a dramaturgist and hold down a day job?
I’m realizing this friend of mine really has the best of both worlds – she gets to work on productions throughout the year, and she gets the steady pay and job security of being a professor.
Two things that I thought of.
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Any job in the theatre is going to make having a real career difficult. I don’t think Dramaturges have it any harder than designers or directors. Maybe less hard because their skills translate into other fields (like academia) easily. I am reminded of a lighting design professor that I once had who told us that as a child he dreamed of being a rock and roll drummer like Neil Pert, or Ginger Baker. But as he got older he realized that becoming a rock star is a lotto ticket and so he perused his second passion of lighting design. What he didn’t realize was that there are *hundreds *of rock stars in the world, and there are about 25 lighting designers who have made it big. If he was going to play the odds he had a better shot at being a rock star.
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I was walking down memory lane last night and came across this(PDF) still on the web. It was put together by the Alley’s dramaturge while I was working there, and is a good example of the types of things a professional dramatrugy department will produce, not just for the people working on the show, but also for other people coming to see the show.
(As an aside the kids who came to that educators performance were assholes and we ended up getting dozens of hand written letters from the students afterward apologizing for their bad behavior.)
It was a major accomplishment for us a couple of years ago when we were able to hire our administrator on full time. We’ve since had to cut back again to a part-time administrator and that’s the only position we have with a steady paycheck. Everyone else is contracted on a show by show basis. And, like I said, we’re one of the bigger community theatres in the area. You simply have to go pro to have any hope of a career, and even then it’s pretty darn difficult. Many, MANY, live the life of a migrant worker, going where the show is. The lucky ones get jobs at colleges and schools teaching drama or running part of the fine arts program and satisfy their performance urges with us. Most don’t work in the theatre at all, despite degrees and extensive training in fine arts. When people are saying it’s hard to make a living with a liberal arts education, they’re not just whistling Dixie.
I could totally see a full time academic and part time Dramaturge, but a full-time Dramaturge? That’s like the famous lighting designers. Very, very little room in that career path. The Dramaturge’s work is all, in theory, assignable to another artist(director, choreographer, etc). In a majority of productions, the role of the Dramaturge is simply divvied up among the rest of the creative team, and that’s that. No Dramaturge is hired/consulted.
Enjoy,
Steven
Yes it can be hard to earn a living while working at theatre, but don’t think it’s impossible. I am a bit biased since most of the people I know who really set their minds to working in theatre, succeeded. Since I am living and working in the theatre community I am constantly surrounded by people who earn a living at it. I have a full time job that for the most part is 9-5 but with occasional evening and weekend work. My husband has a guaranteed 40 hour week with a completely sporadic schedule. Of course, I know people who got out of the business, but they didn’t leave because of lack of work, they just wanted to do something different.
When I first started my career I was a bit transient. I moved from Alberta to New Brunswick for a job, then to Ontario for a summer, then back to Alberta, back to Ontario, and finally settling in Alberta for the long run. In my city if you are a good competent worker who can both do a lighting hang and focus and are willing to get your hands dirty will get work. It might not be the same as a full time gig, but word here travels fast and good crew people are worth their weight in gold. If you can paint or sew in addition to general crew work you don’t stay unemployed long. Sure there will be slow times, and theatre does work on a seasonal basis. So from September through to May a crew person will be busy in the theatre world. For the summer some choose to get retail jobs, and others go to the union to get work setting up summer concerts.
Again this is on the technical side of things, I know that actors have a harder go at finding work.
There are a lot of us here, aren’t there? I’m going to butt in on a couple of these. I’m a lighting guy, mostly, and I do electrics to pay the bills and designs when I can. I recently finished a touring show where we played in six cities a week for four months, so I can speak to that as well.
Some stagehands love being seen, and I have seen directors ask stagehands to ham it up, especially in shows that are about theatre (Noises Off and the like), even to the point of opening the windows in the booth and yelling at the actors on stage. Other stagehands hate being seen, and actively seek to hide themselves or ask others to take the particular jobs that require being seen. Some stagehands don’t really give a damn. Sometimes this is related to how a person got into theatre; an actor who drifted into technical work may enjoy being seen, while someone who started because it was behind-the-scenes work may avoid the spotlight. Generally speaking, though, stagehands dislike it when they are made to wear costumes because it’s a hassle to have to take care of costumes and they can’t eat or drink in costume.
Many career stagehands own tons and tons of black clothes. I myself own about five pairs of black jeans and about fifteen or twenty black shirts.
End-of-show cleanup falls to the SM, the ASM, stagehands, or Properties person, depending on how large the show is.
It can be hard to compliment a stagehand, because if you noticed them they probably screwed something up. Designers are easier to compliment because they make artistic choices. That said, you’ve hit on one exactly; it’s axiomatic among lighting designers that most of the time most of the audience should be unaware of the lights changing. That’s not true all the time, especially in weirder or more stylized pieces, but in The Crucible, for instance, noticeable lighting changes are probably unwanted. Good lighting feels natural and supports the story being told on stage. It does not call attention to itself, but rather draws attention to the story being told.
A bad stage manager can really make a production hell to work on. A good stage manager needs Christlike patience and humility in addition to being able to manage groups of people effectively, organizational skills that border on obsessive, and fast, unorthodox problem solving and decision making. Anyone who has these skills can make more money elsewhere, so the pool of people who have those skills and still want to work in theatre is small. There are bad stage managers out there, especially at lower levels.
I’ve got nothing to add about stage managers’ prompt books except that they’re really worth seeing. If you ever meet one, ask to see a prompt script; they’ve probably got a few as portfolio pieces.
During a show, you tend to work with the same people for a long period of time, and you can really form some close bonds. Frequently the crew will eat together, and so it’s easy to get to know the whole crew. As a lighting designer, I have to be pretty plugged in to what the costume designer’s doing because I don’t want to light a show in a way that makes her costumes look weird, nor do I want to be taken by surprise when characters are wearing mostly white, because white clothing takes on the color of the lights so easily. (White clothes on characters and white set pieces require a lot of attention on the lighting designer’s part to avoid weird effects.) I spent a lot of time on one show negotiating with a costume designer about hats, brim sizes, and how far back on a character’s head the hats should be worn to avoid shading everyone’s eyes.
And finally, when you have a piece of clothing rip while at work or you lose a button, you can run down to the costumers, ask for a needle and thread to fix it, then watch as the costumer fixes it for you rather than watch you do it badly 
I don’t suppose a person could call up a theatre and say, “hey, I’m a theatre groupie, can I come sit backstage and watch you guys?” and get anywhere.
Some regional theatres give backstage tours, but that’s not quite what you’re looking for. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival sometimes allows people to watch their stagehands change the sets between the matinee and the evening show* but I don’t know if a simple phone call would get you anywhere, unless you were a donor, of course.
*And it’s pretty cool, I have to say. The entire set removed and stored and an entire new set installed in less than three hours, twice a day, six days a week.
Hey! Come back! I thought up two more questions:
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Does the Dramaturg get a credit in the Playbill? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dramaturg’s little blip in the Playbill.
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You say that working on a show everyone, lighting guys, whatever, everyone learns every line and every cue. Does that kill the enjoyment for you when you see someone else’s production of the show? (Or maybe you are so sick of Anything Goes that you never see it again. I can imagine the pros sitting in the show going: what, no spotlight there? Or, Man, the prop master is really screwing up!
You know, I’m not sure. I would think they would, but I don’t really know.
It’s harder with shows I have directed to watch someone else’s production, but that’s sort of an artistic comparison thing. Otherwise not really. Some shows I grow to hate while working on them, but that is usually because they aren’t very good to begin with (*Brigadoon *I am looking at you), or the particular production isn’t very good (I am done with *Hamlet *for a good while). If the show itself is good though, I will usually come back around to liking the show on its own merits regardless of the production.
As for appreciating what other people do with the show, it isn’t really like that. I think I (and other theatre folk) probably live in a different head space when watching a show than other people do. I don’t look at things as being definitive, but rather look for things that surprise me, look for what I think works, look for interpretations that are interesting (if I know the show going in), watch the choices. It’s a more granular way of seeing things I think.
Every production of every show is it’s own entity with its own life, and not every choice made for one production would work for another so you can’t really judge them against each other. What’s really interesting is when you are doing a long run of a show and can see the same show night in and night out and watch how every performance is different, how the show really does have its own life. It’s really cool.
[QUOTE=Karen Lingel]
Does the Dramaturg get a credit in the Playbill? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dramaturg’s little blip in the Playbill.
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They do have their name listed, but it’s usually at the back, in smaller print, along with the various technicians. They don’t usually get a bio unless it’s a history play or something like that.
Ha! I was a dancer in a community theater production of Brigadoon. Way back in my dancing days. Waaaayyy back…
I am sorry for you. I can not believe that the people responsible for My Fair Lady were also responsible for that. Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad show. The kind of bad that I am not sure you can understand if you haven’t seen it broken down in rehearsal and then run for ~80 performances. Fun Scottish dance numbers though, so that is something.
It is really hard for me to sit back and watch a show. I am constantly analyzing everything about it. I try and figure out how they made that moving set piece, or try to imagine what is going on backstage. If anything happens to go wrong during the show I am totally brought out of it and think of ways that they might be fixing something on the fly.
Its funny, the first thing that my husband and I do when we go to the theatre is look up. If the lighting FOH pipes are messy my husband will judge them. If there is no main curtain and the set it showing, I spend my time preshow analyzing the set. I went to see a Cirque Du Soile show a few months ago and had figured out what a bunch of the acts were by looking at all of the different rigging that was set up.
I’ve got a specific question about acting.
If you’re in a scene where your character is putting on a facade (feigning innocence, pretending that they’re interested in someone because they need to use them…things like that), how do you determine the level of opacity of that facade, so to speak? How do you gauge how much or how little to indicate that your character is not being sincere?
When I think about this (as a non-actor), part of me thinks the person should be as opaque as they would be in real life. If I’m pretending to be interested in you because you work at a top-secret facility I want access to, I’m going to put as much effort into appearing totally besotted with you as I can muster. If I were an actor and my intention is to be natural, I’m not going to look shifty-eyed and telegraph that I’m not what I appear to be, because I would never do that in real life. And it really bugs me when actors do this.
But on the other hand, you’re telling a story, and the story is not that your character is totally in love with the top-secret-clearance guy – it’s that she’s lying to the guy to get those secrets. So telegraphing the insincerity is part of telling that story.
On the third hand, I would hope that the script itself would reveal that your character’s been lying all along, so there’s no need to act out the Lying business.
But I’m wondering how an actor (or director) figures out the right tone to take in scenes like that. And is it more of a decision you make in light of a particular script, or is it part of your general acting philosophy?
Huh. You know I’ve never really thought about whether it was a good or bad show. If it came to town, I doubt I would buy tickets – because I know what the show is about and all the songs and not sure I would need to see it.
You know: yes, I would buy tickets. Just for the nostalgia. To remember about the songs and the people on the show. It was a looooong time ago, after all, there are things I probably don’t remember.
Well, and this will seem strange but, you don’t. At least not in the school that I subscribe to.
Modern acting 101 in as few words as possible. (let me know if I am being confusing)
Acting at it’s core is about action. It is about physical action (the body moving in space), and dramatic action (the character’s development in the play), you use physical actions to relate the dramatic actions. Dramatic actions are act-able because they can be made manifest physically. Dramatic action is the path that the character takes to overcome their obstacles and achieve their goals.
In every play, every character wants something. Wants create goals, goals create (hopefully) conflict, conflict creates dramatic interest, dramatic interest creates a good story. Wants however, are not act-able. Show me what it looks like to want something. You can’t do it, it’s not an action. Wants are goals, they are the reason for the action. In the case of pretending to be innocent you reference, the lie is the want. Your character (character A) wants to convince some other character (character B) that they are not guilty of, let’s say, a murder. So what does character A want? Do they want Character B to go away and leave them alone? Do they want Character B to be relaxed and certain that there is nothing wrong? What do they want? How to they go about getting that want? Do they, pour a cup of tea? Do they rush about hurriedly as though they are being interrupted from very important business? Do they shout? Do they sing? What do they do to achieve their goal? That’s action.
Or perhaps the lie is an active method of circumventing an obstacle (depending on the circumstance). Obstacle’s run counter to the characters wants and in drama work with them to, again, create conflict etc etc. Let’s take your example of feigning interest. The character A wants to use character B for personal gain and knows that character B is attracted to character A. Character A isn’t interested in character B but must convince character B otherwise. Conflict! Interest! Dramatic Action (potentially). None of the above is act-able. It’s text. You can not act “pretend to be interested”. Again, gut check, what does pretending to be interested look like? The disinterest, in this case, is what you need to overcome. You have to sell the lie, make it convincing. Disinterest is your obstacle, and at first glance lying would seem to be your action, but lying isn’t act-able either. You can’t act the lie it’s too big.
What you can do, is break down the scene and find out what the character does other than lie. So, persuading character B is the goal, pretending to be interested when you are not is the obstacle to that goal (well the disinterest is the obstacle but let’s keep moving forward. Choosing to act “lying” is a weak choice.) So, what are the physical things you do? Do you smile? Do you touch? Etc Etc. So then you work with the text. Is character A simply disinterested or are they actively repelled by character B. Repelled is the more interesting choice and gives character A more obstacles. Would you touch a person that you find repellent? Where is the line? Where is the truth?
That’s where the acting is. Looking at the scenario, finding the core of the truth and getting it to it’s simplest form. Finding the right actions, the right timing for those actions, making the strongest choices and keeping the stakes high so that there is tension.
So…does that answer the question at all?
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Yes. They might not be listed on the first page, though; check in the fine print in the back.
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If it’s really a good script, it’s a lot of fun to see a different production and see the different interpretations that can be added. Despite having worked on The Skin of Our Teeth, I’ll probably continue to go to see that every chance I get. However, I do not ever, ever, ever need to see Isn’t It Romantic again.
But yes, whenever I’m watching a show, new to me or not, I watch the lights carefully and I’m trying to understand what the designer has done, how it’s done, and how effective it is, both so that I can imitate it and because if the design is good, it supports the story being told.
OK, I went through a bunch of Playbill brand Playbills and some non-Playbill brand playbills searching for Dramaturges. (Dramaturgi?)
The non-playbills for productions at Berkeley Rep and A.C.T (also a rep) have little blips for the dramaturges, who seem to be live-in type dramaturges. I don’t mean “live-in”, I mean… I mean… uh, “on staff”? These included programs where you would expect dramaturges (The Composer is Dead, and Compulsion) as well as shows where I would think a dramaturg would be useless (e.g. Aurelia’s Oratorio, which is just a little circus-y clown show) so I’m guessing the dramaturg gets a credit merely for being on staff.
None of the Playbill brand Playbills had a blip for dramaturg. Of course about 75% of them are musicals, and I just don’t see that a dramaturg would be necessary for, say, Shrek: The Musical.
I did find a dramaturge listed in the tiny fine print in the back (no blip) along with a credit for, for example, “Hope Davis Headshot”.
And now for my question:
What is the difference between a Production Stage Manager and a Stage Manager? (I assume Assistant Stage Managers are lower forms of these.) Production Stage Manager is always listed first.