Dramaturging the Dramaturg

Hello, TheaterMakers!

It’s been a minute since you last heard from me, and so many wonderful and terrible things have happened since! For the moment, let’s focus on the wonderful:

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but my project Rise is currently prepping for a workshop and industry reading next month. We’re in the midst of casting, and it’s all such a fascinating, exciting, and absolutely terrifying experience (it’s honestly felt like a complete out of body experience to have the names of some of these actors come out of my mouth recently). And because we are, naturally, looking to put our absolute best foot forward for these presentations, we finally got around to stepping up our dramaturgy game and actually hired a dramaturg.

And boy how the turntables have turned…

I have gone from being the one with all of the questions… the one who pokes and prods, and pushes folks to think more critically, to write more boldly, to be more genuine… to being on the receiving end of all of my own tough love

And I’m not going to lie… it was hard at first. I questioned what I was doing. If I was good enough. If I could ever do this story justice. And that’s not a knock on our dramaturg’s approach. Our dramaturg (Chris Burney, who, if you don’t know him, look him up… because he is f*#king brilliant and just an all around fantastic human being) is wonderful, supportive, and full of both stunning and terrible suggestions (he often does what I do with my own clients, which is starting off a sentence with “this is a terrible idea, and you should never do it, BUT…”).

He has blown open my perception of what this text is. He has pushed me to think more critically, write more boldly, and be more genuine (sound familiar?). The script has gotten so much better, and I know that I have grown leaps and bounds as both a writer and a dramaturg for working with Chris.

So why am I writing all of this? Well… we just finished up the final session of one of my Writer's Groups last night, and as we were closing things up and were discussing how we can continue to support each other outside the confines of our meetings, one of my writers remarked “you can’t do this alone.” 

And she’s 10000000% correct.

Like it or not, theater is a collaborative art. And while it might be tempting to just sit in a dark room and develop your prose in solitude… I can guarantee you that you are not seeing the whole picture in that darkness. We need people who are not as close to our stories as we are. We need people who can stand in as an audience. We need people with more experience and different perspectives to help us pick our work apart and put it back together again and to make it the absolute best it can be. We need people who can keep us accountable and always be pushing forward.

So get a dramaturg. Get a Writer's Group. Get an accountability partner.

Am I saying these things because I happen to be a dramaturg and run Writer's Groups (which just happen to have open applications right now)? Maaaaaybe a little bit. ;-) But I honestly don’t care if you choose me or Chris or someone else in your circle, as long as you seek out and find the support that you need to achieve your goals. That is the real takeaway here.

Because we can’t do this alone. And we don’t have to.

Write on!

Eric