Dramaturgy in the Classroom: Teaching Undergraduate Students

Not to Be Students
Mazer, Cary M.
Theatre Topics, Volume 13, Number 1, March 2003, pp. 135-141 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/tt.2003.0013

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tt/summary/v013/13.1mazer.html

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Dramaturgy in the Classroom:

Teaching Undergraduate Students
Not to Be Students
Cary M. Mazer
There is no better general preparation for a career in dramaturgy than an
undergraduate liberal-arts theatre major; and, arguably, there is no career in the
professional theatre that an undergraduate liberal-arts theatre major better
prepares a student for than professional dramaturgy.
As with other careers in the theatreacting, directing, design, management,
scholarship, teachinga graduate of a liberal-arts theatre major will require
additional advanced professional training, either in a graduate program or in
the trial-by-fire world of the profession itself, before the art and the craft of
dramaturgy can be practiced with impunity. Notwithstanding, the many-faceted
aspects of an undergraduate liberal-arts theatre educationthe things that serve
as a useful background for graduate conservatory trainingare the essential
skills, the indispensable tools, the heart and soul of the practice of dramaturgy:
script analysis, theatre history, dramatic literature, dramaturgy (in the sense of
dramatic structure, rather than the professional activity), social and cultural
history, etc. Moreover, even the most analytical and academic student in an
undergraduate liberal-arts theatre program will have at least some practical handson experience, in both courses and in actual production, with acting, directing,
design, and playwriting, and so will not only understand the nature of the final
theatrical product, but will appreciate the individual artistic skills that go into
its making, and (the most indispensable component of a dramaturgs sensibilities)
will value and respect the process by which the work of art is made.
And yet, undergraduate liberal arts theatre students have a major impediment
to their learning to practice hands-on dramaturgy, at least while they are still
students in the classroom studying dramaturgy: they are students; they think
that they are students; and they think like students. Therefore, one of the most
crucial tasks facing a theatre professor teaching an undergraduate dramaturgy
class is to force the students to stop thinking like students.
Heres what I mean. In any normal undergraduate course, when students
are assigned an in-class exam, a take-home essay, an oral presentation, or a
term-paper assignment, they assume a particular readership or audience for their
work: the professor (or the professors deputy, the teaching assistant or grader).
The students assumption is that the professor knows more about the subject
than they do, and that the professor or grader will assess the work based on
how well the students mastery of the assigned material measures against what
the professor already knows about the subject. Even if the professor has been

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136 Cary M. Mazer

particularly imaginative in crafting the assignment, so that the task requires
original thinking and analysis rather than mere regurgitationasking the student
to put together historical materials in novel and interesting ways, or to imagine
a script in performance according to performance conditions limited only by the
students imaginationsthe student still writes the essay, or delivers the report,
with the assumption that the professor knows more than the student does about
this particular subject. Even the most disrespectful, scornful, contemptuous, and
rebellious student assumes this.
The tendency of students to assume that the professor knows more than
they do poses a particular problem in teaching dramaturgy. One of the central
tools for teaching dramaturgy to undergraduates is to replicate, in the classroom,
the director-dramaturg relationship in the professor-student relationship, just as
an acting class replicates the director-actor relationship in the professor-student
relationship, recreating in the classroom the conditions of the rehearsal room.
This is not altogether possible for a dramaturgy course: we cannot bring an
entire class into a rehearsal room, nor can we create a rehearsal, with directors
and actors, simply to provide fodder for a dramaturgy class. And so a course in
dramaturgy recreates, not the rehearsal room, where the dramaturg sits at the
directors elbow, watching the actors work, but rather the pre-rehearsal
conference room, where the dramaturg, director, designers, and artistic team
assemble around a table to brainstorm about the play and the projected
production. The research assignments, the oral presentations, and the essay
assignments (perhaps in the form of a program note, a lobby display, a subscriber
newsletter, a press release, or an educational programs packet) that the student
presents to the professor take the form of the types of oral presentations and
writing that a dramaturg would prepare in support of the director and the
production.
But while a student completing an assignment for a professor normally
assumes that the professor already knows more than the student does about the
assignment, this is the last thing that a director, in the real world of the
professional theatre, would want from a dramaturg. If the director already knows
more about a particular subject than does the dramaturg, then the director
wouldnt waste the dramaturgs time asking about it; there are countless other
better uses to which the dramaturgs time and energies can be put. Indeed, one
of the first things that a dramaturg learns on the job is not to waste time finding
out things that the director already knows. I once served as a guest dramaturg
on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Peoples Light & Theatre
Company helmed by a British guest-director raised in, and keenly aware of, the
British caste system and its legacy; he didnt need me to tell him about it. This
past year, I dramaturged at the same theatre on a production of The Merchant of
Venice, which the director was setting in the 1920s. The director spent the better
part of a year researching class, politics, and the Jewish population in Italy in
the early years of Mussolini; I therefore knew that I didnt have to: there were
other things to be done with my time, energy, and expertise.
The goal of an undergraduate dramaturgy course, then, is not only to
familiarize the student with the tasks of the dramaturg, and to examine the
ethical, methodological, and professional issues raised by dramaturgy in practice,
but to acculturate the student to a new role: rather than serving the professor/
director as students normally serve a professor, presenting material that they
(rightly or wrongly) assume the professor knows more about then they do, the

Teaching Undergraduate Students not to be Students 137

student/dramaturgs must be acculturated into providing the professor/director
with materials, insights, resources, documents, and perspectives that the
professor/director does not already know.
This process of acculturation is not unlike the one undergone by graduate
students in the humanities (and certainly like that of graduate students in the
sciences, who become working members of a laboratory team): novice graduate
students, accustomed to writing undergraduate papers for the imagined audience
of their professors, who are assumed to know more than they do on the subject,
are acculturated in their first pro-seminars to write essay for an imagined audience
of readers of scholarly journals, who are assumed not to know as much as the
writer does on the subject; indeed, the graduate student must be acculturated to
assume that the reader is hungering for the revelations and new insights that the
writer is now in a position to impart.
And so it is in an undergraduate course in dramaturgy.
I can best illustrate this with examples from my own teaching. Inspired by
my friends and colleagues who teach dramaturgy at their undergraduate
institutionsnotably Lee Devin at Swarthmore College and Geoffrey Proehl at
the University of Puget SoundI normally set three types of ongoing tasks to
the students in my dramaturgy class. The first of the regular assignments is a
weekly grab-bag research question, literally picked out of a hat, which the
student has a week to answer. The grab-bag questions take the form of the type
of questions that directors, actors, and designers might ask a production dramaturg
before and during rehearsals: Would a gentleman take off his dinner jacket in
front of a lady in England in the mid-nineteenth century? What newspaper would
a janitor be likely to read in New York in the 1930s? How many times a day was
mail delivered in London in the late eighteenth century? What class of men
would wear patchouli-scented cologne in turn-of-the-century Europe and Russia?
Where were brothels located in London during the Restoration? How long did it
take to sail from Venice to Cyprus in the early 1600s? After each student presents
the results, we discuss the potential uses to which this information might be
put: how might the information help a director illustrate the social world of the
play? How might it help an actor to understand the character and the characters
world?
For the second assignment, the class creates a season of plays for a
hypothetical theatre companys subscription season, based on the mission, size,
location, artistic vision, and material conditions that we invent for our company
at the beginning of the semester, and fulfilling a particular theme or focus that
we have selected for the season. Every second week, the students (in teams) are
asked to present a short report on the plays that the team has read, explaining
whether the team thinks the play might be good for the company and the
community; describing the play and its technical and personnel demands; and
recommendingor not recommendingthat the artistic directorate (the class as
a whole) consider the play further.
The third regular assignment (every second week, alternating with the play
reports) is the class activity for which it is most crucial that the students stop
thinking like students. Each team is assigned one of six dramaturgical tasks on
one of three plays of our hypothetical theatre companys current season. (If the
class is divided into three groups, we do two rounds of reports for each of the

138 Cary M. Mazer

two plays, with each team being assigned a different tasks each round, so that
by the end of the semester, each team will have reported once on each of the
six tasks.) The tasks they are to report on are:
1) Versions, texts, editions, translations, etc.
2) The play in the context of the playwrights life, career, other works, etc.
3) The specific period, place, and conditions of the plays composition and
original performance, including relevant imagery, iconography, artifacts,
cognate art forms, etc.
4) The specific period, place, and conditions of the play (or the performances)
setting, including relevant imagery, iconography, artifacts, cognate art
forms, etc.
5) The plays subsequent performance history.
6) Useful scholarship and criticism, on the play and on related subjects.
The plays I select for our hypothetical season are in fact the faculty-directed
plays that my Universitys undergraduate liberal-arts Theatre Arts Program is
actually producing that year, and I invite the directors of the three productions
to class, to play the role of hypothetical directors, to hear the reports. (For the
final written assignment, each team prepares interpretive material on one of the
three hypothetical productionsprogram notes about the play, the playwright,
lobby displays, or the production, materials for a program insert or a subscriber
bulletin, packet of materials to be sent to the press, materials to be sent to
school groups and their teachers, etc. These final class projects are often
incorporated into the programs or the lobby displays for the actual productions
later in the semester and the year.)
Ironically, it is when the students dramaturgical tasks are most directly
applicable to actual theatre productionsthe productions that my colleagues
will be mounting over the course of the current seasonthat I am most aware
of how students, unless otherwise prodded, think like students, priding
themselves on telling the professor/director what he or she already knows, rather
than supplementing what the director already knows with new materials, insights,
and resources. Reporting, say, on the play in relation to the playwrights larger
career and other work, the dramaturgy team might present information that
would be useful for an audience member to read in a program note, but which
the professor/director already knows. To address this tendency, I will have my
colleague come to class two weeks before the reports are to be presented, to
help set each teams assignment. The director tells them: heres what Im thinking
of doing with the play; heres what might be useful for me to know; heres what
Id like you to find out for me. And yet, even with this direct instruction from
the director, the dramaturgy teams often try to please the director, and me, by
telling us what we already know.
One way to encourage students to stop thinking like students is to assign a
dramaturgical task that can result in a concrete outcome in the hypothetical
(and the real) production. Two years ago, my colleague Marcia Ferguson was
preparing to direct Caryl Churchills Cloud Nine. This production was designed
to serve as a vehicle for the senior honors-thesis roles for six studentsfour

Teaching Undergraduate Students not to be Students 139

women and two menwho had been precast as members of the ensemble, to
which two or three more would be added by open audition; but the specific
roles that each of the thesis actors would be playing had not yet been set.
Churchill specifies that the same company of actors plays both the characters in
act 1 of the play, set in Colonial Africa, and the characters in act 2, set in
contemporary London, where several of the characters reappear, having aged
only 25 years in the interim; she specifies that several of the roles in act 1 are to
be cross-cast (Betty is to be played by a male actor, Edward by an female actor,
Joshua the African servant by a white actor); but she leaves it to the director to
figure out which character in act 1 is to be played by the same actor as the
character in act 2. And so, one of the dramaturgy teams was assigned the task of
exploring possible doubling schemes, with the additional challenge of
accommodating more women than the playwright had in mind when she originally
developed the piece with Joint Stock Theatre Group in 1979. What would happen
if the male actor playing Betty in act 1 played the adult Edward in act 2? What if
he played Martin instead, or Gerry? Should the child Cathy in act 2 be played by
a man, as the role was originally conceived, or by a woman? What if Harry
Bagley in act 1 were played by a woman rather than a man? Would Harrys
homosexuality be theatrically coded, as Edwards is in act 1, by the cross-casting?
And would that then make Ellens lesbianism anomalous, as the only homosexual
character played without cross-casting in act 1? What if Joshua were played by a
white woman rather than a white man? And what role would that woman play in
act 2?
In reporting on this taskon this script, for this director, on this particular
weekthe students on that dramaturgy team effectively made the transition
from being undergraduate students to being dramaturgs. They gave the director,
not material she already knew, but the tools to make decisions that she needed
to make in conceiving and creating a theatre piece. One of the many jobs of the
dramaturg is to help the director figure out what story the director and the
company wish to tell in their staging of a particular script, at a particular
theatre, for a particular audience, at a particular time, and, having helped them
find the story, to help all of the collaborative theatre artists to tell it. In this
instance, the dramaturgy team not only presented a wide variety of doubling
schemes for Cloud Nine; the team forced the director to confront the implications
of her potential casting choices: if you double Edward in act 1 with Victoria in
act 2, then we would be telling this potential story about sexual identity; if you
double Clive in act 1 with Martin in act 2, then we would be telling that potential
story about patriarchy. The student dramaturgs were forcing the director to
c o n s i d e r w h a t t h e S h a k e s p e a re s c h o l a r A l a n C . D e s s e n , i n d i s c u s s i n g
contemporary directorial choices in staging Elizabethan and Jacobean scripts in
Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions, calls
the trade-offs and the price tags of directorial decisions (34).
Directors, dramaturgs, and other theatre artists must work within the material
realities of their theatre, budget, company, and audiences, and so too must
professors in their teaching. This year, for a variety of reasons, the Theatre Arts
Program at my University is producing fewer faculty-directed productions; and
the faculty-directed acting-thesis production we are producing this spring is
being directed by a colleague who is away on leave this semester, and so cannot
come to class to hear the team dramaturgy reports about the play she will be
directing. And so, this year, as an experiment, my hypothetical three-play season
is truly hypothetical. For our class purposes, I have selected The Bacchae by

140 Cary M. Mazer

Euripides, Major Barbara by Bernard Shaw, and The Voysey Inheritance by
Granville Barker. (The connections between these playsthe simultaneous
composition and structural and thematic connections between the Shaw and the
Barker plays; the undercurrent of The Bacchae and Dionysiac ecstasy in Major
Barbara; the fact that the role of Adolphus Cusins was based on Gilbert Murray,
whose translation of The Bacchae is quoted in act 2 of Major Barbara, and that
Granville Barker played the rolewill become clear to the student/dramaturgs,
I hope, over the course of the semester.) Ironically, I am discovering that having
the dramaturgy teams report on plays without presenting their findings to real
directors working on real productions is actually facilitating my usual pedagogical
goal of teaching students not to think and report like students.
One day before I am writing this, a dramaturgy team reported on the textual
lacunae at the end of The Bacchae, and compared the different translations of
the play (starting, on my insistence, for reasons they dont yet grasp, with Gilbert
Murrays), so that they could recommend the one they think should serve as
they basis of our hypothetical production. The students on the team ended up
rejecting translations that seemed archaic, ornate, flowery, or literary (they quoted
one contemporary of Murrays dismissing his translation as Swinburnian), and
recommended instead our using Paul Woodruffs translation (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1998), for its immediacy, playability, contemporaneity, and its optional
reconstruction of Agaves missing lament over the reassembled body parts of
her dismembered son Pentheus and Dionysuss final punishment of each of the
other characters. But, I asked them, how do we know that our director wants to
be contemporary and immediate? What if the director wants to be deliberately
grand, or deliberately archaic, or deliberately ritualistic? What if the director
actually wants to be Swinburnian?
Of course we dont know the answer to these questions, and we cant
know, since there is no actual director, and there will be no actual production
in our program this semester or next. But because this is so, the students ironically
have an even greater opportunity to make the transition from being studentswho-think-like-students to being genuine dramaturgs. How can we find out
what the director has in mind? I asked. Or rather: what would we need to ask
our hypothetical director, if he or she actually existed, to find out what story
the director wants to tell? Practical dramaturgy is, in many ways, a game of
Twenty Questions; dramaturgs often must ask even more than they answer,
probing, by direction and by indirection, what the directors, the designers, and
the actors sensibilities are with respect to the playscript. The answer to each
question then yields a new set of questions, and a new set of propositions: if
you want to evoke a primitive ritualistic world, then heres the translation you
probably will want to use; but if you use this translation, and if you wish to
invoke this world, then will you want Agave to reassemble Pentheuss body?
At the beginning of the first class, I write on the board, Why is there no
syllabus in this course? Of course there is a syllabus for the course; but it is an
explanation of our goals and working methods, and an outline of our different
individual and team tasks and their frequencies, and not a specific set of scheduled
readings and discussion topics. I explain that I will write that same question on
the board every day of class, until the students in the class, I predict, will suddenly
know the answer.

Teaching Undergraduate Students not to be Students 141

The answer, of course, is that, like a rehearsal, the work to be done in one
class is built upon the material of the preceding classes, often in unpredictable
ways; that the next set of questions to be asked will only become clear when
the previous set of questions has been posed and provisionally answered; that
work breeds work, questions breed questions, and tasks breed tasks, until a
subject is mastered, a story is uncovered from a script, and a theatre piece is
made.
Once the students in the class intuit thisand, invariably they do, at some
point during the semesterthen they are no longer thinking like students, but
like dramaturgs.

Cary M. Mazer is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and English and Chair of
the Theatre Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served as
guest dramaturg at Peoples Light & Theatre Company, in Malvern, PA, most
recently on The Merchant of Venice, the subject of a work-in-progress, Shylocks
Beard: A Jewish Dramaturgs Journal.

Works Cited
Dessen, Alan C. Rescripting Shakespeare: The Text, the Director, and Modern Productions.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.