The Reconstructed Dramaturg

Abstract

The Reconstructed Dramaturg William Casey Caldwell (bio) and Amy Kenny (bio) The public interface between scholarship and theatre practice at theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the American Shakespeare Center’s (ASC) Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, has been the subject of intense debate. Early on, Dennis Kennedy’s take on the Globe as a “touristic” site set the now standard move of comparison with (or distancing from) Disneyland,1 and theatre critic Michael Billington has had a longstanding enmity for the Globe’s putative search for authenticity and the way it seems to authorize “distractions.”2 W. B. Worthen has celebrated and critiqued the Globe’s peculiar form of performativity in relation to history.3 There is also, of course, the inter-institutional argument over the status of scholarship in relation to theatre practice enacted between these theatres themselves in Paul Menzer’s Inside Shakespeare: Essays on the Blackfriars Stage (2006) and Christie Carson and Farah Karim-Cooper’s Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment (2008). These are just a few examples of the critical work generated by the contentious combination of historical research and entertainment these theatres mobilize. However, while the interface of these elements at the sites has generated much debate, the internal side of the relationship between scholarship and stagecraft embodied within these institutions in the practice of dramaturgy has been neglected. This neglect is due, in part, to dramaturgy’s still highly provisional status in both theatres, in addition to its placement “off stage” and away from direct public display and scrutiny. By presenting here a revisionary model of dramaturgy for these theatres, we are critiquing not only the current state of this practice nor simply the politics of institutional knowledge-generation; ultimately, we call for a dramaturgical space that needs to be instituted in these theatres for the first time—as a place of relay and counterpoise vitally different from, but in negotiation with, the other spaces and modes of creative process in these reconstructed early modern theatres. The other operative and established “departments” in these theatres need to extend or pass on financial and political authority within the institution to their dramaturgical teammates.4 Dramaturgy in general is, of course, an abstract practice to define, as it is still provisional in many countries, and in many different theatres within a single country. The dramaturg resides somewhere between academia and theatre and is expected to have intimate knowledge of both. As Mary Luckhurst points out in Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre (2006), the United States and especially England have been the slowest to adopt the German/Eastern European model of in-house dramaturg. Significant strides have been made in theatre labor relations in these two countries, in particular toward incorporating the role of the dramaturg as a fusion of academic and theatre practices. However, as Luckhurst observes, “the academy and the theatre industry may mix more than ever before, but their suspicion of each other is still strong” (40). The dramaturg is expected to bridge the often-sizeable gap between the academic and theatre worlds, and is often considered untrustworthy or incapable of properly engaging with either side. We wish to change this paradigm of resistance toward the dramaturg by observing and analyzing our experiences working as dramaturgs on both sides of the Atlantic.5 The authors of this essay have worked within the fusion that dramaturgy enacts at the Globe and Blackfriars, trained academics who have also worked as dramaturgs in the current models that each theatre deploys. We are the first, and so far the only ones, to participate in a reciprocal work [End Page 11] exchange between the two institutions, where we worked as dramaturgs for each other’s theatre amid the still-intense phases of development in dramaturgy at both. Now that we have worked with each other in each building, performing the standard function of dramaturg as it is defined in these theatres, in what follows, we push forward the conversation about research in so far as it is embodied in dramaturgy at these reconstructed sites. The debate enacted between Inside Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Globe over scholars’ use of these buildings has settled some of the terminology...