By Richard Pettengill

"Why was Richard II's throne suspended up in mid-air?" asks a student audience member after a high school matinee. I deflect the question back to the audience, and I'm off on one of the most fascinating aspects of my dramaturgical work.

Then during graduate school, I began seeing shows at the Court, a new professional theatre on campus devoted to the classics. Two aspects of their productions especially intrigued me. One was that the program booklets included lengthy, well-written essays about the playwright, the play, and the historical context, written by someone called the dramaturg. I began to arrive 20 or so minutes early (as did others, I noticed) to leave time to read up on Chekhov, Shaw, or Ibsen. These program notes really opened up the productions for me, and I saw for the first time a way in which scholarship could illuminate a live event for a general audience.

Court Theatre also had post-show discussions where you could actually sit around and discuss the show with the cast. This, you must realize, seemed positively thrilling to a graduate student accustomed to discussing plays as literature in windowless seminar rooms. Perhaps because my chirpy excitement came across at these sessions, or because someone put in a good word, I later received a call from the theatre asking if I'd like to apply for the position of dramaturg.

"What's that?"

"Richard, do you have a theatre background?"

"Well, I played Tybalt in junior high."

So went that part of my initiation. It was actually a great relief to discover that just listening at times was going to be important in this new job. But I also had to unlearn other hard-won habits, like speaking and writing for an academic audience in favor of attempting to communicate clearly with theatre artists and audiences. A turning point was discovering the 1978 issue of Yale/Theatre, which was filled with interviews with the first generation of American dramaturgs. All of them had very different accounts of what they did in their various contexts, and I saw that I could forge my own definition in my own context. Four years later, I wrote about my Court years in Yale's second dramaturgy issue (Theater, Summer/Fall, 1986).

Here at the Goodman, I do one or two dramaturgy assignments a season. While running education programs is my primary responsibility, the dramaturgy gigs give me a direct connection to the artistic life of the productions and of the theatre itself; they keep my education work vital. Many of my counterparts in other theatre education departments have expressed feelings of isolation from the artistic life of their theatres, but that's not something I can complain about. Access to and involvement in the artistic life of a theatre comes naturally when one is blessed by an enlightened administrative decision. It's key that at the Goodman, education is part of the artistic staff rather than being off by itself or in PR or Administration or Development.

When starting on a dramaturgy project, I like to immerse myself in a solitary way for a month or more in the text and background research before my initial meetings with the director; ideally those initial meetings take place well before an approach to the production has been formulated. I begin by asking myself questions:

What is keeping me from a full understanding of this play? Are there textual issues to be dealt with?

What background do our artists and audiences need to know? These questions form the basis for early discussions with the director, and having those discussions early on allows me to make a real contribution to the production. At first we just talk, and I hand things over verbally and on paper. As ideas evolve and become focused, and as an artistic direction for the production begins to emerge, my research in turn becomes more focused and underscores and stimulates the evolving point of view.

Sometimes my research can reinforce a director's artistic instinct on a a play, as with The Night of the Iguana, directed by the Goodman's artistic director Robert Falls. In our early discussions of the play, Bob said he viewed the play as a poem, and that he wanted to restore most of the poetic language spoken between Hannah Jelkes and the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon in the second act, much of which had been cut on the road to the 1961 Broadway production. Going through Williams' essays, I found that Tennessee repeatedly wrote of Iguana as a dramatic poem, which thrilled Bob. My research served to corroborate a view Bob had already formed on his own, and this fueled our sense that the production was going to be a major re-examination of the play.

The same kind of research and exchange takes place when I attend design meetings. I can feed the design process with ideas and images I've run across in my research, but it's also a big help to keep track of the visual ideas being considered. I often use some of those images to spice up the subscriber newsletter in a way which visually reflects the production. My general rule on this is that I want to give the audience some of the same primary material that helped inspire the artistic team, so as to illuminate the distinctive wellsprings of this particular production. Rather than explaining a production's ideas, I want to set the audience up to discover them for themselves. In the Iguana newsletter, for example, those play-as-poem quotes took center stage.

I also try to avoid giving audiences statements of artistic intent such as director's notes; those run the risk of pre-empting an audience's true response by telling them in advance what to think. They might also rob the production of the chance to succeed on its own terms, for it may have evolved into something wonderful, but quite different from the original directorial statement. I made an exception to this rule for Peter Sellars' production of The Merchant of Venice. Because of the passionate political ideas behind his contemporary Venice Beach setting, I included an extensive interview with Peter which many found fascinating and useful. The production, however, turned out to be controversial more on an aesthetic than a political level, and the interview didn't really set audiences up for the experience. While walking to the parking garage one night after a preview, one subscriber pointed to her interview and said "I wanted to see this production!"

As rehearsal begins, I share as much information with the cast as possible. If the director wants, I'll put together actor packets of information, tailored to anticipate each actor's needs and interests. Often I make a presentation summarizing the research I feel might be useful in rehearsal. These early efforts help to start a rapport with actors; they see what I've already done, and get ideas on what else I can do for them. For Kyle Donnelly's production of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, for example, I spoke about pagan rituals, the Lughnasa festival, bilberries, and traditional Irish music and dance. I also try to find answers to questions that arise as the text is explored. At various points during Lughnasa, I was off finding pictures of 1930s Irish kitchens, or the sheet music for "Play to Me Gypsy." During Iguana, I was asked about women's Baptist colleges in Texas; for Black Snow, we needed Bulgakov's correspondence with Stalin.

I'm less present and more on-call after that first week, but as rehearsal evolves into run-throughs, I come back to give notes designed to help the director fine-tune the show. Being out for a while gives me a fresher perspective on the proceedings, and I can see the play more as an audience member might. Following each run-through, I type up my responses so the director can read them at leisure and not feel obligated to reply to me about each one. I want the director to feel free to take or leave my notes, though I admit it's satisfying when I can tell that notes have been taken. Occasionally -- and this is fun -- I'll watch a director read my notes to the cast directly off my sheet. I figure this way of working puts me in the grand unthreatening tradition of dramaturgs putting good ideas on paper and having an impact, as when Jan Kott's essays inspired Peter Brook.

I continue giving notes as run-throughs give way to tech, final dress, and previews, which is when I begin working with audiences. Previews fascinate me because there, artistic process and audience education intersect. Our preview discussions are geared less toward answering the audience's questions about the show than toward getting ours answered about how the show is working for the audience. Of course we end up doing both most of the time, and what we learn by drawing out the audience often aids our fine-tuning of the show. I include any useful audience comments in my notes to the director.

The post-opening night discussions are, for me, the culmination of my entire dramaturgical process. We invite the actors to join in, and these sessions are a chance to hear as many audience responses as possible. As with the subscriber publications, I try not to talk about the directorial point of view, at least not at first. What audiences most often want to know, especially on shows with a strong directorial take, is, "What did the director intend?" and the subtext of this question is usually, "Did I get it right?" I often know what the director intended, but I try to hold it back at first; people who are told the "truth" behind a production are less likely to trust their own responses, and the discussion can drag to a halt. Only after I've gotten four or five different distinct points of view about the same production element -- like the ones that begin this essay -- am I willing to say "And here's what the director said." It's tricky to lead audience discussions when you know the "answers," but wonderful things do come out, especially with students. I find the student audiences in our free program for Chicago public high schools to be the most candid, and discussions with them to be the most revealing. During previews, their teachers attend special seminars on each play and attend a performance. Then they have a month in which to prepare their students using the scripts, newsletters, study guides, and "Backstage at the Goodman" video-documentaries that we supply. The students end up much better prepared than most adult audience members, having just studied and discussed the play's text in depth in their classrooms, and I do my best to draw them out afterwards.

In this excerpt from a student discussion after a matinee of The Night of the Iguana, the students ask about the German characters, a group of pro-Nazi tourists who frolic maliciously around Maxine's Mexican veranda. I tried here to give them a chance to articulate some of their responses, and then to contrast their views with those of the director.

*This article appears in Dramaturgy in American Theatre: A Sourcebook; ed. Susan Jonas, Geoff Proehl, and Michael Lupu; Harcourt Brace, 1996.