Panel Offers Little Direction on Dramaturgs

The title of the second Dramatists’ Guild symposium Tuesday at Theatre West was “How to Use a Dramaturg.” But get a few dramaturgs together and the discussion is likely to gravitate to the question of what they actually do .

Few people know. In the first place, as panelist Grant Moran, a film and television writer with a long history of dramaturging, pointed out, the word itself, inherited from the German, is off-putting. All those hard consonants.

In the second, it “gives you a variety of functions,” said Stephen Weeks, literary co-manager of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. So many, that they’re nebulous at best.

Moderator Peter Stone, president of the guild, tried to anchor the job description. He cited one that viewed the dramaturg as the person who “champions the text . . . represents and sometimes justifies the writer to the director.” It never got more specific.

The dramaturgs, it emerged, see themselves as everything--from hand-holders to the playwright (Moran and Susan Vaneta Moran who co-directs the Women’s Project at LATC and once served there as dramaturg) to liaison officer, adviser and peacemaker, but always a job that’s “intimate,” “sensitive,” “complex,” “reactive” and never, never, that of a rewriter.

That is the sympathetic view.

Things got tougher when Stone mentioned knottier issues. What does a dramaturg do if a theater or director alters a script in a major way without a writer’s permission? Where is the dramaturg’s allegiance then?

The answers were less satisfying. Moran merely asserted it was an improper thing for a theater to do. Another panelist suggested that “firing the director is an option” (to which Stone retorted: “Well, it’s a drastic solution, but popular with playwrights.”).

Fundamentally, though, Stone did keep the session focused on the nuts and bolts of a dramaturg’s work, outlining the differences between literary managers (more focused on sniffing out good plays) and dramaturgs (the hands-on players who work one-to-one with playwrights on new writing).

Jose Cruz Gonzalez, project director for South Coast Repertory’s Hispanic Playwrights Project and director of the comedy group, “Latins Anonymous” (now at LATC), and Armando Molina, a member of “Latins Anonymous” and some-time dramaturg, showed that working improvisationally is yet still another ballgame. Actors and director/dramaturg doing the writing together is a kind of elaborate buddy system predicated on everyone’s willingness to give and take.

As a whole, though, the emphasis by the panel was on presenting too saintly an image of the dramaturg as a benevolent, non-interfering, enlightened friend in court--a view Tuesday’s small audience did not refute, but seemed to keep at arm’s length during a brief question-and-answer period.

In the end, a droll image of the dramaturg as seat belt emerged--protective for the playwright on his or her wild ride, but its enforcement often resisted by directors.

If the word dramaturg creates a gathering storm in some playwrights’ minds, let them ponder a coming new breed of middleman known as the psychoturg or drama therapist. No confusion over those job descriptions. A subject, Stone said, for the next symposium.