He’s Young, He’s Qualified and He Can Even Define His Role as Dramaturge

“I’m way too young for this job.”

This is a typical remark from Peter Sagal--honest, glib, a touch self-deprecating. Even if age 25 is a bit on the fresh side for a resident theater’s literary manager (his position at Los Angeles Theatre Center), enough time spent with Sagal confirms beyond a doubt that he’s well qualified.

The question is, well qualified for what? The post of literary manager/dramaturge, perhaps more than any other in theater, is cloaked in mystery. Because Sagal is also directing Bill C. Davis’ “Dancing in the End Zone,” which opened Saturday at the Melrose Theatre, he’s had a chance to get some perspective on his puzzling occupation, and maybe even provide a definition.

Playwrights and directors everywhere would be grateful for one because dramaturges, in Sagal’s words, “can be the bane of a theater-maker’s existence.”

What adds to the confusion is that there are two types of dramaturges to be found in theaters such as LATC, the Mark Taper Forum or South Coast Repertory, which have the funding to hire a literary staff. One type is the production dramaturge, who consults with the director and playwright before and during rehearsals of a new play. The other is the classical dramaturge--the literary manager, “the theater’s resident intellectual,” as Sagal puts it.

So far, so good. The problem is that the dramaturge is neither director, writer nor artistic director. “In the case of production dramaturge,” Sagal says, pacing the floor of one of LATC’s rehearsal rooms, “he or she has great responsibility--to the play, to the institution, to the playwright, for making sure playwright and director get along--and zero authority. You can only make suggestions. And even then, the worst and most legitimate rap against dramaturges is that they just tell people what to do, and walk away.

“The best ones check their egos at the door, which is a very rare quality. They have to, because the dramaturge’s chief task is to serve the writer’s vision of the play, not their own.”

Yet that is precisely what a director is supposed to do. The key, Sagal says, is for the dramaturge to provide a removed, unemotional perspective on a new play’s fragile gestation. Two production dramaturges Sagal greatly admires are John Glore of South Coast Repertory and Jonathan Marks, formerly with Boston’s American Repertory Theatre and Sagal’s mentor when he attended Harvard. Both “can ask devastating questions without being devastating. They don’t ask, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ They ask, ‘What do you think this scene means?’ ”

Just as important is for the dramaturge to be the playwright’s friend. Sagal says that Morgan Jenness, who joined LATC’s staff in September as associate director of new play development and who Sagal flatly calls “the best dramaturge in the country,” likes to simply “hang out with the writer, being their listening post. This can be valuable to the playwright, since the final rehearsal phase can be awfully lonely and stressful.”

While he compares production dramaturgy to alchemy (“you don’t know how it works, but you keep toying with it until it works”), Sagal finds being literary manager more tangible.

“The literary manager is the theater’s literary equivalent of the casting director. You search for and find talent. You tap into a network, extending across the country that feeds you scripts. You establish contact with individual playwrights. You sift through hundreds of scripts that arrive in the office. You try to keep your ear to the ground all the time.”

Dramaturges also listen to one another. Glore keeps in touch with Sagal on a regular basis, exchanging ideas on new plays and writers. “I find that Peter and I have similar tastes. He likes writers who are aggressively theatrical, know how to use theater’s elements, have a strong, personal take on the contemporary world and write language that sings on the stage. I think that’s reflected in plays he’s been involved with.”

Once the literary manager finds that gem script, he becomes the playwright’s in-house advocate. In Sagal’s two years at LATC, he was just that for Eduardo Machado’s “A Burning Beach,” Anne Deavere Smith’s “Piano,” Christopher Durang’s “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” and, what for him was a high point, Jo Carson’s “Daytrips.”

“My experience with Jo justified this job,” he says. “Getting her play produced here gave her national attention outside of her Appalachian region; it helped her win the $10,000 Joseph Kesserling Award, and it got her an agent.”

But the name that really gets Sagal’s literary juices going is Neal Bell, who wrote of “Sleeping Dogs,” “Two Small Bodies” and “Cold Sweat.”

“Every literary manager has their prize playwright, and Neal’s mine. I’m not alone: There’s a whole underground Neal Bell fan club among dramaturges. He’s one of those guys that makes a literary manager’s day. He’s a master, so much so that he should have his own theater. And yet he’s still terribly under-produced, because he writes difficult, personal plays.”

Ironically, no Bell play has yet landed on an LATC stage, which may suggest that no amount of enthusiasm from the literary department can guarantee that the theater company will produce a beloved script. But if it does, there’s the risk of a new play being, in the oft-heard phrase, “developed to death”: given workshops and sent through the rewrite bin until the playwright can lose track of the play’s original intent.

Sagal has seen this happen, but he’s reluctant to condemn the process. “It’s true that a theater can use the process merely as a way of auditioning plays and playwrights. That’s terrible. But it’s helpful to see and hear one’s play on its feet, and I’ve seen too many plays improved in that way. ‘Millennium Approaches,’ ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and ‘Miss Evers’ Boys’ are just three examples.

“The development process tests if the new work is stage-worthy. Subscription-based theaters have to be sure of this, since they have to fill their houses with work. If they don’t, they’ll close down, and whom does that serve?”

Sagal then takes a tough assessment of himself: “I think directorially all the time, which is why I’m a literary manager and a bad production dramaturge. I have too many ideas of my own.” That is why he is excited to do Davis’ “Dancing,” although he admits he was hired for the job.

“But,” he adds, “I’m not stupid enough to do a play I don’t like. Davis takes this cliched situation--a college football player manipulated by his coach and mom”--played by theater veterans Alan Feinstein and Lois Nettleton--”and supposedly enlightened by his beautiful female tutor--and turns it into something unexpected.”

Interestingly, Sagal suggests that his day job has made him appreciate the kind of well-made play for which Davis is famous. “Sure, I read a lot of plays, and most of them lack what Davis is so good at: structure. Now, I can see what a craftsman he is. Something is happening in every scene; things are always moving forward. That is very tough to do because few playwrights can do it.”