Now Starring Offstage : Guiding Creative Forces Behind the Scenes Is the Role of a Lifetime for SCR’s Newest Dramaturge Theater

Stage-struck kids dream of becoming actors and dancers, playwrights and singers, directors and producers, fashioners of costumes and designers of sets. It is a reasonable assumption that few, if any, burn to be dramaturges.

Dramaturges? If your first response is, “Sounds Greek to me,” you’re absolutely right. Derived from the Greek words for drama and work, the term is so arcane that experts differ on how to spell and pronounce it.

South Coast Repertory, which employs three dramaturges, spells it “dramaturg” and pronounces it with a hard ‘g.’ Webster’s Dictionary has it as “dramaturge,” with a soft ‘g,’ as in “submerge.”

Jennifer Kiger joined SCR’s staff two months ago as dramaturge No. 3. She doesn’t mind that her job keeps her submerged when the spotlight shines and the applause and critical plaudits come rolling in. For her, life as a dramaturge means happy immersion in a wide range of the theater’s most important creative work.

Six months out of grad school at Harvard, where she specialized in dramaturgy at the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, Kiger is by far the youngest member of the SCR artistic staff that decides which plays are worth staging and helps shepherd them along by serving as in-house advisors to playwrights and directors. An effective dramaturge offers a supportive but objective expert point of view on what is and isn’t working as plays go through rewrites and rehearsals.

At 27, Kiger could pass for a teenage college student. She is slight of build and fresh-faced and rosy-cheeked under a pixie coif. The Indiana native’s voice is wispy, with an adolescent, piping quality that belied the forthrightness and the mature, considered ideas that flowed through her conversation during a recent interview at the theater.

SCR hired Kiger because her bosses, Jerry Patch and John Glore, were swamped. The two men have a combined 47 years’ tenure at the Costa Mesa theater in the jobs of dramaturge and literary manager, respectively--positions that in SCR’s system are largely interchangeable. Their duties ballooned in 1997 when the theater launched its annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, bringing them six to 10 festival-related plays to grapple with in addition to each season’s regular schedule.

Glore says that Kiger, whose title is assistant literary manager, was the first choice among 50 or 60 applicants.

“We were looking for someone who could almost immediately step into the flow of what this department does and do everything Jerry and I do,” he said. Patch said the theater wanted a dramaturgic specialist, “not a playwright who needed a day job.”

“One of the first things she said was that she has known for some time she wanted to be a dramaturg,” Glore said. “Very few people in the American theater have that as a primary objective. They really want to be playwrights or directors.”

So far, Kiger has been dramaturge for a public reading of a new play, “Fighting Words,” and has done historical research for director David Chambers and his cast as they rehearse for the world premiere next month of “The Hollow Lands,” Howard Korder’s epic set in the American wilderness during the early 19th century.

“She admits that [research] isn’t her favorite kind of work, but she dove into it and made Jerry and me look bad in terms of some of the material she came up with,” Glore said--including a detailed map of the main character’s wanderings.

Kiger will be the dramaturge for SCR’s staging of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” later this season. The playgoing public will get to know her through occasional appearances as a discussion leader, and through commentaries and explanatory essays she will write for SCR’s theater programs and other publications.

Along with Patch and Glore, she will sift through the more than 500 new plays sent to SCR each year. A big part of a dramaturge’s job is talent-scouting--seeking producible gems amid stacks of scripts.

Of course, Kiger did not grow up dreaming of being a dramaturge.

Directing was her thing. A high school production of “Flowers for Algernon” marked her directorial debut; her drama teacher in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel fell ill, and she had to go it mainly on her own. Her key move was insisting that the cast visit an institution for the mentally retarded to prepare for this poignant play (better known in its film version, “Charly”). Kiger already knew the turf: She grew up working in facilities for the developmentally disabled where her mother worked as a nurse and medical consultant.

“I wanted the cast to know what we were dealing with. I didn’t want it to be a stereotypical portrayal of a retarded man,” Kiger said. “The boy who played the lead role based his performance on one of the people there, a man I’ve known since I was 6 years old and is very dear to me.”

At the University of Evansville in Illinois, Kiger’s interest in literature competed with her love of theater; her advisors saw her as a budding star literary critic and pushed her toward a doctorate in English. Instead, after graduating she married her college sweetheart, Dax Kiger, and followed him to the University of Utah, where he studied theater directing.

There, she edited technical writing for medical publications, pondered becoming a journalist, and went to lots of plays involving her husband and his colleagues. She awoke to her calling as a dramaturge over post-theater cups of coffee.

“We would talk about the plays, and at a certain point, directors started asking me to dramaturg shows for them. They thought I had insights into how the [plays] worked.”

Kiger got an internship at the Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City, then went through a two-year, learn-by-doing graduate program in dramaturgy at the American Repertory Theatre. Her husband has been working at ART as assistant production manager; he will look for directing jobs and other theater-related work when he joins her later this month in Costa Mesa, where, not yet acclimated to Southern California car culture, she rents an apartment within walking distance of SCR.

“Even a lot of people who work in the theater don’t know what a dramaturg is,” said Kiger. “I tell people the word ‘dramaturg’ means ‘to make drama work.’ ”

That is, she gets to put in her two cents about a play’s strengths and shortcomings for the people who are in a position to do something about it. Kiger will be involved in discussions with Patch, Glore and SCR artistic directors David Emmes and Martin Benson about which plays to produce. When new plays are staged, she will share her ideas for revisions with the playwrights. She will sit in on some rehearsals, then confer with directors.

Her all-time favorite plays? Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” and “Woyzeck,” a dark 1836 drama by the German author Georg Buchner. She also has a fondness for Bertolt Brecht.

“You really have to explore evil as a part of humanity to get ‘Macbeth,’ ” Kiger said. “Every time I read it it tells me much more about humanity than anything else.”

One pitfall of her job is getting too caught up in the excitement of putting on a play. That’s for the directors and actors, Kiger said. The dramaturge is supposed to keep them focused on using their theatrical skills not just for the sake of galvanizing stagecraft, but to tell the play’s story in the most effective way. “If you’re a dramaturg, you’re the one person in the room who is supposed to see it from a distance.”

The stickiest situation for a dramaturge is dealing with playwrights or directors who do not want advice. Kiger said it happened to her once or twice in graduate school.

“When you pour your heart and energy into something and you’re not wanted, you hurt,” she said. “One of the lessons I learned [is that] if I’m faced with [that] in the future, I should withdraw” from the production.

Giving advice, of course, is a tricky business, especially when it involves suggesting ways for artists to better raise their brainchildren. “Part of a dramaturg’s function is to be a diplomat,” Kiger said. “I think I’m pretty good at that.”

For her, the job’s reward is the creative interchange when playwrights and directors are open to the input of an obscure functionary whose role, according to Glore, is to be “the ideal surrogate audience member.”

“They say if a dramaturg does a really good job, no one will know you were there,” Kiger said. “That’s fine. Getting credit and recognition from [the public] is not really what gives me satisfaction. I get satisfaction out of having a really good conversation with a playwright--and when they say, ‘Thank you, you’ve helped me.’ ”