BY LUCIA MAURO
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Dramaturgs might just be the least understood artists in the theatre world. Their roles vary from company to company, production to production and country to country. They’re part historian, part consultant, part script doctor and part critic. And while formal dramaturgy programs exist, most professional dramaturgs come out of a more general theatre studies curriculum.
Even Sarah Gubbins, Naked Eye Theatre Company’s literary manager and artistic associate/dramaturg at Next Theatre, acknowledges that she did not necessarily set out to be a dramaturg.
"Early on," she says, "I didn’t really understand that there was a position called dramaturgy. I don’t have a degree in dramaturgy. I was always more interested in talking about the script and figuring out the writer’s intention."
Gubbins, who also serves as Naked Eye’s grant writer, brings a wide range of experience to the field of dramaturgy. Originally from LaGrange, Ill., she first became enthralled with theatre at the age of four when her father took her to see A Christmas Carol at Goodman Theatre. In high school, she divided her time between playing basketball and ingenue roles in plays–ultimately preferring the latter. Gubbins was an avid reader and recalls finding her voice as a writer by penning elaborate letters to her grandmother in the style of whatever literary classic she was reading at the time.
At Northwestern University, where she earned her BS in Speech (i.e. theatre), Gubbins received an all-encompassing education that paved the way for her interest in dramaturgy.
"Northwestern pretends to be a conservatory program," she notes, "but you have to take a lot of liberal arts classes. I studied acting, but I also got experience in all aspects of theatre–stage management, directing, choreography. I would stitch buttons [on costumes], paint sets and hang lights. It was theatre total."
Shortly after graduating from Northwestern, Gubbins applied and was accepted into an intensive six-week acting program centered on Shakespeare and Shaw at the British-American Dramatic Academy (BADA) in Oxford, England. She studied movement, voice and verse but also realized that acting was not her goal.
After Oxford, Gubbins attended a theatre festival three years ago in Berlin dedicated to new American plays, which had been recently translated into German. It was here that she found her calling as a dramaturg while assisting director Marie-Louise Miller on a production of How I Learned to Drive.
"I met some of the best dramaturgs in Berlin," says Gubbins. "The German model is more formal than the American one. It’s always an institutional position that requires extensive knowledge of philosophy, languages, social policy and literature.
"The structure in a German theatre is that of co-artistic heads–the artistic director, who deals with the practicalities of implementing an artistic vision; and the dramaturg, who is responsible for soliciting new scripts and placing a work in a socio-political context. The dramaturg is the purest sense of the artistic director. The dramaturg is considered a diplomat in constant dialogue with the artists and the community at large."
Back in Chicago, Gubbins was hired as the dramaturg for Northlight Theater’s staging of The Cripple of Inishmann, directed by B.J. Jones. Through networking and engaging in stimulating dialogues with local theatre professionals, Gubbins’ dramaturgy career began to take off, and she has worked steadily here.
Production dramaturgy positions include: Roadworks’ Stupid Kids; The Boarding House, Among the Thugs and The Incident at Next; Naked Eye’s Stop Kiss and Cannibals; Whitman at About Face; and The Weir and The Ordinary Yearnings of Miriam Buddwing at Steppenwolf. She is the dramaturg for Next Theatre’s season opener, The Laramie Project, running Nov. 9-Dec. 16.
In her program notes for The Weir, Gubbins exhibits her skill at writing clearly and evocatively, as well as her ability to unearth the depths of the play’s themes and history. Following is an excerpt from those notes, titled "The Tradition of Irish Pub Plays:"
"In an interview in the New York Times last year, playwright Conor McPherson wouldn’t verify the actual existence of the County Sligo pub, which is the setting of his play, The Weir. 'Many people have said to me that they’d love to go to that bar. Does it exist? I say that I’m not sure, but I had to make it up because I wanted to go there too.’ McPherson isn’t alone. For decades, Irish dramatists have been imagining bars they’d like to go to and putting them on the stage. J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World is the most notable forefather of the Irish pub play. When his wiry Christie Mahon blows into a pub on the wild coast of County Mayo one dark and desolate evening, a murder confession is only one of a myriad tales to be spun over a pint….
"At 28, Conor McPherson has emerged as a storyteller of his generation. And not to dispute the influence Beckett, Miller and Mamet have had on his work, he still reaches back to the pub as the setting for his most recent dramatic works….McPherson, like the great Irish dramatists before him, uses the pub as a confessional, a soapbox and a stage for common people to figure out the fiction of their lives."
As Naked Eye’s literary manager, Gubbins assists in the company’s New Plays Lab selections (she receives at least 15 scripts a week); and workshopped, developed and wrote the grant application for Jaime Pachino’s Kennedy Center award-winning play, Waving Goodbye, receiving its world premiere by Naked Eye at the Steppenwolf Studio Dec. 15-Jan. 6. Other development dramaturgy projects include Prop Thtr’s latest New Plays Festival at the Chicago Cultural Center and the New Harmony Writers Project in New Harmony, Ind.
"I deal mostly in new plays," says Gubbins. "And in terms of defining dramaturgy, I don’t see it as a role but as an artistic necessity of a production. One of my jobs is to place the play in a social context and to set it in a way so that all the collaborative artists know from where they speak. I create a bridge between the artists and the audience."
While the term dramaturgy conjures scholarly immersion, Gubbins points out the more elusive, or intuitive, aspects of the profession.
"I get to sit in the back of the theatre and observe rehearsals," she says. "I’m watching the structure and tempo of the play. I’m making sure that the marriage between text and production is fully realized, and that the director’s and artistic team’s original vision gets followed through. The creative team often gets so embroiled in the moment-to-moment aspects of a production, they can lose sight of the bigger picture.
"I define the dramaturg as the hard drive, or the long-term artistic memory of the play."
Gubbins is particularly attuned to zeroing in on anything extraneous in the production that interferes with the storytelling. For her, the play essentially stops when that sort of interference occurs. And like any successful consultant, she must adapt to each director’s and/or playwright’s method of working.
Sometimes she needs to be more sensitive and tactful. For example, she might go through the text with a playwright and ask probing questions, like "What is this line telling us that this one isn’t?" or address issues of flow, rhythm and phrasing in an upbeat, constructive way. Other writers/directors will ask her to bluntly tell them what works and what doesn’t work.
"I prefer that kind of directness," adds Gubbins. "I love being stripped of my question marks."
Gubbins says that her job begins in casting, especially for new plays. "I like to make the team articulate what they’re going for [in casting]," she stresses. "It helps the director probe for certain nuances in his or her casting pool.
"I do whatever I can," says Gubbins, "to bring the story to life. I love playwrights. It’s very courageous for them to share their innermost thoughts with an audience. And I love directors. They do something I could never do, and that is talk to actors. Directors are amazingly magnetic people who can morph their vocabulary. I tend to speak one language."
Yet within that one vocabulary, a dramaturg can draw out several layers of the writer’s and director’s vision and determine which layers are more effective than others. Gubbins balances scholarship with common sense.
"Theory and intellectual pursuit are wonderful things," she asserts. "But there is an amount of necessary practicality in a rehearsal or note session."
Gubbins likes to apply what she calls "The Susan Gubbins Test"–named after her mother, a teacher who lives in the suburbs. "My mother is not a seasoned theatregoer," she explains, "but she enjoys so many aspects of theatre. She can come to a show and take something away from it. I try to make theatre that’s interesting intellectually so that it can speak to audiences who are not scholars while not alienating seasoned theatregoers looking for those deep meanings."
So many scripts come across her desk. And Gubbins has found that new plays are headed in two directions: Writers are trying to embrace the great classic play form at the same time there is a movement to incorporate non-linear elements and embrace a broader theatricality.
"Playwrights either want to be the next David Hare," says Gubbins, "or they want to push the theatre’s walls as far as they can go–plays that have emotional arcs rather than structural arcs. There’s an attempt to reclaim the avant-garde. But you need to master the form in order to break it.
She also finds that emerging playwrights are committed to making each play its own distinct entity. They don’t like to be pigeonholed as embodying a specific style. Another part of Gubbins’ work as a dramaturg is reading scripts and then putting together writers and directors who can complement each other’s craft.
While she does not have a degree in dramaturgy, Gubbins points out that Yale, Harvard and Columbia universities boast comprehensive graduate dramaturgy programs.
Nevertheless, she urges, "You really only learn by doing. Dramaturgy is the sum of your experiences–including books and articles you’ve read, knowledge of pop culture, the world at large–and being open to ideas."
So what does Gubbins cite as some of the most conducive qualities for being a dramaturg?
You must be a good listener; have a strong relationship to text and a good capacity for writing; be able to research; know when to speak and when to stay quiet; have a solid understanding of a wide breadth of literature; cultivate your imagination so that you talk artistic possibilities (the "what if" and "yes and" approach) versus chronic criticism; exhibit a healthy and expansive theatre knowledge; and demonstrate the ability to critically articulate a large spectrum of plays.
"A dramaturg is not just an editor," says Gubbins. "A dramaturg is someone who brings in the added fuel for a production.