Re: RAT ticket expiration and dramaturgs

[willie barbour <willieb@avalon.net>]

This is not my experience. The dramaturgs I have worked with were there to 
provide help, a sounding board, if you will, to provide questions in terms 
of character and plot for my to answer. To test my ideas, to assist not to fix.

At 03:56 PM 11/28/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Perhaps I was misunderstood. My notion of a dramaturg is someone who may (or
>may not) be foisted upon a playwright by the big regional theatres who need
>to pound a play into "shape" so that it appeals to their subscription masses.
>
>I am not against a play going through a development process (mine do) in the
>sense of reading them for fellow (male and female) playwrights, maybe doing a
>reading at a theatre one is associated with, and soliciting comments from a
>trusted director. I supposed you could say that all those people function as
>"dramaturgs," but a playwright is free, one hopes, to have the final say.
>That's why theatre is often magical -- the writer has the final word, even if
>it's not always the most overpolished, overdeveloped word. We've got to trust
>our instincts and not be pressured to bring in yet another body whose sole
>purpose is to remake the play.
>     The "remake" is a process that happens in screenwriting or 
> journalism, in
>which change and editing occurs simply for the sake of a producer or editor
>to justify their "artistic" existence.
>
>Michael Farkash