Between the Lines: The Process of Dramaturgy (review)

Reviewed by: Between the Lines: The Process of Dramaturgy Leslie Katz (bio) Judith Rudakoff and Lynn M. Thomson. Between the Lines: The Process of Dramaturgy Playwrights Canada. iv, 334. $33.00 Since I started reading Between the Lines (peripatetically as is my habit), numerous newspaper and coffee vendors have asked me what it's about. Maybe it's the cover, with its mesa-coloured photograph of an open highway, but I'm more inclined to think it's the subheading that piques inquisitiveness, causing more than one person - out of a genuine thirst for information - to resurrect the question forwarded by Bert Cardullo in his 1995 collection: What Is Dramaturgy? Adopting a less scholarly tack than Cardullo, Rudakoff and Thomson engage diverse practitioners from Canada and the US in 'conversation' about their work. What emerges is a multifaceted picture of this curious profession which, from its origins in Europe, has steadily gained institutional status across North America. While initiated readers will be pleased to see familiar names, like Mark Bly and Anne Cattaneo in the US, Bill Glassco and Urjo Kareda in Canada, the uninitiated will be surprised to learn the comprehensive, often uncredited, role dramaturges have played in facilitating the creation of significant drama (including the work of David French in Canada and George C. Wolfe in the US). Refreshing all around are the ideas of dramaturges who dare to reformulate the basic ways in which plays are written and seen: in response to the geography of the Atlantic provinces, Jenny Munday proposes a delivery service that will send dramaturgical help directly to the playwright's home, while D.D. Kugler in the Western provinces suggests selling subscription tickets to 'the arc of a play,' so audience members can choose to attend anything from rehearsals to a finished production. The thirteen interviews tell an eclectic story, complicating the notion that dramaturges are essentially script readers or research assistants. As individuals discuss their contributions, the reader comes to appreciate the extent of their collaboration with - as Norman Frisch puts it [End Page 361] - 'the art stars' of late twentieth-century theatre. Looking at contemporary theatre history through the eyes of the dramaturge creates a turn, a displacement of the theatrical centre, and consequently affords a close-up look at the 'invisible' politics and processes integral to theatrical production. In their respective introductions, Rudakoff and Thomson stress the importance of establishing a dialogue across 'national borders.' In Canada, as Rudakoff states, dramaturgy is synonymous with the development of new plays, and thus crucially connected to the creation of a new body of national literature. While Thomson also seeks to discover a link between dramaturgy and national identity in the US, what proves more interesting is the ongoing effort, epitomized by production dramaturges at the New York Public Theatre and Los Angeles Festival, to keep pace with incoherent and restless regional identities. (A regrettable omission in Thomson's section is the vital theatre culture of Chicago.) Despite the promise of a comparative framework, the most urgent tensions emerge internally, between East and West, between cultural centres and less densely populated territories. By skirting other lines of potential conflict and pressure, such as those determined by professional borders (which might have been traversed by interviewing playwrights and directors about their experience working with dramaturges), the volume falls short of fully capitalizing on its border-crossing metaphor. Rudakoff and Thomson have targeted a group they call the North American 'pioneers,' the individuals who entered the fledgling profession in the 1970s, and subsequently contributed to its evolution through the 1980s and 1990s. Accordingly, readers may experience these 'aesthetic biographies' as belonging to a recent, but nonetheless nostalgic, past. Many interviewees, both north and south of the border, refer to the impact of television and new media on theatrical practice. None, however, belong to the newest crop of dramaturges whose responsibility it will be to reshape the profession in light of these technological and globalizing trends. In this way, the book mirrors the generation of its authors. A related constraint is that, as a result of trying to convey this history exclusively through interviews (primarily in-house anecdote and assumption), the material will appeal mostly to...

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