Tartuffe - "Diary of a Dramaturg"

by: Julianna Fultineer, B.A. Theatre Studies: Dramaturgy, '13

“DramaWHAT???” is a question/statement that I hear just about every day. Sometimes, I even get this question from other theatre people. The role of dramaturg is a relatively new one in the American theatre scene. While it is seamlessly integrated in Europe, the necessity of a curator of information pertaining to a production has not totally taken hold in the United States. For this reason, I am often greeted with quizzical and confused looks when I state my major here at Emerson College. The ultimate expression of this came just a few weeks ago, as I was wrapping up my dramaturgical work for the Emerson Stage production of Tartuffe.

As the Saturday matinee performance came to an energetic close, I popped up out of my seat to start the obligatory “Talk-Back”. This is an opportunity for members of the cast and creative team to share their thoughts and answer audience questions about the show. As I did my “Good-afternoon-everyone-I’m-the-dramaturg” spiel, it occurred to me that many of the audience members were, in fact, saying “DramaWHAT?!” in their heads. This turned out to be exactly the case, as one audience member raised their hand and asked “Excuse me, but what does the dramaturg DO?” This brought about a brief moment of dumbfoundedness, followed by my attempt to summarize the various things that I partook in during my role as dramaturg for Tartuffe. It made me think: Where did I start? Where did I end? How did I get there? Here is what I came up with:

I started with the text, as many dramaturgs do. Tartuffe is a classic. It is well known and often produced, so I was familiar with other translations. The adaptation by Charles Edward Pogue, however, required special attention. As it says on the cover page, it is “freely adapted” and can theoretically be set in any time and place. Because of this, I had to pay extra attention to the new words and the unique quality that our adaptation had about it. After doing the usual “what does this word mean?”, “what are the themes/conventions here” type work, it was time to move outward to the world of the play, something that was largely created through director Benny Sato Ambush’s vision for the piece.

During our first meeting way back in May, Benny informed me that our Tartuffe would take place in the 1920’s United States on Long Island’s Gold Coast. I was immediately struck by the specificity of this vision, and knew it would pose a lot of dramaturgical research and challenges. I immediately began thinking of The Great Gatsby and the colorful, dynamic world created by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I started by thinking about what I, as an average theatregoer with (at that time) limited knowledge of the 1920’s would expect to see, and what would create the world that I could relate to. After establishing those surface concepts, it was time to move deeper in and discover the specific events and details that would make this world work with a four hundred-year-old text. This purpose of all this is, obviously, to share my findings and interpretations with the team.

The “Talk-Back” or post-show discussion, or whatever you are calling it, is often the only time where the dramaturg actually takes the stage. Until this moment, “dramaturg” is probably just a strange, awkward sounding word that people have seen in the program and wondered (or not) about. If this is the case, why wouldn’t they ask the question “What does a dramaturg do?”. As soon as the audience member asked it, I realized what an important question it was.

I was, for their sake, not able to say all of this to the lovely audience of Tartuffe’s Saturday matinee crowd, and even what I have written here only begins to encapsulate the diverse, and sometimes seemingly random, array of tasks that a production dramaturg undertakes. I did, however, try to convey some of what I do, so that those 10 or 15 people will never have to ask “DramaWHAT?!” again.

Tartuffe ran from October 4-7th, 2012 in the Greene Theater.