Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The Dramaturgical Wunderkammern

Dramaturgs do not exist merely to save directors, actors, and designers a trip to the library. The information that they compile serves as more than a specialized encyclopedia that explains the historical references, glosses the unfamiliar words, and outlines the aspects of a director's concept. Rather, dramaturgs create organized, but diverse collections of items that provide a means of contemplation for her audience – the director, the designer, the playwright, and the actor. Entering into a dramaturgical installation or reading a dramaturgy research packet should be like entering or opening a Wunderkammern, or cabinet of curiosities. There much be the dual impulse to be awed by the amount and variety of the content and to be drawn into it to discover more or add to what exists.

Close your eyes and imagine a marble rotunda with a compass legend inlaid into the floor. Around the circumference of this vast cylinder are a dozen doors. Each door has a brass plaque engraved with bold text. Behind each door lies another rotunda with another eleven doors; each of those doors have a brass plaque, as well. This dodecagon fractal might expand eternally – an architectural Koch snowflake. The only limitation on this structure, like the seemingly endless Winchester Mystery House, for example, is time; otherwise, each room could inform another into eternity. This building is an architectural metaphor for dramaturgy in practice, and aptly grasps at the infinite possibilities which the field encompasses.

The architecture, though grand, seems insignificant in comparison to the Wunderkammern it holds. This museum of research and creative organization holds the considerations of a collector, the dramaturg. The actor, director, or designer enters this cabinet of dramatic curiosities at its hub, the play itself. Off this hub, Macbeth, for example, the doors may be labeled - “English Early Modern Drama,” “History,” and “Design.” Through the door marked “History,” an interested individual may find further doors marked “The Scottish Monarchy,” “Scottish/English Relations,” and “The Scots at War.” These doors continue on into rooms filled with weapons, death masks, cloaks, and maps, anything and everything that may fit into the ever more specific confines of it labeled door. Dramaturgy, as a discipline, draws from the mindset of the Early Modern private collectors of curiosities in creating its theatrical museum. The dramaturg, as a collector, seeks to create a museum of the minds by which the practitioner can be further inspired.

But, how does the visitor affect the layout of this museum? The director, actor, and designer have different goals when they use the dramaturgical Wunderkammern, and the dramaturg much realize the those goals and organize the information to suit. For a director or designer, the dramaturg may serve as the acquisitions specialist and docent of materials. For the actors, one might serves as an Information Desk clerk, providing a map and general directions, but letting each person take their own path through the museum, picking a choosing what interests and is relevant. A playwright is a different animal altogether. A dramaturg, in working with a playwright, becomes the assistant to the new play's Ashmole or Smithson. The playwright has set the foundation for this collection. He has created the rooms with his scenes, allusions, and word choices, and the job of the dramaturg is to get the museum ready for public consumption. Each practitioner approached the Wunderkammern from a unique angle and with different goals, and it is the job of the dramaturg to meet the needs with specificity.

The dramaturg endeavors to both enlighten and inspire by providing the information necessary to answer a production's demands with accuracy, while also providing information, images, and media intended to inspire the director, designer, and actor to explore the museum as far as its fractal can take them.

The thought process behind creative collection, ingenious taxonomy, and careful presentation marks the difference between a dramaturg and a scholar. They share many traits, but their goals are different. The scholar endeavors to enlighten, but the dramaturg undertakes to inspire. Within a wonder cabinet, there’s no single, prescribed path of analysis, but an excess of intuitive possibilities, and the dramaturg seeks, within the Wunderkammern of a play, to lead the director, designer, actor, or scholar to the exhibits that most serve their creative needs. In creating a traditional dramaturgy packet or in casting the foundation for a devised piece, the dramaturg must aspire to the same ideals as the Early Modern men who created the original Wunderkammern. We must create something that will illume, explain, inspire, and intrigue; we must create the universe of the play in microcosm and open this cabinet of dramaturgical wonders to all those who wish to enter.

The books I plan to read

Whenever I walk into a bookstore or a library, I have an overwhelming bittersweetness come over me. The joy that so many words mingle together in this one place, creating glorious narratives and emotions and histories; sharing knowledge and advice; striving to entertain and enlighten combines in a moment with the realization that I may read only 1% of all these things and that I will go to my grave having missed so much and I want to cry. I sometimes feel I know why the library at Alexandria must have been torched to the ground.

All that being said, I still have many books on the back burner, and here is an ever increasing list. Let me know if any of these are skippable to make room for another!

Monday, September 21, 2009

The Magic Men

Recently, I finished rereading The Prestige by Christopher Priest. I think it ranks as one of my favorite books. It has all the elements I find appealing in a novel - Historical setting, fantasy elements, a twist of some sort, and complex characters. It also has what I would normally consider a strike against it - first person narrative throughout (for five different characters!). However, Priest handles this choice so deftly that the narrative style becomes intrinsic to the story, which is how things should be.

The story itself is a steampunk infused, pseudo late-gothic thriller. The first-person narratives sit like nesting dolls, one within another, and the reader must crack open the shell of Andrew's mystery to get to the Lady Angier's to get to Borden's to get to Rupert's. The revelations occur slowly but satisfyingly, but, once the final mystery is unearthed (literally), the shells snap back, closing both the remaining characters and the reader out of the fantastic history and thrusting them, shivering, into the cold of reality.

The film adaptation, by virtue of its medium must needs differ from the novel, but Pajiba.com's review of The Prestige sums the matter up quite nicely. Daniel Carlson writes, "Magic and movies are a lot alike, notably because some essence of the thing is inherently lost in the dissection. On one level, it’s disappointing to find out the magician’s secret: That’s all? He palmed the coin? He forced the card? Then again, I never was one to subscribe to Mark Twain’s sad belief that learning to pilot a riverboat robbed the Mississippi of its beauty; to me, learning the trick only enhances the showmanship used to pull it off. However, people are often tempted to carry that sense of letdown, of betrayal, over into cinema, especially when it comes to movies built upon misdirection and a killer twist."

He's right in some respects, but what you lose in the genre shift is the overreaching effect that the main characters' actions have on their families into the present day. In the film, the twist satisfies less, not because you can chalk it up to "movie magic" but because the trick is revealed within the tricksters' lifetimes. The book, as is almost always the case, far surpasses the book - allowing the story to exist within various types of text - a history within a diary within a first-person novel narrative. In the film, the jumps back and back and then forward again sometimes lose the viewer and one is left unsure if this is happening "now" or if this is something that has happened before. The film is a lovely addition to the tale of The Prestige; something, perhaps, better enjoyed with the book rather than instead of it.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Growing Up Goth

I grew up on the sunny Central Coast of California, loving the Gothic. Now, I'm not talking the "oh, my upper middle-class life is a veil of tears - I must clothe myself in the mourning weeds of a misunderstood youth and 'Please, Mom, I have to stop at Walgreen's on the way home to buy more semi-permanent black hair dye'." type of Goth, I'm talking misty moors, haunted houses, and brooding gentlemen. So, below is the brief history of my time in the Gothic mode:

The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Little Princess Frances Hodgson Burnett
Rappacinni's Daughter Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Speckled Band Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The short stories of Edgar Allen Poe
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Dracula Bram Stoker
The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield
Gormenghast Mervyn Peake
Pretty much anything by Shirley Jackson - particularly We Have Always Lived in the Castle
The Picture of Dorian Grey Oscar Wilde
Edward Gorey's anything - but I like "The Curious Sofa" best

I'm sure that, with enough time and energy, I could come up with twenty more, but this is a solid start. Now go to the library, and get reading!