Last month I had the pleasure of having a public staged reading of my new full-length play, Burning Up the Dictionary, performed with Vagabond Theatre Group.  This took place at Trident Booksellers & Cafe as part of their "There Will Be Words" reading series.  

Before I say much more I do have to point out that I was very amused to have a play that's largely about language appear in a series called "There Will Be Words." 

Readings are a step in the development of a new play.  I once discussed this process with a computer programmer friend and we realized that we had something significant in common: neither playwrights nor programers really know what they've done until they get to see it running.  The staged reading is a sort of a test run of a play wherein the writer can figure out what changes they intend to make as the work evolves.

This was the first time I've heard the play in its entirety in front of an audience.  I did have the privilege of a table reading of an earlier full draft at the Lark Play Development Center this past November (which I blogged about here) and I got to hear a chunk of it at a Small Theatre Alliance reading back in September (which I also blogged about) after earlier development through Playwrights' Commons' Summer Playground.  All three were really useful experiences, and the script has come a long way because of them, but this last piece was a larger step as it was an opportunity for me to evaluate the current (more advanced) draft under more public conditions and figure out what to do with it next.

This past week while I was the guest-tweeter for the LMDA Twitter Project an undergrad from a school in Utah contacted me as part of an assignment for a dramaturgy course she is taking.  She was tasked with finding a dramaturg and asking them a series of questions about what they do, their methodologies, and how they interact professionally with their various collaborators. 

My first thought was that it's been a little while since I was last billed as a dramaturg on a production, so maybe I should refer her to someone else who regularly holds that job description.  But then I thought about my favorite recurring discussion at the LMDA Conference I attended at the Banff Centre a year and change ago, where the consensus was that dramaturgy is as much a way of thinking as it is a job description, and that ideally everyone involved in a production should be thinking in dramaturgical terms.  Along those same lines, most of the better designers I know across various disciplines generally speak in dramaturgical terms on many levels, so I decided to answer her questions primarily from the perspective of how I apply dramaturgy to fight directing. 

Below are my answers (with minor edits).  I'd also like to thank the student, as her questions made me articulate some stuff I'd been thinking about for a while.  Anyway...