Auditions and Dramaturgy

Hello! This is Clara Giebel, back again for another summer of blogging about the ASC Theatre Camps. We’re only a couple days in, and already we have settled ourselves into Mary Baldwin College campus, climbed hundreds of stairs, laughed, smiled, made new friends, and caught up with friends from the past. Additionally, we have made it through auditions, casting, and our first read-through of the plays, all with much laughter and enthusiasm. 


I love auditions in this camp because they overflow with trust, love, and potential. Monday morning we opened with Symmonie Preston, our new Director of College Prep Programs,  leading the campers to give and receive their trust to each other. Standing in a circle, the campers and all the staff promised to each other, “If you fall I will catch you.” Rather than beginning with aggressiveness or vicious competition, we started with trust and went from there. The audition progressed from trust to love, as the counselors taught all the campers a musical round to the words of Hamlet’s poem,

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt thou the sun doth move,

Doubt truth to be a liar

But never doubt I love.

Once they’d learned the song, the campers broke into little groups of three or four, then each group performed the song with their own interpretation. One trio meowed their song instead of singing it. One trio impersonated Charlie’s Angels. One trio made their song into a story of rejected love. Other groups choreographed dance moves or broke into harmony. We heard the same song at least fifteen times, and I don’t think any of us watching had any opportunity to get bored. 

After the song, the campers did a series of movement centered performances based off of some lines of each of the three plays, and finally all the campers performed their ten lines of prepared text. It is such a privilege to be in a room surrounded by young people who are just brimming with enthusiasm for Shakespeare and his language. We are all flying on potential at this point in the camp, imagining the fantastic things that these young people will achieve, readying ourselves for the work ahead to make the ideas come true. 

Before I leave off for today, I wanted to answer some possible queries about the dramaturgy of this camp. The difficulty in explaining “dramaturgy” lies in the abundance of definitions. For an exuberant list of some possible answers to the question, “what is dramaturgy?” you can explore the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (LMDA) website: http://www.lmda.org/what-dramaturgy-few-possibilities. Usually, a dramaturg assists a production by doing research so that the the actors and directors have a strong foundation in the text and context of the play. For our camps, the dramaturgs gloss (add in the footnotes for) our cut scripts, put together a binder full of pictures and historical backgrounds, provide some literary analysis of the plays, and attend the rehearsals to stay right in the middle of the action. 

That’s all for now, but please keep checking back for more throughout the week. Our regular schedule begins on Tuesday!

Dramaturging for ASCTC

Here is a post from one of our beloved dramaturgs, Paul Rycik, sharing what it means to be a dramaturg and some of his experiences in the Timon rehearsals

In some ways, a dramaturg is like the twine of the theatre world- at first people don’t know what to do with it, but it always comes in handy. The job itself is often not very well defined, which means that a dramaturg’s responsibilities change on a daily basis. Therefore, when I came to work at ASCTC, I knew that the best policy was to expect the unexpected and sure enough, I found myself doing a huge variety of tasks before and after rehearsals began, from creating annotated notes in the script, to writing character descriptions, to creating a dramaturgy website (https://sites.google.com/site/timonofathensdramaturgy/home).

I view a dramaturg primarily as a resource for the actors. When rehearsals began, I made myself useful by giving workshops and lectures on the play and providing packets and other information to the actors. I also served as a text coach; each actor came to me and we would discuss the meaning in the text, and talk about how to apply those ideas in their performances The campers listened very carefully to everything I had to say and brought a great deal of creativity. One particular area I feel we had great collaboration on was implied, or embedded, stage directions, an instance in which subtle cues in the text direct an actor to gesture or laugh or move in some way.

Together, the director, the two counselors, the actors, and I have mined this play’s text and discovered a treasure trove of rich humor, social commentary, and incredibly complex characters. We spent a great deal of time figuring out what each character is saying and why he or she talks the way they do. Some characters in this play speak in a very long-winded manner, using hyperbolical text, noting these tendencies gives the actor clues about their character’s personality. Other characters like Timon and Apemantus frequently speak antithetically, juxtaposing words like “dark” and “light,” possibly because the characters wish to see chaos in Athens. All of the actors are working to find the richness in the text and use it to create and costume their characters in very imaginative ways.

One of my favorite moments of the rehearsal process was the day the actors created a framing device for the play. The director wanted to create the market place of Athens for the first scene and gave the actors free reign to interpret how to represent it onstage. The actors found a perfect iconic device to represent many of the play’s themes of poverty and wealth: cardboard boxes. They strew the stage with boxes to represent shops, stands, goods, even the shields of the peacekeeping soldiers. Characters ran in and out, pressing their wares, and it became apparent that the Athens of this play is a place where most residents are profoundly poor. Likewise, the boxes became Timon’s banqueting table and the cave he retreats to in the second half of the play, which showed the cast members’ great imagination and ingenuity. It was at this moment that I knew I was involved with a great production and that this group of actors was well suited to taking on this challenging and difficult play.

Dramaturgs don’t usually get thanks for their work, since everything they do is invisible to critics and audience members, but I feel my reward is seeing these talented young performers take some of my ideas and use them to make their own performances richer to create a wonderful piece of theatre. The talent and enthusiasm of these wonderful performers and the chance to work alongside Jeremy, Caroline, and Francis on this production of Timon is certainly a reward in itself. I truly hope that when you see this production, you see its value is worth its weight in gold.