ABSTRACT

Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgy offers fresh perspectives on how dramaturgs can support a production beyond rigid disciplinary expectations about what information and ideas are useful and how they should be shared.

The sixteen contributors to this volume offer personal windows into dramaturgy practice, encouraging theater practitioners, students, and general theater-lovers to imagine themselves as dramaturgs newly inspired by the encounters and enquiries that are the juice of contemporary theater. Each case study is written by a dramaturg whose body of work explores important issues of race, cultural equity, and culturally-specific practices within a wide range of conventions, venues, and communities. The contributors demonstrate the unique capacity of their craft to straddle the ravine between stage and stalls, intention and impact.

By unpacking, in the most up-to-date ways, the central question of “Why this play, at this time, for this audience?,” this collection provides valuable insights and dramaturgy tools for scholars and students of Dramaturgy, Directing, and Theater Studies.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

Dramaturgy in motion

section Section One|28 pages

Permission to speak

chapter 1|9 pages

Deconstructing our perspectives on casting

An “inter-article” with Hana S. Sharif

chapter 2|10 pages

Dramaturgy as prophecy

Facing Our Truth and dramaturging the Predominantly White Institution

chapter 3|6 pages

The dramaturgy of the classroom

section Section Two|26 pages

Taking up positions – playwright/dramaturg

chapter 4|7 pages

The dramaturgy of Black culture

The Court Theatre’s productions of August Wilson’s Century Cycle

chapter 5|6 pages

Embodied dramaturgy

The development of the indigenous play, The Patron Saint of the Lost Children

chapter 6|6 pages

The name (isn’t a) game

New explorations in trans applied theater

chapter 7|4 pages

Translation and form

section Section Three|40 pages

Who’s “at the table”?

chapter 8|14 pages

Crossing The Line

chapter 9|5 pages

Depth Perception

Re-thinking social roles, staging Asperger’s from the inside

chapter 10|10 pages

Decolonizing “equity, diversity, and inclusion”

Strategies for resisting white supremacy

chapter 11|8 pages

Dramaturging revolution

Diana Oh’s {my lingerie play} 2017: the concert and call to arms!!!!!!!!! the final installation

section Section Four|30 pages

Cultural landscapes, past, present, and future

chapter 12|10 pages

The stakes of expanding a cultural landscape

Dramaturging, adapting, and performing Gao Xinjian’s The Other Shore

chapter 13|7 pages

Visit to a zoot planet

UCSC suits up in 2017