Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy

by Michael Mark Chemers, Faedra Chatard Carpenter (Foreword by)

Overview

A new edition of the celebrated introduction to dramaturgy training and practice
 
Since its release in 2010, Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy has become the international standard for dramaturgy training and practice. The first textbook introduced students to the “ghost light” model of dramaturgy—a creatively engaged, artistically vibrant approach that draws on extensive knowledge of theatre history, practice, and theory—and this second edition brings the conversation up to the present.
 
Over three parts, author and theory creator Michael Mark Chemers helps students explore the world of the dramaturg. Part 1 describes what dramaturgs do, presents a detailed history of dramaturgy, and summarizes many of the critical theories needed to analyze and understand dramatic texts. Part 2 teaches students to read, write, and analyze scripts through a twelve-step program with suggestions about how to approach various genres and play structures. The final part delves into the relationships dramaturgs forge and offers useful advice about collaborating with other artists. It also includes ideas for audience outreach initiatives such as marketing and publicity plans, educational programs, program notes and lobby displays, and more.   
 
Perfectly suited for the undergraduate theatre classroom, this holistic guide includes chapter exercises for students to practice the skills as they learn. The new edition also incorporates recent theory and new resources on multimedia performance and dramaturgy in the digital age. As the field of dramaturgy continues to shift and change, this new edition of Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy prepares theatre students and practitioners to create powerful, relevant performances of all types.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809338887
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	02/23/2023
Series:	Theater in the Americas
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Michael Mark Chemers founded the Production Dramaturgy Program at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama. He is a professor of dramatic literature and theatre arts and the chair of the Department of Performance, Play & Design at the University of California Santa Cruz. His works include The Monster in Theatre History: This Thing of Darkness and Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show, winner of the ATHE Outstanding Book Award (Honorable Mention) of 2009.

Read an Excerpt

Asking Questions

The history of dramaturgy since the 1800’s is a tumultuous one. The act of dramaturgy (getting to grips with the deeply transformative power of performance) has become increasingly important to theatres worldwide, particularly since the reconstruction of Europe after World War II (a process in which theatre played a significant role). But the question of who exactly carries that work out, and in what capacity and to what extent, has manifested in many ways in different regions around the world. The proliferation of regional theatres in the United States in the 1960’s fostered a generation of great American playwrights and required a specialist on staff charged with developing new writing. Prestigious universities began to instruct dramaturgs and the international society known as the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) was formed in the 1985. Nevertheless, although individual dramaturgs like Mark Bly gained great prominence, dramaturgy as a profession was too often considered an over-specialization, a luxury pursuit, or even a second prize for intellectually-inclined theatre artists who couldn’t make their way as directors or playwrights.

Since the late 1990s, when I was pursuing my own training in this discipline, the artistic centrality of dramaturgy has become far better understood, thanks to the diligence of dramaturgs at all levels. Dramaturgs were increasingly enlisted to work with some of the nation’s top directors, designers, actors, and producers. Less commonly did we find we had to answer the question “What is a dramaturg?” and the more often we found ourselves engaged in serious discussions of history, theory, practice, and aesthetic philosophy. The dramaturg began to get a reputation as the go-to when a play is in trouble. Dramaturgy training expanded explosively in universities, and books on dramaturgy began to proliferate as well, not only new books in English but translations, so that English-speaking dramaturgs could pursue their growing curiosity about what was happening outside their borders.

The first edition of Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy was one of those books, and it became an early part of a wave of deeply-considered and hugely useful volumes for the phronetic student of performance. These books covered meditations on the practice of dramaturgy itself, studied the effects of dramaturgs on companies, surveyed world historical trends in theatre and performance, and reached out to create new dramaturgies for digital worlds, dance, and the “postdramatic”. Ghost Light was translated into Korean and Farsí, and even appeared as an audiobook.

Today, dramaturgy is enjoying a Golden Age around the world, although dramaturgs operate in many different ways and in many different contexts. In places like South America, Australia, and South Africa, dramaturgs struggle with the horrific legacies of colonialism. In Eastern Europe, dramaturgs guide an already-robust theatre culture into a period of post-Soviet depoliticization, while in more repressive countries dramaturgs find themselves working to navigate (or subvert) state censorship. India and Japan have studied theatre seriously for centuries but only recently have begun to foster specialist “dramaturgs,” while in Latin America the position is often indistinguishable from the playwright.

So, whereas in my own living memory dramaturgy was barely understood, it is becoming a necessary component of the work of theater artists around the world. That Ghost Light is able to come out in a second edition says a lot about the impact dramaturgs have made. We are not yet as completely indispensable as directors (another new-ish tradition in the long history of theatre), but dramaturgy is increasingly recognized worldwide as a vital, and artistically fulfilling, specialization in the modern theatre.

[end of excerpt]

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Foreword by Faedra Chatard Carpenter
Preface to the Second Edition 
Preface to the First Edition
Acknowledgments  

Part One: Philosophy
1. What the #$%@ Is a Dramaturg?
2. Historicizing Dramaturgy
3. Power Plays
Part Two: Analysis
4. The Twelve-Step Program for Script Analysts
5. Form Follows Function
6. Why This Play Now?
Part Three: Practice
7. New Plays
8. The Company
9. Audiences
Appendixes
A: The Casebook
B: The Dramaturg’s Library
C: Journals, Periodicals, and Online Databases
D: Accessing Original Texts Online
E: Recommended Play Anthologies

Notes   

Editorial Reviews

This book documents the rigor, intellectual research, and collaborative skills required of a practicing dramaturg today.  Students and professionals alike will find illumination of lasting value in Ghost Light.”
 —Elizabeth Bradley, New York University
 
“Ghost Light offers students of dramaturgy a welcome introductory foothold. . . . Michael Chemers combines an academically rigorous overview of the field’s historical discourses with an entirely practical guide to everyday dramaturgical work.” 
—Ken Cerniglia, Dramaturg and Literary Manager, Disney Theatrical Productions

 

From the Publisher