Author Archive for Dylan Southard
Dylan Southard is the co-Artistic Director of needtheater and previously served as their resident dramaturg and literary manager. Production dramaturgy credits for needtheater include: Fatboy, Mercury Fur, Scarcity, tempOdyssey, and The Web. He also directed needtheater's world premiere production of Guided Consideration of a Lamentable Deed. He is the resident dramaturg for The Robey Theatre Company at the Los Angeles Theater Center, where he runs the advanced playwrights lab and helps to oversee new play development. He is also an associate artist with the international, new script development group LoNyLa, and works as a script consultant for theaters, including The Center Theatre Group, The Geffen Playhouse, The Theatre @ Boston Court, and Native Voices at the Autry. He trained for two years under a dramaturgy fellowship at Centerstage in Baltimore and is a graduate of Wesleyan University.
Dramaturgy Case Study: The Secret of Monkey Island
Fairly early on in the computer game The Secret of Monkey Island, our hero, the fantastically named Guybrush Threepwood, is apprehended by power-hungry sheriff Fester Shinetop (the names!!) and fitted for the proverbial cement boots, dropped into the ocean while chained to a giant statue that Threepwood had set out to steal from the Governor’s [...]
The Dramaturg: Live!
At the increasingly frantic intersection of psychology and video game design, there’s a term, “cognitive flow,” which describes the kind of mental state that games strive to induce in their players. The psychologist Mihály Csikszentmihályi first coined the term, describing it as, “the satisfying, exhilarating feeling of creative accomplishment and heightened functioning.” Now, “satisfying” and [...]
Dramaturgy Case Study: Family Guy, episode #198
I’m totally biting Colin’s idea. I can live with that though because if Family Guy is going to the theater world as the setting for an episode, I’m going with them. It sorta pains me to admit it given its plummeting credibility, but Family Guy is a perennial regular in my TV viewing line-up. The [...]
The Dramaturg: Dramaturgy Case Study: J.M. Synge, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and The 1999 British Open
Golf is the best sport to watch hungover. I’ve researched this myself. The pace is unhurried. No one speaks above a whisper. And the dominant image is of small groups of nicely dressed people strolling through vast expanses of manicured lawns. Every golf telecast is like a very long, pastoral lullaby. On the other hand, [...]
The Dramaturg: Dramaturgy Case Study: The Gnawing Horror of Skittles Commercials
Conservatively, I would say that candy comprises about 10% of my total diet. I can’t decide how alarming this is. I think it’s a lot. I spend an uncomfortable amount of time standing over the candy aisle at 7-11, considering the pros and cons of various candy brands. Yet I almost never consider Skittles. I [...]
The Dramaturg: Loving The Silent Tears
A couple of weeks ago, I started to get emails from representatives of the new musical, Loving The Silent Tears, inviting me to attend their red-carpet premiere that was held at the Shrine Auditorium this past weekend. In their words, “We would most appreciate a post-event editorial, complete with visuals, first-hand accounts, and all the [...]
My Best Friend, The Dramaturg
There’s a large chunk of a dramaturg’s job that is vague and amorphous and sorta sounds like bullshit whenever you try to describe it. It’s also the most exciting part of the job, at least for me. And the most challenging. It’s the collision of dramaturg and playwright. This usually comes about when a theater [...]
The Dramaturg: Site-Unspecific
Let’s not talk about theater (we’ll get back to it, trust). Let’s talk about computer games instead. Computer games are far and away the most popular form of narrative entertainment out there. They blow everyone else away. This makes them very influential and it means that the particular way they tell their stories is going [...]
The Dramaturg: The Sad, Beautiful Face of The Loser
I was at a party recently and a friend of mine paid me a (sorta) compliment about these Bitter Lemons posts that also managed to be (sorta) confusing and (sorta) dispiriting. She said something like, “I really like those things you’re writing. I know it’s you because they’re so angry.” Compliment because she likes them, [...]
The Dramaturg: Fringin’
You know that scene in “Caddyshack” where Bushwood Country Club opens up its pool for fifteen minutes to the unruly gang of caddies? That’s kind of what the Hollywood Fringe Festival is like. There’s the distinct feeling that the gates have been thrown open and every theatrical nutbar in the SoCal area has been invited [...]
Death and The Dramaturg
I spend more time thinking about death than pretty much anything else, with the possible exception of the current, past and future states of the Oakland A’s, San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors. I don’t think of this as being especially troubling or indicative of some sort of deeper, psychological problem. I assume everyone [...]
The Dramaturg: Dramaturgy Case Study: “Hey Ladies” music video
“Hey Ladies” was the first single off of Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys’ 1989 follow-up to their massive debut, License to Ill. At the time, the ambitious Paul’s Boutique was considered somewhat of a conceptual mess, a reach for a group that had previously specialized in frat-boy anthems about one’s right to party and drink [...]
The Dramaturg: Totally Uninformed Tony Picks
The Tony Award nominations were announced this week! Double exclamation point!! I struggle mightily to connect the Tony Awards to my daily, professional life. I feel no personal stakes in these awards, no ownership of my industry, no sense of pride in what we as a group have accomplished. I understand that there is a [...]
The Dramaturg: The Curious Case of the Missing Women Writers
Last Monday, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, one of the largest and most respected regional theater companies in the country, announced its 2012-2013 season. Of the twelve shows that will run on its two main stages, not a single one was written by a woman. Only one will be co-directed by a woman. This discrepancy [...]
The Dramaturg: The Most Theatrical Place on Earth
I love Disneyland. The rest of the Disney empire-the movies and merchandise and TV shows and cruise lines, the whole entire lifestyle thing-I could probably do without but I remain semi-obsessed by Disneyland. And frankly, I don’t know why the rest of the theater world isn’t. It’s a theme park. It’s an entire park dedicated [...]
The Dramaturg: Wait, theater sucks?! When did that happen?
Here’s a question: How many Bitter Lemons readers out there are not theater professionals or theater artists of some kind? Not actors or writers or directors or producers or designers or technicians? How many readers have no affiliation whatsoever with the performing arts other than being audience members? Here’s another question: of all of you [...]
The Dramaturg: Live from the LA Weekly Theater Awards!
It’s a big night for the under 99-seat theater crowd. The LA Weekly Theater Awards! If the Ovations are like the Oscars, the Weeklies are like the Independent Spirit Awards. They’re the cooler, kinda quirky awards show. So I’m out of my dramaturgical shell to report in with a running diary. 5:24pm: I peruse the [...]
The Dramaturg: Intrinsic Impact
Yesterday, I attended the inaugural installment of LA STAGE Talks, a series of public presentations and conversations brought to us by the good people at LA STAGE Alliance. The subject was a nationwide, two-year research study called “Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Live Theatre,” and its resulting book, Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the [...]
The Dramaturg: 5 Things More Important to Theater than the Truth
Say what you will about Mike Daisey (and I think we’ve said it all at this point, yes?), he did get legitimate theater into the national news cycle. It’s been pretty exciting. I feel so relevant. So in honor of him and his duplicitous double chin, today we will look at 5 things more important [...]
The Dramaturg: Starring Kobe Bryant as Pozzo
Last week, I read a blog post from a playwright/teacher/dramaturg named Meron Langsner in which he shared a classroom exercise he uses. He asks his students to cast a production of Hamlet with Muppet characters. This is a sneakily genius idea not just because it’s fun and knocks some of the self-seriousness out of theater [...]
The Dramaturg: Out-Theatered
As someone who is not only obliged to read a lot of bad plays but then also to talk about them, I often have occasion to think about bad playwriting in a kind of macro sense. If you read enough of them, you begin to see commonalities that say a lot about the particular challenges [...]
The Dramaturg: Developmental Hell
I said last week that The Fury of the Dramaturg would return. Consider yourself warned… This past weekend, there was a big gathering of dramaturgs in Washington, D.C., convened by the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage. As is usually the case when dramaturgs meet en masse, there was a fair amount of [...]
The Dramaturg: 5 Theater Things Currently Making Me Happy
I feel like I’ve been kind of a bummer so far here at Bitter Lemons. All I’ve done is complain and pick fights. So, I apologize. It’s February. There’s no good sports on. I get cranky. Forgive me. But it’s like 80 degrees in Santa Monica today and I’m feeling jovial, so let’s turn things [...]
The Dramaturg: The Devolution of the Modern Day Theatre Critic
None other than our esteemed editor Colin Mitchell weighed in this week on the subject of dramaturgy. Believe me, any time that dramaturgy is mentioned anywhere without someone making the “dramaturd” joke, it is a win. But if you’ll permit me a little point-counterpoint, I will say that before we start giving dramaturgy jobs away [...]
The Dramaturg: On Twitter, or The Marketing of Theater to Kittens
News broke last week that The Los Angeles Times will be severely curtailing their theater listings. Even amid the extended and by now predictable death throes of the newspaper industry and its arts coverage in particular, this most recent development seemed to really alarm people. This is because the aforementioned curtailing would include listings online. [...]
Enter The Dramaturg
Hello. I’m Dylan. I’m new here. Okay then, enough chit-chat. Let’s get started: I’m of the opinion that, right now, the most commonly understood fact about dramaturgy and dramaturgs is that no one understands what dramaturgy is or what dramaturgs do. And this haziness also applies to the dramaturgs themselves, who spend as much time [...]
