A new and challenging job in many U.S. regional theatres is that of dramaturg - sometimes spelled that way, sometimes with a final "e." Spelled either way, my 2001 Oxford (Abridged) Dictionary of Current English doesn’t even list the word. My 1960’s Random House unabridged defines "dramaturge" as "a dramatist," which doesn’t in any way cover the job as practiced in a growing number of 21st century regional theatres.

I asked Dan Gotch, who serves as dramaturg for Pacific Repertory Theatre, to explain what it is he does and who he does it for. He admits the subject not only needs clarifying - but could probably do with a bit less academic nit-picking. "I belong to the Dramatists Guild of America. They spent four issues just arguing about the spelling! With or without an e? . . . For me these are people with a lot of time on their hands!"

Dan opts for no final e, however, mainly because that links the job with its Teutonic roots in regional theaters of Germany associated with the 18th century career of Gotthold Lessing. Back then, a highly-subsidized local dramaturg might do anything from translating foreign language plays for local production to working out a whole season of academically related works. Often he supervised development of new scripts. Sometimes he even auditioned and hired actors.

It’s a lot less complicated and demanding than that at Pacific Rep. "The bottom line for me," Dan explained, "is that the dramaturg is a literary manager. At a place like Ashland, you’re dealing with a whole staff, but what I see myself doing is more literary. . . I read tons of plays, play reviews, keep up with the New York and London Times theatre reporting.

"Basically, I search out and recommend scripts. It’s more literary than hands on. Of course, I almost always attend first readings, and I’m on hand at rehearsals from time to time. I’m there for tech week. All those times and whenever there are questions, I give directors notes. I write the notes for the programs. But for us, it’s basically a literary function."

Asked exactly how a dramaturg serves the director, Dan described it as "being a sort of middle-man between director and author. You help him or her get things clear so that the action of the play will be understood by the audience. If the writer’s alive, maybe he or she can be there for the whole run, maybe only for the beginning, maybe not at all. You are really there as a kind of advocate for the playwright. When the director and cast run into a problem in rehearsal, I either solve it from what I know from research, or try to go directly to the author for an answer. It saves the director from having to do all that for himself."

Dan sees the work of the dramaturg in some regional theatres as taking on a load of background, research and preparation work that has traditionally been the job of the director. He believes this has happened because of increasing recourse to what he calls "swift Equity contracts" - arrangements which bring in an already-extended director and expect a finished production "four weeks from sit-down." Committed to a succession of assignments all over the country, such a director will tend to expect the dramaturg to carry out advanced production plans, character analyses and historic understandings directors used to prepare for themselves.

THE BEARD OF AVON

"Fortunately, we don’t tend to operate in that way. I’m not so sure as a director I would want the kind of dramaturg who does all the work for me. At PacRep, we’re generally dealing either with in-home directors or ones we hire for two or three plays in the course of one repertory season.

"When it comes to actors, it’s usually a matter of questions that arise as they develop a part in rehearsal. With Louis Zorich and Olympia Dukakis there were questions about Russian terms and customs for THE CHERRY ORCHARD. Last year in THE BEARD OF AVON, there were Elizabethan references actors didn’t get that I was able to research and explain. It was the same with some of the Irish material in

STONES IN HIS POCKET

STONES IN HIS POCKET. I usually found answers there too - but in one case, try as I might, I couldn’t explain the word or reference myself. . . I guess you don’t win them all.

"Technicians in general don’t need much help. They do an awful lot of advance research to insure their designs are authentic."

Part of the dramaturg’s work also tends to be educational. "Apart from program notes, if you have after-show discussions, often the dramaturg will moderate those discussions. We originally thought we’d have those, but we decided the place where discussion usually happens best and probably ought to happen is by the audience and between members of the audience. . . Educationally, we might hope someday to develop a program for having a dramaturg go into schools."

THE WIER

Commenting on current assignments, Dan is enthusiastic about his research on THE WOMAN IN BLACK, a thriller he himself will be directing later this year at Pacific Rep. "It’s from a novel by Susan Hill, and if memory serves the script was written in the mid 1980s from a novel Susan wrote in 1983 as an established writer of British pot boilers. "The playwright, Stephen Mallatratt, I’ve just discovered, was one of the major authors of the long-running English soap opera "Coronation Street," which explains why WOMAN IN BLACK is so well constructed. With that kind of play the information is accessible and easy to use."

RETREAT FROM MOSCOW

Dan has directed a number of plays for PacRep including THE WIER in 2003 and RETREAT FROM MOSCOW in 2005.

"TIMON OF ATHENS is something Ken Kelleher has wanted to do for years. There probably isn’t a bit he himself hasn’t thoroughly researched. With John Farmanesh, I was there for the first reading of MEASURE FOR MEASURE, and he’ll probably be asking me stuff as we go along.

"I find it a fascinating job, but I have to admit as with so many things with our theatre, I never set out to do it. I’ve never taken a class in dramaturging. I was simply writing the notes and getting the rights for the plays, and then I began to discover there was this thing called ‘literary managers and dramaturgs.’ So that’s what I became, and it’s turned out to be quite a big profession in the theatre world."