Weekly 5 for LMDA (Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas)

For the past decade, I have had the immense good fortune to be a member of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA), the professional organization for dramaturgs. This month (November 2019), they’ve asked me to curate a series of links for their Facebook page. To kick things off, we did a brief Q&A. They made some graphics of the interview for Facebook, but I thought this blog post version would be more accessible.

1) Who are you?

My name is Sara Keats, and I’m dramaturg and communications professional in Seattle, WA. As a dramaturg, I focus primarily on developing new work, supporting productions, and advocating for playwrights. Lately, I’ve been really energized by thinking about how the storytelling intuition I’ve developed as a theatre artist can serve me as a content strategist.

What else, what else? Right now, I am just starting to learn French. I am terrible at it, and I hate being bad at things, which is why I have never learned to play an instrument. It’s very humbling and probably really good for me, ego-check wise. I have a dog, Dziga, who is amazing. I can’t wait for him to be old and mellow enough to come to tech with me.

2) Where do you work?

My day job is at a user experience research and design consulting firm called Blink. For about a year and a half, I was the one-woman marketing department for this 100+ person agency. Now I work on a team of three, which is still pretty small. I do all things marketing — event strategy, thought leadership, social media, and email marketing.

In the theatre part of my career, I’m a freelance dramaturg, script reader, and assistant director. I co-founded and serve as the director of dramaturgy for the Umbrella Project, a new play development organization in Seattle. I’m also an associate artist and advisory board member for ARTBARN. My recent projects included production dramaturgy for The Thanksgiving Play at Seattle Public Theatre and a workshop of Danielle Mohlman’s new play Voyagers.

3) What is your favorite part of working as a dramaturg? What is your least favorite?

There’s so much I love about being a dramaturg. I’ve had a number of artistic and professional identities, but my dramaturgy practice is the only thing in my life that feels like a calling, a vocation — that’s what Ken Cerniglia called dramaturgy at a recent LMDA conference, a vocation, like we’re priests or something. As a kid, actually, I briefly wanted to be a rabbi when I grew up, because I loved the idea that you could help people understand something about themselves and make them feel better by helping them interpret stories. Dramaturgy, at least how I practice it, is so optimistic and necessary in that way: if we can just tell the best version of this story, if we can just get to what I often call “capital-T truths,” then maybe we can really impact people. To believe in dramaturgy is to believe in a rigorous approach to the craft of storytelling while simultaneously trusting the unknowable magic of it. It’s my faith now, essentially. My dramaturgy practice is slow, thoughtful, and intimate, and I think any slow, thoughtful, intimate practice is pretty radical in this particular moment of late-stage capitalism.

To be slightly more chill about it: I also have immense affection for this community. American dramaturgy is an extended intellectual family, and it delights me to see my friends and colleagues at conferences and (most frequently) on Twitter. I love dramaturg Twitter, especially gushing about TV, sharing salary information, and seeing photos of people’s other projects.

My least favorite thing is the financial impossibility of a full-time dramaturgy work, at least for me. I have so much admiration for the people who are making it work, but where I live? With my financial goals? And this anxiety? It just isn’t an option for me. Luckily, I have built this whole other career in marketing, where I get to use my dramaturgy skills in a way a company that’s never used the word “stipend” totally understands.

4) When did you first realize that you were "dramaturging," or when did you first start working as a "dramaturg"?

I was probably doing something like dramaturgy before knew that that’s what it was called. My cousins and I would put on these epic little plays and films when we’d get together for holidays, and I suspect my artistic leadership on those projects had a dramaturgical bent. But I really found dramaturgy my freshman year of college, or rather, my mom found it for me the summer before I started school.

The story, briefly, is this: the summer before leaving for our respective colleges, my best friend and I embarked on a road trip to Quebec City and Montreal, to drink legally, stay in hostels, and attend an arts festival. While we were there, my mother learned that my class registration was past due, and offered to handle it. One afternoon, I sat in the cramped phone booth under the stairs of our Montreal hostel and “uh-huh”d along while my mom ticked through prerequisites and course descriptions she had laid out for me. “I’m putting you in something called drama-gurgy,” she said. “It sounds like you just read some plays and talk about them, and it fulfills your arts requirement.” I must have rolled my eyes a little because I was planning to leave my illustrious high school drama club career behind for a more serious pre-law track, but she was right that I needed an art credit.

Wendy Aron’s Dramaturgy I class changed my life. It was my first exposure to, really, any kind of critical theory and broke my whole world view open. I remember a few weeks in, walking down the stairs with her after class, she said something like, “You know, this could be your major.” Two weeks later, at Parent’s Weekend, I presented my parents with a binder, naturally, of information about the BXA program, which was my undergrad’s program for cross enrolling between colleges, and a new plan to abandon the pre-law strategy to study creative writing and dramaturgy. I am so grateful they got on board, because both my studies of poetry and dramaturgy have reshaped my life, and I’ve been a dramaturg ever since.

5) What theatre tome on your shelf couldn't you live without?

For that Dramaturgy I class, we had to buy this giant critical theory primer edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. So many essays in that book influenced my thinking, and it’s such a huge book, it’s very useful to have around. I have pressed tofu and paneer with that book, it’s held up our couch. But the inside is very good, too.

Close seconds: Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy by my second dramaturgy teacher, Michael Chemers; and Grief Lessons, Anne Carson’s translation of few Euripides plays that is just stunning.