When I started my theatre career, Canadian theatres didn’t have dramaturges on staff. Once a playwright had written his play, and most often it was his, the director would assemble the actors and everyone would read the script. Day one of rehearsals, the cast would sit around offering suggestions, contributing lines, compliments, corrections, criticisms, alternative visions, various levels of hope and despair, and the important dramaturgical query, “Why isn’t my part bigger?” No one had yet proposed the thoughtful and effective methodology of dramaturgy which consists of asking the playwright unselfish, open-ended questions. Playwrights who were nervous about that ‘first reading’ with the cast had good reason to be. Often, the most persistent or loudest voice in the room won the scene. {In that milieu, a lot of female playwrights skipped off and created their own companies.}

Then theatres got money. Or, more to the point, the granting agencies got money and the top down directive was to invest it in the creation of a canon of Canadian plays. So, theatres began to build playwrights’ units that existed as laboratories designed to produce work for production. Well, why else would you invest in the process?

Some theatre companies became almost exclusively dedicated to the task of filling their seasons with new work. Most eventually created a demand for that new work; you get the audience you play for. The Blyth Festival, founded in a town of under one thousand people, exists as testimony to the notion that good art can make of itself a necessity.

The results were of course mixed. It is not an easy thing to write a play.

Most theatre scholars grant Gotthold Ephraim Lessing the distinction of being the profession’s first practicing dramaturge. Running a theatre and writing about plays between 1767 and 1769, Lessing ‘blogged’ copiously about the plays he produced and was a passionate advocate of the art form.

Plays, Lessing believed, would improve the intellectual life of the community, would prompt debates on questions of morality, and were thus an essential component of the fabric of culture.

The first real dramaturge of note in Canada was probably Urjo Kareda. Though he never bore the title, he had an eye and an ear for the good new play. He recognized craft in structure and dialogue, was sensitive to a unique voice, appreciated the twisted or original perspective, and he was both eager and delighted to discover the artist who was miraculously willing to devote their life to writing plays. Urjo Kareda also read a lot of plays. In the hundreds. Which is probably still the task that will best equip one for dramaturgy. And I don’t mean just good plays. Reading plays that will never make it to the stage is essential training for a dramaturge. (Just ask your local theatre for a chunk of the slush pile. You never know, apparently Kareda’s pile of unsolicited manuscripts yielded Judith Thompson’s White Biting Dog.)

So, now we have dramaturges and play development centres where plays are written and workshopped, and we have play creation labs that propel work to the stage, or stall the process before the humiliation of a defeat at the box office. For the most part, the system works. Plays are being published, winning awards, and every now and then a play leapfrogs across the country from theatre to theatre leaving fire in its wake.

But these successes occur in pockets, hotbeds where development flourishes. Is Ottawa one of them? Does everybody get excited when a theatre company in our city announces the premiere of a new play?

How often in the course of a theatre season is such an announcement made? Do we even talk about the necessity of producing new work for our stages?

The lifeblood of theatre is the new play, not the old favorite. For all new plays announce a message for their times.

New plays illuminate a behavior, a human activity or tendency that when isolated and imbued with the urgency of crafted interaction demands our examination. Crafted interaction: that is the playwright’s job.

To examine the past is important, but if we do not write and produce plays that offer a window on the way we live now, we will not understand the future we are unfolding.

Yes, new plays can be that important. And so can dramaturgy. Because, aside from reading her one hundred plays – for starters – the dramaturge is an advocate.

So, the work of the dramaturge is to read plays, find playwrights, participate in the mechanisms that support script development, ask the right questions, and commit to the task of getting new work to the stage. Or as one dramaturge said to me once: I really had to fight for that one.

Mary Luckhurst’s book Dramaturgy is subtitled “A Revolution in Theatre”. That’s what it takes. If you care about this art form, you will write for it and you will fight for it.