Student Blog: The Role of Research in Theater

Up until last December, I had no idea what being a dramaturg was or what it entailed.

Research. Lots and lots of research, I very quickly learned.

For the past three and a half months, I've been reading everything I could find about Stephen Sondheim, James Lapine, and Into the Woods. As I mentioned incredibly briefly in my last post, I've been working as both an assistant stage manager and dramaturg on my department's spring musical, Into the Woods, and the ASMing has been taking up a large portion of my time. Bouncing between my classwork and my dramaturgical work when I could was a challenge, but I can finally say I've completed my dramaturgical packet for the cast! And what an experience it was.

Three books (Meryle Secrest's Sondheim, Finishing the Hat and its companion Look, I Made a Hat, both written by Sondheim himself), one documentary (Six by Sondheim), one movie musical (the 2015 version of Into the Woods), two or three academic essays, multiple online articles, six (and counting) bloody fairy tales, twenty-seven rehearsals, and countless "can I speak from the dramaturgical point of view"s later, the compiled information about Into the Woods is ready for the cast to look at, thirty-four pages of headers and footnotes and blockquotes, but at least there's a hyperlinked table of contents for them to easily navigate everything I threw at them.

I haven't left them high and dry while I've been working on this. I hope. Uploading the biographical information of Lapine was relatively painless, and dropping in all of the condensed information about Sondheim was less painless but still easy enough. When I got to the fairy tale section of the packet, though, I began to pause. The original Brothers Grimm fairy tales are bloody enough, but I was also digging through all of the works that they had looked at. Many of the original details were even darker. Keeping in mind that we're all people with our own triggers, I very carefully went through each fairytale I had found and wrote out content warnings.

A content warning here for body horror, cannibalism, mutilation, rape, and implied necrophilia. Please skip to the next paragraph if you find any of those things to be disturbing or triggering. In my research, I rediscovered the story of Cinderella, in which the stepsisters cut off their heel and toe in order to fit into the slipper. I wrongly assumed that would be the most disturbing thing I found. On the contrary. One telling of Little Red Riding Hood places an ogre, not a wolf, in Grandmother's bed. Before eating the grandmother, he hid parts of her body around the house. Upon Little Red's arrival (in this version, dubbed Little Red Hat), he tricked her into eating them. But what I personally found to be the most disturbing was Giambattista Basile's version of Sleeping Beauty, entitled Sun, Moon, and Talia. Instead of kissing the sleeping princess awake, her rescuer, the king, has sex with her while she's unconscious, and then she bears his twins while she's still in her magical sleep. Her rescuer's wife, the queen, gets suspicious. After finding out he's had an 'affair,' she orders the children (Sun and Moon), along with their mother Talia, to be killed and cooked and fed to the king. The story does have a happy ending but... wow.

I had to very carefully navigate some of the research I was doing in order to make it presentable for the cast to accept. While we are all college students who are living in a tumultuous world, I do feel as though it's my duty to make sure that everything is presented in a way that is easily digestible for everyone. That included formatting, too! Since I knew there would be a great deal of information in the final document, I divided everything into that hyperlinked table of contents. The subheadings for the "Fairytales" portion total six, and there's about twice that under the "Into the Woods" category.

I may give the cast a brief rundown of what I've written, musical motif analyses and all, or I may give them a pathetic look and say "Please, just look at it" right before they leave for the night tomorrow. Similarly to my ASMing, I had no idea what I was getting into with becoming a dramaturg. But I'm enjoying the ride, and can't wait to answer any more questions the cast might come up with.