The
Dramaturg's
Workshop
What to Expect
Each session is tailored to your unique creative goals and the demands of your script and/or score.
The outline below serves as a basic overview.
1 - Each consultation begins with a brief conversation to establish your aims for the piece and its current stage of development.
2 - A close reading and dramaturgical analysis.
My training is in dramaturgy, not just structural notes — so the conversation about your work can range well beyond "does the plot work?" Depending on what the piece needs, I might draw on:
Narrative shape
...how the story is built and paced, and where its own internal logic wants to go, even in places you got there by instinct rather than plan.
Character and voice
...whether the people (or the songs, if it's a musical) on the page want something distinct, and whether the version of them speaking right now is the truest one you've got.
Genre and form
...what tradition the piece is in conversation with, knowingly or not, and whether it's honouring that conversation or ready to break from it.
Theme
...the question underneath the plot: what the piece is actually asking, and whether every scene, or every song, is really in service of it.
Ideas and context
...the wider intellectual, historical or political currents your work sits inside, and how that context might shape the way an audience receives it today.
Language and texture
...rhythm, subtext, the word-by-word (or note-by-note) craft, not just the shape of the whole.
Stageability
...how it behaves in a rehearsal room or in front of an audience, which is sometimes a different question from how it reads on the page.
3 - Our 2 hour in person session.
The session itself is a conversation, not me reading a report at you. We'll work through whatever the analysis revealed as most useful for where the piece, and you, are right now: sometimes that means starting wide, at the shape of the whole, before we zoom into particular scenes or songs; sometimes it means starting exactly where you're stuck and working outward from there.
Either way, the two hours are led as much by your questions as mine, and we'll spend more time on what's genuinely holding the piece back than cataloguing everything that's already working.
If there's music involved, we can listen to it together rather than just talk around it.
You'll leave with a clear sense of what to tackle next, not forty notes, but the two or three that actually matter, so you know exactly where to put your redrafting energy.