Carnegie Mellon Dramaturgy

Carnegie Mellon Dramaturgy The undergraduate Dramaturgy Option at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. Check back here to stay in touch and follow us on Twitter !

The Carnegie Mellon model of dramaturgy is a muscular, critically engaged, artistically vibrant approach to dramaturgy that requires thorough historical understanding, theoretical training broad and deep, and a passionate dedication to creating powerful, relevant performance of all types.

The time: 1974. The place: a fishing boat bobbing in the ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The situation: the me...
06/01/2025

The time: 1974. The place: a fishing boat bobbing in the ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The situation: the mechanical shark (aka “Bruce”) being used to film Jaws has malfunctioned - yet again - and the movie’s three principal actors – Richard Dreyfuss (Hooper in the film), Roy Scheider (Brody), and Robert Shaw (Quint) – find themselves needing to fill time while the crew gets their temperamental co-star up and running again....

The time: 1974. The place: a fishing boat bobbing in the ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The situation: the mechanical shark (aka “Bruce”) being used to film Jaws has malfunctioned & #8211…

Front Porch Theatricals has once again rummaged around in the attic of theater history and dusted off a forgotten musica...
05/23/2025

Front Porch Theatricals has once again rummaged around in the attic of theater history and dusted off a forgotten musical. This time, it’s Baby - originally produced in the early 1980s with a book by Sybille Pearson, music by David Shire, and lyrics by Richard Maltby, Jr. – which tells the story of three couples coping with the challenges of surprise pregnancies....

Front Porch Theatricals has once again rummaged around in the attic of theater history and dusted off a forgotten musical. This time, it’s Baby – originally produced in the early 19…

Embers is a play that’s easy to describe but difficult to categorize. Adapted by Christopher Hampton from a novel by Hun...
05/23/2025

Embers is a play that’s easy to describe but difficult to categorize. Adapted by Christopher Hampton from a novel by Hungarian writer Sandor Marai, the play depicts the reunion, after 41 years, of two men who had once been the closest of friends. As the play opens, Henrik (Sam Tsoutsouvas) awaits the arrival of Konrad (Jack Wetherall) with some nervous apprehension: he tells his housekeeper Nini (Susie McGregor-Laine) that this is his opportunity to finally know “the truth” of a past incident in their shared lives....

Embers is a play that’s easy to describe but difficult to categorize. Adapted by Christopher Hampton from a novel by Hungarian writer Sandor Marai, the play depicts the reunion, after 41 years, of …

Reader, let me get your first concern out of the way: even though basketball – and, particularly, basketball legend LeBr...
04/29/2025

Reader, let me get your first concern out of the way: even though basketball – and, particularly, basketball legend LeBron James – are important to its characters, you yourself really do not need to be a basketball fan – or even know the first thing about basketball – to be swept up into the world of Rajiv Joseph’s King James…...

Reader, let me get your first concern out of the way: even though basketball – and, particularly, basketball legend LeBron James – are important to its characters, you yourself really do not need t…

This weekend, CorningWorks premiered its new dance theater production Stand By – an allegory, which was conceived and ch...
03/31/2025

This weekend, CorningWorks premiered its new dance theater production Stand By – an allegory, which was conceived and choreographed by CorningWorks’ artistic director Beth Corning (who also performs in the show). The theme of this work is “our” relationship to mortality – that is (as the text intoned at the opening observes) the notion that “because we don’t know when we will die we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well” and take our time on earth for granted....

This weekend, CorningWorks premiered its new dance theater production Stand By – an allegory, which was conceived and choreographed by CorningWorks’ artistic director Beth Corning (who al…

I need to start this post by getting something out of the way. Having read Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia ...
03/25/2025

I need to start this post by getting something out of the way. Having read Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – likely more than once in the three decades I’ve been teaching drama – and having seen some (if not all) of the 1966 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (memory’s a bit hazy on that front), I did not feel my life was missing something for never having seen a staged production....

I need to start this post by getting something out of the way. Having read Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – likely more than once in the three decades I’ve been teach…

One of my favorite productions of 2018 was the then-newly formed Aftershock Theater’s production of Orphans, which featu...
03/23/2025

One of my favorite productions of 2018 was the then-newly formed Aftershock Theater’s production of Orphans, which featured actors Max Pavel and Ken Bolden under Ingrid Sonnichsen’s direction in a production that I found “dynamic, mesmerizing, and moving” on multiple dimensions. The same set of collaborators (no longer operating as “Aftershock,” presumably a pandemic casualty) teamed up to produce the recently closed ...

One of my favorite productions of 2018 was the then-newly formed Aftershock Theater’s production of Orphans, which featured actors Max Pavel and Ken Bolden under Ingrid Sonnichsen’s direction in a …

Playwright Noah Haidle has noted that one inspiration for his play Birthday Candles was Thornton Wilder’s one-act play T...
03/18/2025

Playwright Noah Haidle has noted that one inspiration for his play Birthday Candles was Thornton Wilder’s one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner, which speeds through nine decades of Christmas dinners, along with several generations of a wealthy family’s life in their ancestral home, in about thirty minutes of stage time. But it was a different Wilder play that signaled to me through the City Theatre production of ...

Playwright Noah Haidle has noted that one inspiration for his play Birthday Candles was Thornton Wilder’s one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner, which speeds through nine decades of Christmas dinn…

Chatham Baroque is putting its mastery of the early music repertoire on display this weekend in a sort of amuse-boucheco...
03/16/2025

Chatham Baroque is putting its mastery of the early music repertoire on display this weekend in a sort of amuse-bouchecollection of some of its most iconic performances. The concert, entitled “Quintessential Chatham Baroque,” aims to convey the quintessence of the ensemble’s early sound and style via a brief tour through the trio sonata repertoire. Former ensemble member Julie Andrijeski (violin) joins the local core ensemble of Andrew Fouts (violin), Patricia Halverson (viola da gamba), and Scott Pauley (theorbo) to take audiences on this trip down the group’s memory lane....

Chatham Baroque is putting its mastery of the early music repertoire on display this weekend in a sort of amuse-bouchecollection of some of its most iconic performances. The concert, entitled “Quin…

Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind from 1955 is one of those plays that feels ahead of its time on so many fronts that it...
02/13/2025

Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind from 1955 is one of those plays that feels ahead of its time on so many fronts that it’s hard to identify which to focus on. It is, first and foremost, a play about racism and racist representations in the performing arts; but it’s also about working conditions in the theater, the dynamics of the rehearsal room, and the fraught nature of political art that – well-intentioned though it may be – depicts oppression but does not involve the oppressed in its creation....

Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind from 1955 is one of those plays that feels ahead of its time on so many fronts that it’s hard to identify which to focus on. It is, first and foremost, a…

Hypocrisy is in the air, dear Reader. No, I’m not talking about the sh*tshow in Washington, although obviously it hangs ...
02/06/2025

Hypocrisy is in the air, dear Reader. No, I’m not talking about the sh*tshow in Washington, although obviously it hangs thick there; rather, I’m talking about what’s on our local stages, and, in a weird synergy, a common thread of the two solo performances currently running. I’ve already written about the barebones production of Unreconciled, which aims its ire at the self-serving Catholic Church....

Hypocrisy is in the air, dear Reader. No, I’m not talking about the sh*tshow in Washington, although obviously it hangs thick there; rather, I’m talking about what’s on our local stages, and, in a …

It’s an elementary school cheat, but I’m going to start this post with a definition: Unreconciled: 1) not brought into h...
02/04/2025

It’s an elementary school cheat, but I’m going to start this post with a definition: Unreconciled: 1) not brought into harmony, incompatible; 2) not reconciled or mollified; 3) theology not reconciled with or at peace with God. The first two of those definitions aptly describe actor/writer Jay Sefton’s current relationship with the Catholic Church; the third ought certainly to pertain to…...

It’s an elementary school cheat, but I’m going to start this post with a definition: Unreconciled: 1) not brought into harmony, incompatible; 2) not reconciled or mollified; 3) theology&n…

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