Inside A.C.T.

posted by Katie May, A.C.T. Publications & Literary Intern  Katie writes about her experience doing dramaturgical research for the Round and Round the Garden edition of A.C.T.’s performance guide series, Words on Plays . And her correspondence with Simon Murgatroyd, personal archivist to playwright Alan Ayckbourn, which grew out of that research. Dramaturgical work on a play is an interesting process. It begins (of course) with reading the play, but it’s a different kind of reading from reading for pleasure or critical evaluation, a deeper reading informed by the question: What information would deepen the audience’s experience of this playwright’s work? After the reading comes the research. Which begins, like most research nowadays, with a Google search and quick trip to Wikipedia, but quickly extends to trips to the library and explorations of the archives of obscure literary journals in a quest to bring our audience precisely what can’t be found with a Google search a...