Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 159
Spotlight
Dramaturg Jerry Patch*
One of America’s leading and longtime dramaturgs, Jerry
Patch has played a role in the development of four Pulitzer
Prize–winning plays (David Lindsay Abaire’s Rabbit Hole,
Donald Margulies’s Dinner with Friends, Margaret Edson’s
Wit, and Lynn Nottage’s Ruined), four Pulitzer-nominated
ones (Amy Freed’s Freedomland, Richard Greenberg’s
Three Days of Rain, and Donald Margulies’s Sight Unseen
and Collected Stories), and about 150 others.
Most of this work took place in his three-plus decades
as head dramaturg at South Coast Repertory in Southern
California, but he also spent eight seasons as artistic
director of the Sundance Theatre Program in Utah, which
includes the noted Sundance Playwrights Laboratory, and
he was co–artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre
for three years until, in 2008, he was invited to New
York to assume the post of director of artistic development
at the distinguished Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), where
your author interviewed him for this profile.
One of Patch’s greatest successes was discovering
Margaret Edson’s Wit in the mid-1990s. It was one of the
hundreds of plays submitted annually “over the transom”
(unsolicited, unrepresented by an agent, and written by a
beginning playwright unknown to the theatre’s management)
to South Coast Repertory.
“When we got it,” Patch said, “its core was there, but
elements in the first draft showed the playwright’s inexperience.
I knew there was an intelligence there, and the story
that moved me was very human, and I was impressed that
for all of Vivian Bering’s [the lead character’s] intelligence,
she was most comforted by the nurse giving her a Popsicle.
For a woman in her twenties to write this work was pretty
amazing, so even though it wasn’t seaworthy at that time, it
was full of potential. So we took a couple of years—maybe
three—working with Maggie to get the play to where it
made sense for us to produce it. During that time we gave
her regular dramaturgical feedback, we gave it a public
reading, and finally we put it into rehearsal, during which
we encouraged her to trim it from two acts and over two
hours to a ninety-minute one-act—a very different structure.
It was absolutely amazing, and she’s an amazing woman.”
Wit has enjoyed enduring success: it opened in New
York in 1998, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and made its
Broadway premiere, starring Cynthia Nixon, in 2012. You
can see an excerpt of the script in the chapter titled “The
Playwright.”
Patch acknowledges that today’s New York theatre is at
least as much about star actors as it is about new plays. He
says it was difficult to get Lynn Nottage’s Ruined produced
in New York because it had “no stars, and, with eleven
*Courtesy of Jerry Patch
Dramaturgs don’t always work in theatres! Here, over a couple
of beers, dramaturg Jerry Patch and playwright Donald Margulies
talk through a moment in Margulies’ Time Stands Still, which the
Manhattan Theatre Club, where Patch serves as Director of Artistic
Development, brought to Broadway in 2010, where it enjoyed a year’s
run and won a Tony nomination. © South Coast Repertory Theatre
actors and understudies and a couple of musicians, it was
not a cheap show to put on. And what’s it about? A woman
who gets raped in the Congo! So at first we had to paper
the hell out of the house [give away free tickets] to get audiences.
But once people saw it, they became its advocates.
The play became a grand event and we extended it several
times; nearly everyone who saw it recommended it.”
Patch had worked with Nottage before, at Sundance
on her earlier Crumbs from the Table of Joy, and then at
South Coast for the co-premiere (in a co-production with
Baltimore’s Centerstage) of her Intimate Apparel. The latter
won “every critics’ prize that year except the Pulitzer,” Patch
says wistfully.
Ruined first opened at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre,
where it remained in development until its New York
debut at Manhattan Theatre Club. Before its MTC opening,
Patch—along with his MTC colleague Mandy Greenfield—
“mostly just went to the rehearsals and gave notes. We
just asked questions, such as ‘This is what I’m getting—is
it what you want?’ and ‘Could this be shorter?’ Lynn took
it from there, and the play went all the way.” In all, Ruined
received thirteen best-play awards—including the Drama
Desk, New York Critics, Outer Critics, and Obie awards, as
well as the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.
Patch well remembers being told at the start of his
career, “No kid ever dreamed of growing up to be a dramaturg.”
With the enormous contribution dramaturgs now
make to the American theatre—and, indeed, to American
culture—it is not surprising that students around the country
are now contradicting that observation.