Welcome to DRAMATURGY CORNER

Hi Internet!

Welcome to the kickoff of the inaugural 4615 Summer Rep DRAMATURGY CORNER.

My name is Susannah Clark, and I’m the Literary Director and one of the co-founders of 4615 Theatre Company. I’m also serving as Production Dramaturg on this summer’s repertory productions: Macbeth by William Shakespeare and Dinner by Moira Buffini. This space will feature weekly posts featuring literary musings, peeks into our rehearsal process, exclusive interviews with our fabulous company of performers, and insights from our leadership team. It promises to be a fun experiment, and everyone who knows me knows I need very little excuse to shout my thoughts/analyses/opinions into the void, so I’m thrilled to be embarking on this journey – and I hope many of you join me.

Jordan thought I should include a picture of myself, and this felt way more accurate than my headshot. Not pictured: The book I was reading while ignoring everyone at the party.

I wanted to kick off this first post with the question I’m sure all of you are asking: Why on EARTH have we decided to pair these two shows together? What does Shakespeare’s sprawling epic, one of the cornerstones of Western literature, have to do with this 2002 play about a dinner party? And it’s a valid question to ask. At first glance, these two plays have very little to do with each other than the fact that they were both written by Brits and that both take place in foggy weather.

Look a little closer, however, and the similarities begin to peek through the haze. The central events of both of these pieces are dinner parties – and they’re two of the most apocalyptic, uncomfortable, and upsetting dinner parties ever put on stage. Both plays feature a central couple struggling desperately to play God and to control their fates. Both plays are obsessed with the grotesque and with the dire consequences that result when the natural order is disturbed by meddling humans.

So yes – Macbeth and Dinner are stylistically and tonally dissimilar. But thematically, they intersect in numerous interesting ways. As we get deeper into the rehearsal process, I’m looking forward to seeing how these pieces continue to speak to each other and inform one another. I’ll be checking in with our actors – many of whom appear in both plays – about how their work on one text affects their work on the other. We all have our own ideas about how these plays work together, but it will all be sure to evolve greatly as we begin to really work through them. I’ll be sure to keep you all updated.

Check back here every week from now until we open for more exciting content as we begin to put together our second full season, and be sure to get your tickets for Macbeth and Dinner, opening next month!