About Haley Willits

Personal Statement

My interest in dramaturgy began before I ever heard the word itself. I have always had a deep-rooted fascination with obscure knowledge and a love of being able to pull specific and seemingly random facts from some corner of my mind. I have no reasons for knowing Film Noir slang, soccer positions, and women’s career choices in 1910 other than theatre, but theatre is always reason enough for me. I have a love of research, writing, and theatre that lends itself perfectly to the kind of specific and all-embracing research integral to exceptional dramaturgy.

My career as a dramaturg began as a steep and fast learning curve. In my junior year of college, a professor of theatre was working on writing and directing a Film Noir adaption of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. A classmate and I were encouraged by the theatre faculty to take on the challenge of being dramaturgs for this production, as the production team, actors, and audience were in need of twice the amount of information usually required of a classical Greek play. We began with a glossary and built our actor packet from the two different time periods. Our lobby display became a tangle of red threads connecting Film Noir terms, Greek terms, and their modern English counterparts. We wrote our own Film Noir stories and placed them on Oedipus’s desk for audience members to take home. It was my first taste of research that could be a clever and fun way to give artists and audiences information they may have never seen before. It's the information that leads them into the world of the play and makes that experience more powerful.

Dramaturgy helps to give actors, production crew, and audiences the joy that comes from discovering new knowledge. It makes learning fun again in a world where word-filled bulletin boards and monotonous lectures are all too common. I feel accomplished in my work as a dramaturg if I am able to guide others into an interactive, creative way of finding their own love for obscure knowledge, especially when it relates to their theatre experience. The world of a Film Noir Oedipus Rex becomes more real when everyone involved is able to make choices based in fact. We as theatre artists use the knowledge that sits in a corner of our mind as the basis for every choice we make in our process of bringing these character, plots, and settings to life. As a dramaturg, I get to help the artists around me gain the knowledge base necessary to create meaningful, contextualized theatre while guiding the audience into this world through lobby displays and program notes.