Dramatic persona

No one knows Tracy Letts' play Superior Donuts, which opened Wednesday night at the Arden Theatre Company, better than Letts himself. But two other people know it at least as well.

One is its Broadway director, Tina Landau. The other is its Philadelphia director at the Arden, Ed Sobel. On Broadway, where it played last season, after Letts won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for August: Osage County, he and Landau and Sobel - members, then, of Chicago's Steppenwolf company - worked together on Superior Donuts.

Sobel - boyish at 46, articulate, and confident - held a position on both plays that theater people understand: He was the dramaturg. Audiences, confronted by the word in programs, frequently either don't know what it means or find it confusing. And for good reason: It has no simple definition.

"Probably if you asked 50 different dramaturgs, you'd get 50 different answers," says Sobel, now associate artistic director of the Arden, where he has lived, again, with Superior Donuts for several months - this time at the helm, as director.

As dramaturg, he says, he was a sounding board. "Because the role can be so undefined, it allows a lot of latitude for doing it well and a lot of latitude for doing it badly."

A dramaturg can be partly literary manager, someone who reads scripts and finds plays that will work for a particular company. Or he or she might be a theater artist who helps a playwright stay on track in the development of a script. A dramaturg could be a go-between who tries to understand a new play's essence - the backstory, the context of the time, the story on stage - as playwright and director tough it out creatively. Or he could write program notes for the audience, or provide the historical context of a play or musical to the cast - down to, say, the way a word was spoken 300 years ago and whether it makes any sense to say it that way today. A dramaturg might arrange audience talk-backs after a show.

At its touchiest, the job can involve being the person who says to a director: Tell me what you're trying to accomplish and I'll tell you if that's what I see. Dramaturgs are, in that sense, first responders - mouthpieces for an audience not yet there.