This project is multiple years in the making, having been initially proposed for the BYU 2020-21 season. Originally, it was going to be my project as a faculty dramaturg. And I began working on a script adaptation that would feature women and build a more gender-neutral world in which both men and women would hold power. The pandemic forced a postponement for a year, and I paused my work on an adaptation.
One year later, I resumed adaptation work with our guest director, Linda Hartzell. As I finished the first few drafts of the adaptation, I met a senior student majoring in history, Emme Corbett, who had just discovered dramaturgy and was eager for production experience before graduation. I happily added her to my dramaturgy team, and we began working on historical and cultural research for performance. Not long after Emme joined the team, Angela Moster, a graduate student in the theatre department and a native Italian, was looking for another project to join while she finished her graduate studies. I was naturally happy to add her to the dramaturgy team as well.
The three of us then began working in summer 2021 to build a dramaturgy website that would serve as a resource for our actors, designers, and potentially even the audience. We built an interactive glossary as well as a pronunciation guide, a collection of videos, and resources on the various time periods explored in the production. In our group text conversations over the summer, we shared this website, asked questions, discovered answers, and generated new questions. We invite you now to take a tour of our website and the world of this play.
