Artistic Statement
I'm a Virgo, so I'm good at spreadsheets, with rising fire Sag signs, and I've often found myself in the midst of American theatre fires, but I'm really a Jersey shore girl at heart and I'm happiest reading new scripts by the Ocean, or flying off somewhere to travel to wherever a playwright needs me to go (b/c usually a theatre doesn't have a resident dramaturg anymore). It's the balance and mixture of elements that have led to my freelance dramaturgy practice, so it's not surprising that the projects I work on are varied. I help writers find a balance of theatrical elements in storytelling as well. If I have an area of expertise, it's working through chaos---and maybe my grad school training at the Moscow Art Theatre School in dramaturgy gave me some skills to manage that.
When I graduated from my dramaturgy program in 2007, the economic crash of '08-09 led to massive layoffs of institutional literary managers, so I realized early that I worked for Playwrights, not buildings. A playwright is in a unique position to be in a business partnership with a company, but don't often get treated with such respect, so my role is to advocate for the vision of my writer while I'm also passionate about an institution's authentic relationship to their audience/community, asking questions of how to get the audience the writer is writing for to the building. My dramaturgical advice is in service of a lead artist playwright and I enjoy working with writers over multiple plays, as dramaturgical lessons are often learned on one script that then are learned on Future ones.
By the time became a Literary Manager (not just a script reader for various orgs and awards, although I love doing that and still do)---it was 2020. Between the two offices I worked for, I became responsible for evaluating over 1,000 plays at a time where we were all experiencing dumpster fires, job loss, grief, loneliness, teaching on Zoom, consequences of political extremism, and other difficult shifts and pivots. I read everyone's Covid play and never learned how to make sour dough bread, while also recovering from a major surgery where I had to re-learn how to walk, and fought 3 rounds of long Covid as an asthmatic. When I respond to plays now, I have a purview of reading a wide range of plays that were responding to major cultural shifts, all while diligently going through PT.
I'm grateful to every writer I ever worked with, but my first lessons about being a new play dramaturg for Terrence McNally early in my career are still master class lessons I carry with me. And while I work across a multitude of forms and aesthetics, I do prefer work that feels deeply meaningful to the current moment and align best with artists who share my values.
Because I'm an immunocompromised artist with a chronic illness who was also diagnosed late in life as neurodivergent, I'm aware that systems are not built for me, so I passionately advocate for writers of many walks of life who are telling stories on stages that weren't built for them either. So much of the hoops writers go through have to do with systems built on scarcity culture, so I work towards abundance. I lead with my values and prioritize anti-bias work and care work. And fun! Let's laugh together as we work through imperfect systems and write new plays that aim for new storytelling structures.
When I graduated from my dramaturgy program in 2007, the economic crash of '08-09 led to massive layoffs of institutional literary managers, so I realized early that I worked for Playwrights, not buildings. A playwright is in a unique position to be in a business partnership with a company, but don't often get treated with such respect, so my role is to advocate for the vision of my writer while I'm also passionate about an institution's authentic relationship to their audience/community, asking questions of how to get the audience the writer is writing for to the building. My dramaturgical advice is in service of a lead artist playwright and I enjoy working with writers over multiple plays, as dramaturgical lessons are often learned on one script that then are learned on Future ones.
By the time became a Literary Manager (not just a script reader for various orgs and awards, although I love doing that and still do)---it was 2020. Between the two offices I worked for, I became responsible for evaluating over 1,000 plays at a time where we were all experiencing dumpster fires, job loss, grief, loneliness, teaching on Zoom, consequences of political extremism, and other difficult shifts and pivots. I read everyone's Covid play and never learned how to make sour dough bread, while also recovering from a major surgery where I had to re-learn how to walk, and fought 3 rounds of long Covid as an asthmatic. When I respond to plays now, I have a purview of reading a wide range of plays that were responding to major cultural shifts, all while diligently going through PT.
I'm grateful to every writer I ever worked with, but my first lessons about being a new play dramaturg for Terrence McNally early in my career are still master class lessons I carry with me. And while I work across a multitude of forms and aesthetics, I do prefer work that feels deeply meaningful to the current moment and align best with artists who share my values.
Because I'm an immunocompromised artist with a chronic illness who was also diagnosed late in life as neurodivergent, I'm aware that systems are not built for me, so I passionately advocate for writers of many walks of life who are telling stories on stages that weren't built for them either. So much of the hoops writers go through have to do with systems built on scarcity culture, so I work towards abundance. I lead with my values and prioritize anti-bias work and care work. And fun! Let's laugh together as we work through imperfect systems and write new plays that aim for new storytelling structures.
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Heather Helinsky
Artistic Statement
I'm a Virgo, so I'm good at spreadsheets, with rising fire Sag signs, and I've often found myself in the midst of American theatre fires, but I'm really a Jersey shore girl at heart and I'm happiest reading new scripts by the Ocean, or flying off somewhere to travel to wherever a playwright needs me to go (b/c usually a theatre doesn't have a resident dramaturg anymore). It's the balance and mixture of elements that have led to my freelance dramaturgy practice, so it's not surprising that the projects I work on are varied. I help writers find a balance of theatrical elements in storytelling as well. If I have an area of expertise, it's working through chaos---and maybe my grad school training at the Moscow Art Theatre School in dramaturgy gave me some skills to manage that.
When I graduated from my dramaturgy program in 2007, the economic crash of '08-09 led to massive layoffs of institutional literary managers, so I realized early that I worked for Playwrights, not buildings. A playwright is in a unique position to be in a business partnership with a company, but don't often get treated with such respect, so my role is to advocate for the vision of my writer while I'm also passionate about an institution's authentic relationship to their audience/community, asking questions of how to get the audience the writer is writing for to the building. My dramaturgical advice is in service of a lead artist playwright and I enjoy working with writers over multiple plays, as dramaturgical lessons are often learned on one script that then are learned on Future ones.
By the time became a Literary Manager (not just a script reader for various orgs and awards, although I love doing that and still do)---it was 2020. Between the two offices I worked for, I became responsible for evaluating over 1,000 plays at a time where we were all experiencing dumpster fires, job loss, grief, loneliness, teaching on Zoom, consequences of political extremism, and other difficult shifts and pivots. I read everyone's Covid play and never learned how to make sour dough bread, while also recovering from a major surgery where I had to re-learn how to walk, and fought 3 rounds of long Covid as an asthmatic. When I respond to plays now, I have a purview of reading a wide range of plays that were responding to major cultural shifts, all while diligently going through PT.
I'm grateful to every writer I ever worked with, but my first lessons about being a new play dramaturg for Terrence McNally early in my career are still master class lessons I carry with me. And while I work across a multitude of forms and aesthetics, I do prefer work that feels deeply meaningful to the current moment and align best with artists who share my values.
Because I'm an immunocompromised artist with a chronic illness who was also diagnosed late in life as neurodivergent, I'm aware that systems are not built for me, so I passionately advocate for writers of many walks of life who are telling stories on stages that weren't built for them either. So much of the hoops writers go through have to do with systems built on scarcity culture, so I work towards abundance. I lead with my values and prioritize anti-bias work and care work. And fun! Let's laugh together as we work through imperfect systems and write new plays that aim for new storytelling structures.
When I graduated from my dramaturgy program in 2007, the economic crash of '08-09 led to massive layoffs of institutional literary managers, so I realized early that I worked for Playwrights, not buildings. A playwright is in a unique position to be in a business partnership with a company, but don't often get treated with such respect, so my role is to advocate for the vision of my writer while I'm also passionate about an institution's authentic relationship to their audience/community, asking questions of how to get the audience the writer is writing for to the building. My dramaturgical advice is in service of a lead artist playwright and I enjoy working with writers over multiple plays, as dramaturgical lessons are often learned on one script that then are learned on Future ones.
By the time became a Literary Manager (not just a script reader for various orgs and awards, although I love doing that and still do)---it was 2020. Between the two offices I worked for, I became responsible for evaluating over 1,000 plays at a time where we were all experiencing dumpster fires, job loss, grief, loneliness, teaching on Zoom, consequences of political extremism, and other difficult shifts and pivots. I read everyone's Covid play and never learned how to make sour dough bread, while also recovering from a major surgery where I had to re-learn how to walk, and fought 3 rounds of long Covid as an asthmatic. When I respond to plays now, I have a purview of reading a wide range of plays that were responding to major cultural shifts, all while diligently going through PT.
I'm grateful to every writer I ever worked with, but my first lessons about being a new play dramaturg for Terrence McNally early in my career are still master class lessons I carry with me. And while I work across a multitude of forms and aesthetics, I do prefer work that feels deeply meaningful to the current moment and align best with artists who share my values.
Because I'm an immunocompromised artist with a chronic illness who was also diagnosed late in life as neurodivergent, I'm aware that systems are not built for me, so I passionately advocate for writers of many walks of life who are telling stories on stages that weren't built for them either. So much of the hoops writers go through have to do with systems built on scarcity culture, so I work towards abundance. I lead with my values and prioritize anti-bias work and care work. And fun! Let's laugh together as we work through imperfect systems and write new plays that aim for new storytelling structures.