I Was an LMDA Bake Sale Baby; Or, reasons to love Lessing Week

by Charles Haugland

My first Lessing Week bake sale was while I was an intern at Actors Theatre of Louisville. I can’t remember what I made, and all I remember eating was Julie Dubiner’s rugelach. They are pretty phenomenal, like you-remember-eating-it-eight-years later phenomenal. The pastry was flaky, the jam on the sides had caramelized and crackled, and – okay, I’ll stop talking about them. Staff members from all over the organization came out, and bought things, or even just gave money. We raised over $100 that day that we sent off to LMDA.

Every year, dramaturgs across the Americas host informal fundraisers for the organization, right around January 22nd (the birthday of the world’s first dramaturg, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing). The proceeds from those bake sales go to fund early-career dramaturgs to attend the national conference, and here’s where these silly bake sales really changed the course of my life and career. Because the year following my internship – before anybody ever paid me to do dramaturgy – the organization underwrote my travel through one of those grants, and I attended the 2008 conference in San Diego. That conference solidified dramaturgy for me as a profession; I created professional relationships and friendships with colleagues in the field who I still call for advice; I became a lifelong believer in the power of LMDA to gather the field and create meaningful conversation.

So when I started working at the Huntington later that summer, I knew I’d be baking that winter to help bring more dramaturgs to the conference that year. These fundraisers are by design small, humble, and don’t require a lot of start-up capital. Every year I’ve held one at the Huntington, I have been able to raise at least $70, and now colleagues from the development, education, and production departments bake with me.

What I want to emphasize though is how important and transformative for our field bringing early-career dramaturgs to the conference is. For dramaturgs who don’t have an organization that can offset any of their costs, attending the conference is a really high bar, and a program like this makes at least a tiny crack in the economic barriers that hold back the diversity of our field. Each year, participants’ perspectives enliven discussions and broaden our view of what the next generation of dramaturgs is thinking about. I can’t imagine last year’s conference in Portland without the 2015 Travel Grant recipients: Jolene Noelle, Fly Steffens, and Gabriella Steinberg.

So please join us for LMDA’s 2017 Lessing Week events, including the bake sale – send me an email and I’ll send you all the details! Bake a plate of cookies and sell them at your desk – or rally your organization and make a big old spectacle of it. For those who don’t want to bake, you can crochet little figures or write poems for a dollar or do anything else where you can get people to give you money based on some skill you have. As one of the many dramaturgs who have been welcomed into LMDA through this program, I can tell you from experience how much this support can transform a young dramaturg’s career path. I’ll be thinking about my first conference when I’m icing cupcakes.

Originally published in the December 2016 Newsletter