Often the dramaturge's strategy is to manipulate a narrative to reflect the current Zeitgeist through cross-cultural signs, theater- and film-historical references to genre, ideology, questions of gender and racial representation, etc., in the dramatization.
He was the first to occupy this role in European theater and described his task as that of a "dramatic judge" ("dramatischer Richter"), one who must assess the most compelling and appropriate means of staging a particular theatrical work.
He analyzes the relations among character, action, and speech, gives examples of good plots, and considers the role of audience response as an aspect of theatrical form.
In Poetics, Aristotle discusses many key concepts of Greek drama, including the moment of tragic recognition (anagnorisis) and the purgation of audience feelings of pity and fear (catharsis).
Many of the innovations associated with Brecht as a theorist and writer for the stage, including the concept of the "estrangement effect" (or Verfremdungseffekt) and the acting technique known as gestus, were intended as deliberate revisions of the values upheld by Aristotle.
[13] Institutional or production dramaturges may make files of materials about a play's history or social context, prepare program notes, lead post-production discussions, or write study guides for schools and groups.
[14] In the early 21st century, the field of dramaturgy has been enriched by the emergence of drametrics, a quantitative approach introduced by dramaturg and theatre scholar, Magda Romanska in 2014.
This methodology allows dramaturgs to discover structural patterns, character relationships, and dramatic rhythms through computational tools like configuration matrices and network analysis.
[16] While traditional dramaturgy relies on close reading and interpretation, drametrics complements this approach by revealing patterns and structures that might not be apparent through conventional analysis, particularly when examining large bodies of dramatic work or comparing multiple texts systematically.