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Dramaturg's efforts pay off Work on 'Les Blancs' wins award for OSF's Douthit BY BILL VARBLE Lue Morgan Douthit and Timothy Bond had a problem. Douthit, a dramaturg at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Bond, a director, wanted to bring Lorraine Hansberry's "Les Blancs" to the stage. A lesser-known work by the celebrated playwright, who died in 1965, "Les Blancs" is about a European medical mission in Africa and the exploitation of indigenous Africans by whites. The script jammed a lot of dialogue into an opening scene set in the hut of several brothers whose father had died. "It created a really, really, really, really, really long scene," Douthit says. "We couldn't make it work." She wound up persuading Hansberry's estate to go along with some important changes in the play based on alternate texts. "Les Blancs" was finally produced to raves last year in Ashland starring Derrick Lee Weeden and Bill Geisslinger. For her work on the play, Douthit has been awarded the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas Prize in Dramaturgy. The award underscores the importance of the dramaturg, a crucial if unseen member of the theater whose job description pretty much takes in all the turf involving the script. "It's anything that helps illuminate the text for audience, actors, directors and technicians," Douthit says. Most of her work is based on research, but instinct also plays a role. For "Les Blancs," she researched colonialism, Albert Schweitzer, the 1950s, anything that might have influenced Hansberry, who was best-known as the author of "A Raisin in the Sun." She even talked to Hansberry biographer Margaret Wilkerson. Douthit eventually uncovered no fewer than three versions of the script, which some authorities thought was unfinished. The original "final" text had been adapted by Hansberry's husband, Robert Nemiroff, and debuted in 1970 on Broadway. It was also produced Washington, D.C., in 1988. Douthit contacted the playwright's literary executor, Jewell Gresham Nemiroff, a daughter of Hansberry's husband. "Give it a try," Nemiroff said. "She agreed to let us go back to what we think is the original version," Douthit says. "It went in a whole other direction. It wound up being an easier bite to handle." Douthit, originally from Sandusky, Ohio, has been at the Festival for five seasons. She has a doctorate in dramatic theory and criticism from the University of Washington. This year she worked on "Chicago," "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Tongue of a Bird." She's previously worked on "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Sailing to Byzantium, "Death of a Salesman" and other plays. The prize recognizes outstanding contributions in the conception, development and production of theater. It's named for Elliott Hayes, a former dramaturg and literary manager at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada. The winner is chosen by a panel of judges who are LMDA members. Judges said they were impressed by Douthit's correspondence with Nemiroff. Director and dramaturg Harriet Power praised the changes Douthit brought to the play. "To bring an overlooked work by a major American writer of color to one of the major theaters of our nation, and through dramaturgical work to help catalyze an important textual adjustment is to make a major contribution to dramaturgy and to American theater," she said. Douthit has a simpler description: "We thought it was the story she wanted to tell." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA