Have you ever met a dramaturge? Do you even know what one is? If you answered no to either of these questions, then stop by the FAB box office and meet Assistant Professor of Theatre Sergio Costola who is a practicing dramaturge.

According to Costola, a dramaturge "helps the director study the play from a critical and historical perspective." What exactly this entails may vary significantly depending on the theatre company, the director, the play and even on what side of the Atlantic one works. Costola happens to have experience on both sides. Traditionally, the dramaturge plays an important interpretive and scholarly role for the theatre. Costola explains, "The dramaturge researches the history of the period surrounding a play to provide the production with the understanding necessary for the performance of a play." He or she provides the contextual knowledge of the play's period that enables a company to accurately interpret both text and subtext. Costola now shares these perspectives and their import with Southwestern students in courses such as theatre history.

Now in his second year at the University, Costola brings greater international perspective and scholarship to the Southwestern community and a strong critical and interpretive voice to the theatre department. Though he has always been interested in history and critical studies, Costola's early scholarly passion was for film. He grew up in Brescia, a city of 200,000 located between Milan and Venice in northern Italy. He left home for the University of Bologna for his undergraduate work when he was 18 and pursued film studies until he walked into a theatre class one day. This wasn't a typical acting or a directing class, but a course on medieval and renaissance theatre. It also happened that the professor of the course was one of the most important scholars of his generation. Costola says, "From that day I decided I want to study this and only this." He completed his undergraduate work in Bologna and then came to the States for graduate school where he earned a Ph.D. from UCLA.

The decisiveness Costola exhibited in selecting his scholarly pursuits carried him through his first academic job search in rather short order. "I wanted to devote my entire life to studying, but you come to a point where you must share the knowledge you have gained. Teaching is a natural outgrowth of this realization." After meeting with members of the Southwestern community about a position, Costola knew there was no place else to consider. He says, "I loved it. I cancelled all my other interviews after interviewing at Southwestern. I was so impressed with the intellectual level of the students and with the atmosphere of the Sarofim School and the University."

A year later, Costola remains enamored with Southwestern. "The contact you have with colleagues is wonderful. Because of the small size of the school, we get to work closely together. You also have the opportunity to know, more or less, most of the students." Most recently, Costola served as dramaturge for The Tony Kushner Project: Imagining the Unimaginable, a collage performance of Kushner's work. With this project, Costola and the theatre department made an important effort to extend the reach of the piece beyond the confines of the scheduled performances to provoke intellectual discussion among Southwestern students. "We were trying to bring the work outside the theatre to the students in other classes. The general topic for the performances was theatre as social change. Sexual, gender and racial identity, religion and politics and justice were areas for more specific consideration. The players from the Kushner Project performed scenes from the project to stimulate student discussion about these ideas as they were generated by Kushner's work."

Costola and his wife, Faith Koskey, who is from Nairobi, Kenya, and now a student at Southwestern, are very happy with his decision to join the faculty of Southwestern. They have even purchased a house here in Georgetown. "Whenever we have free time, we try to do work on the old house. I also love to cook with my wife," he explains. Time permitting, they entertain their two cats.