An Anecdote on Observational Indistinguishibility

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

I once saw Tony Kushner speak (playwright, author of Angels in America and Caroline, or Change, among other things). During his talk he mentioned a cute litle anecdote to illustrate how he felt about Dramaturges in the playwriting process.

The story went something like this: a friend of his was given a playwriting grant, but a condition of the grant was to work with a professional dramaturge on each draft of the work. Said friend hated collaboration, and especially didn't like the dramaturge assigned to him. So before the first draft was due, he wrote his first draft. He also wrote his second draft. For his first deadline with the dramaturge, he handed him the first draft.

And every subsequent due date, the dramaturge would be one draft behind the author. The dramaturge would send his notes for draft n, the author would throw them away, work on draft n + 2, and send the dramaturge the already-existing draft n + 1 at the next due date.

As far as we know, the dramaturge never caught on.