Everything changed once Dauterman started her Playwriting I class.
Once she started the course, she immediately called her mom and revealed her love for teaching.
“I got to come here where I would be paid to do the work I would love to do and be guaranteed the opportunity to teach undergrads,” Dauterman said.
Dauterman was able to turn her newfound passion into a reality when she wrote her fourth full-length play, created to be performed by IU theater undergraduates.
“Sing To Me Now,” an original play by Dauterman, will premiere at 7:30 p.m. Friday in the Wells-Metz Theatre as part of the collaboration between IU’s MFA Playwright Program and IU Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance.
“Sing To Me Now” introduces the muse of epic poetry, Calliope, or Callie as she is called in the show, who decides to take on a human intern, Yankee, when she gets overwhelmed with her workload. The two of them develop a complex working relationship in which Callie has to find a way to let someone not only into her office, but also her life again. The story follows Yankee as she tries to figure out how Callie became the closed-off muse that she is.
When Dauterman first started writing her required play for the program, she originally wrote a different piece, she said. But three months into working on it, she felt disenchanted. Eventually, she came up with the idea for what became “Sing to Me Now,” despite realizing she would only have a month to write it, she said.
“After a day of thinking about it, I was already 10 times more invested than I’d been in three months of trying to do something else,” ?Dauterman said.
When Rob Heller, the director of the play, read the script for the first time, he was impressed at how she found a way to attack some very real-life issues without rubbing it in his face, he said.
“It felt like I had permission to think about some pretty hard questions in my life without knowing I was doing it because I was so caught up in the magic and heightened circumstances of this world,” Heller said.
Dauterman said one aspect of inspiration she found for her play was a memory of going to IU Theatre plays and looking at the ticket box right outside of the theater that had two masks with a happy and sad face on it. These two masks are the symbol for comedies and tragedies in the theater world. Dauterman said her play is a representation of both a comedy and a tragedy.
“When I saw the comedy-tragedy mask, I was sort of like, ‘(expletive) that,’” Dauterman said. “My favorite types of theater are ones that jump you ?between extremes.”
Dauterman said theater is the thing that jolts her out of the slump of following daily routines and she hopes her work can do the same for the audience.
“I hope that it would inspire people to talk about what their inner artist looks like,” Dauterman said. “To let go of the pre-law student, the surgeon or the guy that digs ditches and focus on what you are inside and let each other in on that a ?little bit.”
Initially against ?becoming a teacher, Dauterman said teaching was definitely the biggest surprise of coming to IU because she realized how much she wanted that to be a part of her life. She said working with the theater department gave her a sort of “mama bear” persona.
Dauterman said her original works represent her babies and others’ work is like her nieces and nephews in her theater life.
“I want more plays to be protective over and give a lot of love to,” Dauterman said. “So doing that with a group of undergrads was incredibly exciting.”
