2026 Feb 05 – Everything-as-code

I'm a bit baffled at resistance to docs-as-code and the premise that Git is a "developer-level" tool that complicates writing when really nothing about it at all is specific to code, only text formats with line numbers. While I've never written documentation in a CMS, I've seen something worse: how playwrights, dramaturgs, and stage managers track script changes in a new play process.

My career prior to tech has been in new plays, primarily as a dramaturg and producer with minor traction as a playwright. Dramaturgy is, in essence, UX and DX for theater. The Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA) website has looked the same for about a decade, except for its "What is dramaturgy?" page that gets longer every time I check, but most pertinent is:

dramaturgs contextualize the world of a play; establish connections among the text, actors, and audience...

and

Locate drafts and versions
Collate, cut, track, edit, rewrite, construct, and arrange

In new play development, especially in production, this takes on a horrific form. With redaction, here is a folder in my Google Drive for drafts of a world premiere I worked on after college:

PLAY
|-- PLAY current script/
|   `-- PLAY - March 5, 2020.pdf
|-- PLAY older scripts/
|   |-- PLAY first rehearsal script
|   |   |-- PLAY - February 12, 2020.docx
|   |   `-- PLAY - February 12, 2020.pdf
|   |-- AUTHOR - PLAY - May 7, 2019.pdf
|   |-- AUTHOR - PLAY.pdf
|   |-- AUTHOR - PLAY -October 23, 2019.pdf
|   |-- PLAY - February 16, 2020.2.pdf
|   |-- PLAY - February 16, 2020.pdf
|   `-- PLAY - February 23, 2020.pdf
`-- PLAY inserts/
    |-- PLAY inserts & changes, 2.22.20/
    |   |-- PLAY Script Change Log 2-22.pdf
    |   |-- Pg. 15.pdf
    |   |-- Pg. 19.pdf
    |   |-- Pg. 22-22B.pdf
    |   `-- Pg. 25.pdf
    |-- Pgs 4-10A.pdf
    |-- Pgs 15-16.pdf
    |-- Pgs 21-22A.pdf
    |-- Pgs 26-27.pdf
    `-- Script Log Write-Ins - 2.18.pdf

If you know version control, this folder makes its own kind of sense. PLAY current script/ is like a latest or nightly tag while everything in PLAY older scripts/ is deprecated. A few things to explain here:

• In the American theater and in screenwriting, standard script formats roughly denote one page = one minute. This varies wildly based on content. It could be a multi-page monologue that stretches two pages into five minutes, or snappy, Sorkin-esque back-and-forth that takes 20 seconds. Nevertheless, page numbers mean something, especially to stage managers and designers for timing cues. In a 501(c)(3) with and ink and paper budget, the hope is for the first rehearsal script to be as close to final as possible to minimize revisions. Hence the page inserts.
• A new play in rehearsal may have the playwright in the room to varying degrees, but especially at the start. They might have their laptop out or their own printed copy of the script on which they write by hand. As they discuss edits verbally, the dramaturg takes note in something like these "Script Logs," which also gets a section in a .pdf Rehearsal Report that the stage manager sends out to everyone involved in the production.
• The playwright sends a revised script to the dramaturg so they have time to print enough copies of only the affected pages in time for next rehearsal, so it's up to actors and the creative team to manually replace the pages in their script binders and keep the old ones on hand in case of reversion. This leads to frankenpages like Pg. 22-22B where the contents of "22B" would naturally continue onto 23.

All of this is unique to the budget and scale of a LORT member theater with 50 years of history that intended to give this a play a fully-realized production. But at much smaller institutions that offer little more than a staged reading, this overhead tends to disappear. There may not be a resident dramaturg logging these changes because literary offices are shrinking if not vanishing, so it's left to the playwright and stage manager to figure something out. If they're both younger, say born after 1990, they'll tend to get along great just sharing a Google Doc of a "living script" for the current production. If they're not...

In the big 2026, I hear horror stories from my playwright friends about stage managers, even those who primarily work on new plays, who can't adapt to how writers work now. To Google Docs. The thing is, playwrights are happy and more than able to export their Google Docs to whatever format you like, but most people in theater pass around .pdf's. They're PORTABLE by design.

This story is a little too specific, but I'll share it anyway. My friend's play is multilingual and includes non-Latin unicode characters. It's been in development for four years and circulated as a .pdf the whole time. Now that it's in production, she's working with a stage manager who prefers .docx. Why? I cannot imagine. I think scripts are only the playwright's business to edit. When the stage manager sent her screenshots of Microsoft Word complaining that the pagination is messed up (it would be!), what my friend actually noticed, first thing, was that all of the non-Latin characters were �������.

This is horrific artist relations, as it were, that borders on linguistic xenophobia and makes me question how does someone not have system fonts that ship with Microsoft and Apple meant to prevent such a thing? Because this stage manager clearly isn't someone who installed Linux and forgot to apt install fonts-noto.

While this is in part me making fun of people with consumer tech knowledge–I wholly respect the knowledge they do have is constant, high-level project management—I bring all this back to tech writing with you all sound like the stick-in-the-mud stage manager in this scenario.

I don't see how coming closer to how developers interact with their work does any harm. You may not understand code, but a common workflow should beget empathy. As a dramaturg, I understand prioritizing the audience. I understand much of tech writing is spent thinking about end users.

None of this means you need to insulate yourself from the people you work with, or prioritize your comfort over the thing you're contributing to, or hand off static site tooling and automation to an engineer. I suppose what I'm noticing is writers who insist upon only being writers, and that docsascode.org has the tone of persuading developers that they should be involved in documentation.

Theater, on the other hand, is much more utilitarian. You learn what you have to to keep the ship afloat, no matter what you showed up as.

In grad school—my initial attempt to flee professional theater—I kept my class and literature notes in an Obsidian vault backed up to a private Git remote, largely because of mgmeyers/obsidian-zotero-integration. Thus, my papers were version-controlled. Lengthy, footnote-laden humanities papers in Chicago style that I turned in as .docx's with pandoc. (You can see how I ended up in tech while studying theology.)

If I were to return to playwriting, I'd seriously consider writing in Markdown and automating .pdf generation with pandoc and weasyprint like I do for my resumes. It would look absolutely crazy because I wrote scripts in Google Docs by styling the first three heading levels so h1 was the scene title, h2 was character names (centered), h3 was stage directions (left-aligned but starting 4.25 inches into a letter-sized page):

# ACT V
### Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room. She is at her writing-table as before. The parlor-maid comes in.

## THE PARLOR-MAID
### (at the door)
Mr. Henry, mam, is downstairs with Colonel Pickering.

## MRS. HIGGINS
Well, show them up.

## THE PARLOR-MAID
They’re using the telephone, mam. Telephoning to the police, I think.

## MRS. HIGGINS
What!

## THE PARLOR-MAID
### (coming further in and lowering her voice)
Mr. Henry’s in a state, mam. I thought I’d better tell you.

## MRS. HIGGINS
If you had told me that Mr. Henry was not in a state it would have been more surprising. Tell them to come up when they’ve finished with the police. I suppose he’s lost something.

This would have no bearing on my collaborators, mind you. The goal would still be to have .pdf's, and frankly with setptools-scm-esque suffixes that prevent filenames from turning into the directory I showed you. Which actually sounds awesome. Maybe I should make it.