His second, Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility: Landscape and Journey (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2008) explores the intimate relationship between theatre artists and the dramaturgy of the texts they interpret. In 2009, it received the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

Proehl’s fiction, grounded in the landscape of the Pacific Northwest, tells the stories of people caught up in the mysteries of faith, sex, and love – characters torn between belief and desire. Works in progress include a set of three inter-related novels, the first two set in an isolated Oregon logging town a quarter century apart – The Pleasures of Selah (1975)and The Bones of Selah (2000) – the third, The Memory Readers, set twenty-five years later in the attic of a bookstore on the edge of Portland’s seedy Burnside neighborhood and in an old Volvo on the road to Yellowstone.

Beginning with the essays that would become Toward a Dramaturgical Sensibility, Canadian dramaturg DD Kugler (Professor Emeritus, School for Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University) and Proehl have worked together as a dramaturg/writer team, sharing, in the summer of 2015, a residency at Tofte Lake Center (Liz Engelman, director) in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota.

Proehl taught for over three decades at Villanova University and the University of Puget Sound. With Professor Grace Livingston (African American Studies), he dramaturged and directed three new plays by C. Rosalind Bell – The New Orleans Monologues, 1620 Bank Street, and My Louisiana Project – for Race and Pedagogy Conferences at Puget Sound in 2006, 2010, and 2018. Additional directing credits with designer Kurt Walls include Angels in America (Part I), The Seagull, Three Sisters, Trip to Bountiful, Our Town, Skin of Our Teeth, As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night. Most recently, he dramaturged Paul Osborn’s The Vinegar Tree (2022) and Boo Killebrew’s Lettie (2023) for director Abigail Adams at People’s Light, a professional theatre in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

From 1998-2000, Proehl served as president of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, working before and after his term on a series of special projects and initiatives. In 2016, LMDA recognized his work in the field with its highest honor: the Lessing Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Proehl holds a BA from George Fox College, an MFA in directing from Wayne State Univeristy, and a PhD in directing and dramatic criticism from Stanford University.

He grew up in a small logging town in the northern Coast Range of Oregon, where his parents were educators and he did a lot of fishing.

Photo Credit – Emily Kauffman