Article 1
[I’m going to do
something a little different with Rick On Theater the
rest of this month. When the September issue of American Theatre magazine came out, I saw that there was an article on documentary theater,
which, as ROTters know, is a subject
of interest to me. (See my article “Performing
Fact: The Documentary Drama,” posted on 9 October 2009.) I figured I’d republish the AT piece
in an upcoming slot on the blog. When I went to the AT website to download the article for my
files, I found that there wasn’t just one article but a series; the others
weren’t all published in the magazine’s print edition. There are seven
articles, three of them too short to run alone so I combined them. So I
have a series of five potential posts about documentary theater. I’ve decided
to shorten the gap to three days between posts (as I often do for related
pieces), and post all five selections in a row starting today, 15 September.
The only other time I republished a bunch of pieces together like this
was a series of six open letters on theater by Washington Irving I ran in August
2010.
[The overall
on-line reference for all seven documentary theater articles is on the American
Theatre [Theatre Communications Group;
New York] website dated 22 August 2017, http://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/on-the-real-documentary-theatre
(which has links to the separate articles).
The individual articles and the dates on which I’ll post them (under the
blog heading “On The Real: Documentary Theatre,” the series’ umbrella title) are
as follows: “A History of U.S. Documentary Theatre in Three Stages” by Jules
Odendahl-James, 15 September; “Ringside? Let’s Take Down the Ropes” by Anna
Deavere Smith, 18 September; “Real Talk About Real Talk” by Amelia Parenteau, 21
September; “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Documentary Theatre?” by Parenteau,
24 September; “A Room Full of Mirrors”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt, 27 September; “‘Foreign to Myself’ Delves Beyond the
Trauma of War” by Brad Rhines, 27 September; and “Our Reflection Talks Back” by Carol
Martin, 27 September.]
ON THE REAL: DOCUMENTARY THEATRE |
THEATRE HISTORY
A HISTORY OF U.S. DOCUMENTARY THEATRE IN
THREE STAGES
By Jules Odendahl-James
Both in content and form, documentary theatre
in the U.S. has always been at theatre’s cutting edge.
Broadly conceived, American documentary
theatre (also sometimes called docudrama, ethnodrama, verbatim theatre,
tribunal theatre[1],
theatre of witness, or theatre of fact) is performance typically built by an
individual or collective of artists from historical and/or archival materials
such as trial transcripts, written or recorded interviews, newspaper reporting,
personal or iconic visual images or video footage, government documents,
biographies and autobiographies, even academic papers and scientific research.
I
locate three significant moments of innovation in the form, content, and
purpose of documentary performance over the past 100 years of American theatre
history and practice. The first is marked by the work produced under the
auspices of the Federal Theater Project (1935-1939), particularly “living
newspapers,” a form itself borrowed from agitprop and worker’s theatre in Western
Europe and Russia. While the content of these early American documentary plays
was drawn from everyday life, particularly the experiences of first- and
second-generation working-class immigrants, their form was decidedly modernist,
embracing collage, montage, expressionism, and minimalism in a symbiotic
relationship with new forms of visual art, early cinema, and atonal musical
compositions.
These
plays were sometimes built with the input of communities where artist-workers
were stationed as part of FTP and the Works Progress Administration. But mostly
artists crafted and performed them as an educative or cultural service, using
techniques that may or may not have resonated with audiences who reflected the
stories or characters depicted. This tension between ethnographic content and
modern or postmodern artistic form remains a hallmark of documentary
performance, whether defined by features or practices.
If we
mark the start of American documentary performance history in the early 1930s,
it is easy to see the centrality of social and political crises to its content
focus and aesthetic properties. On this timeline, the second key moment of
development happens in the late 1960s, when the Civil Rights movement, the
Vietnam War, global economic upheaval, and the newly dominant televisual mass
media invited or compelled a new generation of theatre collectives to explore,
employ, and explode the formal and aesthetic properties of documentary.
Companies such as the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, Bread and Puppet
Theatre, Teatro Campesino, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe questioned
dominant media and state narratives around economic and social oppression,
democracy, equality, and the rule of law.
These
subjects were not wholly new to theatremakers. In the 19th century, artists in
the emerging genres of naturalism and realism were also social reformers and
took inspiration in both content and form from the lived experience and
social/political struggles of “ordinary” people, their personal histories, and
their environments. But in the 1960s and ’70s, as traditional definitions of
home, family, nation, and creation were contested with new fervor, energy
shifted away from conventionally structured and produced plays and theatre
spaces toward unbounded and unscripted events (“happenings”) as well as highly
controlled multimedia installations and durational work that tested artists’
and audience’s physical capacities. At the same time the impulse to craft a
theatrical world from real lives, experiences, and places evolved into a rawer,
distinctly autobiographical, artist-driven type of storytelling.
This
turn to artist as source material marks the third historical development in
American documentary theatre, particularly in the work of Anna Deavere Smith.
In Smith’s work the primacy of written, archival documents takes a backseat to
artist-collected, interview-based materials. Smith also functions as performer,
presenting painstakingly studied and faithfully rendered bodies and voices
(across race, ethnicity, and gender) using her own body as tabula rasa,
activating new questions about truth and authenticity.
Other
artists of this late 1980s, early 1990s era, including Tim Miller, Holly
Hughes, Spalding Gray, Karen Finley, and the collective Pomo Afro Homos, tell
more singularly personal stories of identity formation, the struggle against
oppressive religious ideologies, discriminatory social hierarchies, and
inequitable political systems. The dramaturgy of these monologue documentaries
frequently echoes the collage organization and expressionistic elements of the
1930s living newspapers, eschewing a realistic approach to time and place.
Instead the performer’s emotional reality shapes the storyline and the
audience’s experience of social history as it meets an individual’s lived life.
Perhaps the most notable script of this third
era is The Laramie Project (2000), a three-act play
that takes the murder of college student Matthew Shepard as its catalyst event.
We see the history of the play’s construction in its opening moments, as
company members describe how they traveled with director/writer Moises Kaufman
from New York City to Laramie, Wyo., where they conducted interviews with
community members in the wake of an anti-gay hate crime that brought
international attention to this relatively small, isolated Western U.S. town.
Using Kaufman’s “moment work” technique, Tectonic’s interviews became the
centerpiece of their script.
Kaufman
had developed “moment work” for an earlier verbatim theatre piece, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, which stages the three trials that
eventually brought about Wilde’s conviction charge of indecency (downgraded
from sodomy). While the play, informed by an investment in exposing homophobia
in legal and social domains, forwards the notion that Wilde’s prosecution was a
miscarriage of justice, it also dramatizes how Wilde’s own arrogance, racial
and class privilege, and appetites contributed to his fall from public grace
and celebrity. The play even hosts an out-of-time onstage debate over the
artist’s and historian’s roles to combat, reveal, or ignore social injustices.
While
Kaufman’s authorship is singular in Gross
Indecency, he places the acting ensemble, whom he calls “narrators,” as the
central negotiators of the play’s complex ideas about sexuality, aesthetics,
and authority. But in The Laramie Project,
the actors became co-authors who work as performers and interlocutors, and the
play’s central dramaturgical structure is the three-fold act of witnessing,
remembering, and testifying. Such meta-theatricality—revealing the mechanics of
theatre’s process of collection, creation, and performance—is not a new or
singular feature of documentary plays. With the success and influence of The Laramie Project, however, it has
become a central aesthetic conceit of work built from interviews, especially if
those interviews are conducted by the same artists who then construct and perform
the documentary script.[2]
And
yet, as Carol Martin, a professor at NYU, has noted in multiple books and
essays on what she terms “the theatre of the real,” American documentary
theatre gains more public attention for the subjects it presents than for its
aesthetic innovation or critical complexity. While many artists working in this
domain hope to call into question shared understanding of terms such as “real”
and “fact,” for Martin and other critics and historians, such interrogations
exist to varying degrees based on the extent to which documentary theatremakers
connect their performance’s politics to its aesthetics. In her 2014 book Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage,
Martin argues artists working in the “theatre of the real,” often outside the
U.S., engage a broad and self-conscious examination of how theatre
“participates in the larger cultural obsession with capturing the ‘real’ for
consumption, even as what we understand as real is continually revised and
reinvented.” Martin leaves us with key questions about when and how, even if
we, as artists or audience members, can “definitively determine where reality
leaves off and representation begins.”
In the
contemporary moment, when the blur between the real and the represented is
daily, systemic, and overarching, companies such as the Civilians, which bills
its work as “investigatory theatre,” deliberately avoid the label
“documentary,” arguing their theatre asks more questions than it answers, does
not press any particular political agenda or audience action, and embraces
theatrical devices such as music and dance to expose dimensions of absurdity,
hyperbole, and non-linearity—essential tools to understand the complex social,
political, and cultural forces that shape our daily life. This new moment in
documentary theatre’s development is one marked by a mix of urgency, intensity,
and hybridity. The Civilians, for example, deliver their content across
multiple media platforms, including but not limited to theatre and concerts,
including via podcasts.
The
latter illuminates an aural dimension of communication that documentary theatre
more broadly is exploring (or returning to). In the past five years,
audio-based story platforms and site-specific events (such as narrated walking
tours, podcast and smartphone plays, even car plays), have expanded the
everyday dimensions of the theatre “stage” and its performance and reception.
Against
this backdrop we can see why debates over whether the category of “documentary”
is a formal genre or a set of practices and politics have churned among
filmmakers for decades. The rise and proliferation of reality TV, devised
theatre, and now podcasting or serialized audio storytelling has intensified
this discussion across fields and industries. Offered as an antidote to staid
scripted dramas where narrative control is in the hand of a writer or writing
team, reality TV has been marketed as unfiltered and unadulterated, uncovering
the rush of emotion available within the risky and uncontrolled flow of
everyday life.
Since
the early 2000s, devised theatre, which encompasses practices that have had
many names in eras before, has been touted as bringing (or returning) democracy
to the rehearsal room, decentering written text in the theatremaking process
and allowing artists of all backgrounds and skills to become authors of a
performance script, upending narrative conventions to tell the story of any
idea, individual, or event. This kind of performance can be built by an artists’
collective, but it is also accessible to non-artist communities, thereby
shifting the aesthetic authority to those with lived experience over artistic
training.
A
two-fold insistence on questioning and shaping reality gives documentary
theatre its unique character, whether one prioritizes its content or form.
First, by dramatizing lesser-known or counter-narrative aspects of contested or
supposedly stable experiences, documentary theatre unsettles what we thought we
knew in an effort to upend privilege, invert the margin and the center, and
interrogate structures of authority. Second, theatre offers a unique
opportunity for a body-to-body experience in a shared material space, which
makes it a complicated and dangerous art no matter its form.
While theatre
can only ever be a facsimile of the real, to create worlds and inhabit them is
a powerful act of imagination and resistance. Consequently, documentary artists
bear particular public scrutiny and critique because of their influence over
the selection, shape, and reception of their work. The paradoxes of documentary
theatre as both real and representational, multivocal yet clear, direct, and
coherent, critical of a unified truth yet believable and compelling, are part
of its complex, innovative, and ever-evolving history.
Jules Odendahl-James is a dramaturg and
director, and serves as director of engagement in the humanities department at
Duke University.
[1] In the United Kingdom
and Australia and in nations who bear a legacy of colonialism (e.g., India,
South Africa, Palestine, Lebanon) or totalitarian oppression (Turkey, Poland,
Argentina, Slovakia, among others), “verbatim theatre” or “tribunal theatre” shares
some of the formal, rhetorical, and political features as the American
documentary theatre history I will sketch here, but with its own, unique
national and aesthetic dimensions. For those interested in these traditions, I
recommend Martin’s Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage; Get
Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present (edited by Alison Forsyth and
Chris Megson); Verbatim: Techniques in Contemporary Documentary Theatre
(edited by Will Hammon and Dan Steward); Playing For Real: Actors on Playing
Real People (edited by Tom Cantrell and Mary Luckhurst), and Cantrell’s Acting
in Documentary Theatre.
[2] Perhaps not since
Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (1985), about the assassination of gay
rights activist and board of supervisors member Harvey Milk and San Francisco
Mayor George Muscone by former board member Dan White, has there been an
American documentary play of such direct, political, and rhetorical influence
as The Laramie Project. Not only did it have an off-Broadway run,
but since its publication in 2000, it has had more than 400 regional, college,
and high school theater productions. In 2008, many of the original company
members and Kaufman returned to Laramie and crafted The Laramie Project: Ten
Years Later, including interviews with both men who were convicted of
Shepard’s murder. All of this public attention kept Shepard’s story alive, as
well as drew [attention] to the drive for hate crimes legislation that
specifically addressed crimes against LGBTQ citizens. In 2009 Congress passed and
President Barack Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr.
Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
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