On Broadway: Fake News

  

[New York Times culture correspondent Jesse Green is taking a look at what he finds is a new phenomenon on stages in the Western world.  It’s related to documentary theater, but has some intriguing differences, according to Green’s analysis. 

[As regular readers of Rick On Theater will have noticed, documentary theater is of special interest to me, and I have blogged on the subject quite a few times since I started ROT.  (Hence my inclination to post this article.)  Some of the previous posts on the blog regarding documentary theater are: “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama” (9 October 2009), “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre’” (15 September 2017, 18 September 2017, 21 September 2017, 24 September 2017, and 27 September 2017), “Documentary and Investigative Theater” (10 September 2025).

[Below, there are a couple of embedded links to posts on ROT that touch on theater of fact or verbatim theater, variations on documentary plays.  I didn’t include them in the list here because they’re placed where Jesse Green’s article treats a closely related point, but also because those posts aren’t strictly about documentary theater.  Nonetheless, I urge interested ROTters to check them out.] 

“FAKE NEWS”
by Jesse Green

[The article republished below was originally seen in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 17 May 2026; it was also posted on the New York Times website as “On Broadway Stages, a New Kind of Fake News” on 12 May.  Author Green was the New York Times’ chief theater reviewer from 2020 until 2025.]

A new style of theater has emerged in which the characters and events are real — even when the dialogue isn’t. Or is it?

Recent plays are approaching the archival density of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Mark Rosenblatt’s [British; b. 1978] “Giant” [2024], about the children’s book author Roald Dahl [1916-90; British author of popular children’s literature and short stories, poet, and screenwriter], arrived on Broadway this season [23 March-28 June 2026] bristling with monstrous excerpts from published accounts of Dahl’s antisemitic screeds. Off Broadway earlier this year, the director Daniel Fish [b. 1967] devised “Fauci/Kramer” [sic; program and reviews have Kramer/Fauci at Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, New York City, 11-21 February 2026] from the transcript of a brawlsome 1993 C-SPAN debate between the AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci [b. 1940; physician-scientist and immunologist; director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, 1984-2022] and the AIDS activist Larry Kramer [1935-2020; playwright, author, film producer, public health advocate, and gay rights activist]. Last year’s “Liberation” [Laura Pels Theater (Roundabout Theatre; Off-Broadway), 20 February-30 March 2025; James Earl Jones Theater (Broadway), 28 October 2025-1 February 2026], by Bess Wohl [b. 1975], about the hopes and failures of second-wave feminism, is based partly on interviews with participants in real meetings of a 1970s consciousness-raising group. In 2024, Mario Correa’s [b. 1969 in Chile] “N/A” [Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center, New York City, 27 June-4 August 2024] — the “N” for Nancy Pelosi; the “A” for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — offered ferocious, mile-a-minute yet totally imaginary depictions of private conversations between the two congresswomen.

I could go on: The 1933 obscenity case against James Joyce’s 1922 “Ulysses” [The United States vs Ulysses by Colin Murphy; premiered in Ireland in November 2023; U.S. premiere: JL Greene Theatre (Irish Arts Center; Off-Broadway), 30 April-1 Jun 2025], the secret back-channel negotiations behind the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords [Oslo by J. T. Rogers at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater (13 April-16 July 2017)], a woman’s taped recollections of being held captive for five months and an FBI transcript of another woman’s arrest for leaking classified information have all been remixed for recent drama [Is This a Room, conceived and directed by Tina Satter; premiered at The Kitchen on 4 January 2019; Off-Broadway premiere on 21 October 2019 at Vineyard Theatre; Lyceum Theatre, 11 October-27 November 2021]. And we in the audience have been left like reporters in darkened rooms to judge the resulting dialogue for ourselves. Is it real or does it just sound as if it might be?

This isn’t entirely new. Peter Morgan’s [British; b. 1963] 2006 play, “Frost/Nixon,” borrowed liberally from the British broadcast journalist David Frost’s [1939-2013] grilling of Richard M. Nixon [1913-1994; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74] in 1977. David Hare’s [English; b. 1947] 2004 play “Stuff Happens” featured another U.S. president, George W. Bush [b. 1946; 43rd President of the United States: 2001-09], conferring with members of his administration during the buildup to the 2003 Iraq war. (Some of the dialogue, not to mention the title, was drawn from the public record.) And since 2001, the Civilians, a Brooklyn-based “investigative theater” company, have been creating narratives from interviews conducted with evangelicals, porn workers, prisoners and politicians.

But then the line starts to dwindle. Other than the verbatim collages of Anna Deavere Smith [b. 1950] starting in the 1980s [see “Fires in the Mirror (Signature Theatre Company)”(12 December 2019)] and the occasional nostalgia act (like Hal Holbrook’s [1925-2021] “Mark Twain Tonight!” from 1954) or courtroom drama (like Jerome Lawrence [1915-2004] and Robert E. Lee’s [1918-1994] “Inherit the Wind” from 1955), 20th-century plays didn’t generally try to borrow, or simulate, the actual speech of historical figures. No evidence suggests that [William] Shakespeare [1564-1616] consulted 11th-century Scottish transcripts to create “Macbeth” some 600 years later. The Greeks kept the muses of theater and history distinct.

[In point of fact, the Greeks did, at least in one instance, combine history (as distinct from myth) and theater. The first known true history play, Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-ca. 456/455 BCE) The Persians (premiered 472 BCE). is based on actual events rather than myths. The oldest extant ancient Greek drama, the play focuses on the defeat of Xerxes’ (ca. 518-465 BCE; fourth Emperor of Persia: 486-465 BCE) navy at the Battle of Salamis (26 or 27 September 480 BCE) and the Persian reaction to the battle.]

So why are playwrights now so eager to eavesdrop on reality, offering audiences facts and quasi facts in the form of dialogue? It’s hardly the purpose, and rarely the case, that theater should profit by telling us what real people said. Drama has historically been considered a form of fiction or poetry. Yet as recent plays approach the feeling of reportage, what’s surprising isn’t that so many fail to convince but that several succeed, in the process inventing a new style befitting our time.

Take “Giant.” Set on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1983, it presents Dahl (John Lithgow) dealing with the repercussions of having made anti-Jewish comments in his review of a book about Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon. A lunch at his home with representatives of his British and American publishers has been organized to encourage him to walk back the comments before they affect sales of his own book “The Witches,” set to be published later that year. Instead, he doubles down, referring to the media, for example, as “a nasty little cabal of nasty fucking Jews” [Brian Appleyard, “The Master Storyteller,” The Independent (London, Eng.) 20 March 1990].

Hearing that line, one would like to take comfort in the idea of dialogue as fiction. But in “Giant,” one cannot. The worst of Dahl’s antisemitic comments are verbatim — and when not verbatim, close enough. “They control the media,” he said of Jews in a 1990 interview eight months before his death. “Jolly clever thing to do” [Hugo Williams, “The Big Friendly Giant and the Kids,” Independent (London) 18 March 1990]. Yet Rosenblatt writes in a preface to the script that the play is “never striving to be documentary.” The lunch with the publishers’ representatives is plausible but invented, and one character, the American, who’s Jewish [Jessie Stone, played on Broadway by Aya Cash], didn’t exist.

That’s why it makes good drama. The combination of direct quotation from published accounts and close approximations in fully imagined scenes creates a compound glue that’s stronger than its components. Having Dahl say awful things at home, in front of his fiancée and within earshot of his housekeeper and handyman, suggests more about his character than similar things he wrote for public consumption. His antisemitism isn’t just a sound bite, it’s embodied — and thus more absolute and complex.

The paradox recalls Marianne Moore’s [1887-1972; American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor] description of poetry as a form that presents “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” [“Poetry,” first published in Alfred Kreymborg, ed., Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (N. L. Brown, 1920)]. Regarding “Giant,” the phrase “real toad” is especially apt. But in “Liberation,” it’s the garden that’s real: a feminist group in an Ohio gymnasium 50 years ago. I say “real” because Wohl based most of the play’s characters on women who were part of an actual consciousness-raising group from that era, and drew additional inspiration from her mother’s own circle of friends. What they say sounds real too. In their meetings, the women argue about how to respond to the unenlightened men in their lives (“I think you should kill him”), what the goal of feminism should be (“If we don’t take action, we have no group”) and whether it’s permissible for one character to open the top button of her blouse to get a promotion at work (“She has to get through the day somehow”). Eventually, the narrator figure, a semifictionalized stand-in for Wohl, has a debate with her late mother, who materializes to say the play has “some funny lines” but “you got most of it wrong.” That scene is heartbreaking, even if you know that Wohl’s mother is alive and attended the Broadway production eight times.

[Liberation was nominated for the 2026 Best Play Tony, though it didn’t win the award; however, it did win the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Off-Broadway, it won the 2025 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play, and it was nominated for the 2025 Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Play.]

The acknowledgment of the blurry space between quotation, paraphrase and guesswork — the subtitle is “A Memory Play About Things I Don’t Remember” — makes “Liberation” feel more accurate. “It has to do with the way theater rewards emotional truth over literal truth,” Wohl told me. “The invented dialogue is all in support of the emotional truths I’m investigating, which spring from tons of research and firsthand conversations.”

Wohl’s method, like Rosenblatt’s, works because, even if the dialogue sounds accurate and is sometimes verbatim, the playwrights take a freer hand with the characters, inventing some and compositing others. Notably less successful are those plays, like Stefano Massini’s [Italian; b. 1975] “The Lehman Trilogy,” which opened on Broadway in 2021, that work the other way around, putting fake speech into real mouths, in this case those of three generations of the American banking family. Even putting real dialogue in real mouths can be a problem, though: The historic political statements in “Stuff Happens” are never as convincing as what Hare invents because you cannot reach the depths of character with language designed specifically to be shallow.

Current events have rarely been theater’s forte. Catastrophes that once seemed epochal have over the past two decades merged into one continuous sludge. But it’s not just the pace of the events; it’s how we now encounter them. Social media and A.I. have flooded our field of attention with hot takes and chaotic imagery, leaving us to extract the truth on our own. We learned of the killings of George Floyd [1973-2020; African-American man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 25 May 2020], Renee Good [1988-2026; American woman fatally shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis, 7 January 2026] and Alex Pretti [1988-2026; American intensive care nurse for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs shot and killed by two U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis, 24 January 2026]  within hours, with disinformation, false narratives and even, in some cases, deepfake videos soon following.

What the English poet William Wordsworth [1770-1850] described as his poetic ideal in 1800 — “emotion recollected in tranquillity” [sic; British spelling] — was for almost 200 years drama’s watch cry as well. But with no tranquillity left in which to recollect emotion, it’s no wonder that playwrights have looked for workarounds. Many have discovered, or rediscovered, the way older crises can serve as analogues for newer ones: AIDS can speak to Covid, Dahl to the antisemitic tropes of today, second-wave feminism to third-wave and beyond. What’s new is that playwrights have begun leaning into the objective techniques of nonfiction to sidestep the noise of fake news.

The best works to emerge from this movement toward facts are those that nevertheless manage to exploit the expressive opportunities of fiction. It may have been Smith, in her verbatim plays, who provided the inspiration, paradoxically achieving the imaginative weight of pure invention while observing strict verbal fidelity. The potency of that approach was established by two of her works from the early 1990s: “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities” (about the riots [19-21 August 1991] following the death of a 7-year-old Black boy when a car driven by a Hasidic Jew struck him [19 August]) and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” (about the violence that ensued after police officers who attacked Rodney King [1965-2012; African-American victim of police brutality on 3 March 1991 in Los Angeles] were acquitted in state court). But their power also derived from Smith herself, who was usually the only performer onstage, filtering as many as 40 oppositional voices through her own singular lens. The filtering was itself the drama, making the point that any of us contain the possibility of all of us.

Smith’s achievement has been difficult to replicate in other formats, only partly because of her extraordinary mimetic skills. With a strong enough actor, like Michael Benjamin Washington [b. 1979] in the 2019 revival [see also link above] of “Fires,” the play remains overwhelming. But a 2021 Off Broadway revival of “Twilight,” which divided the play’s characters among several actors, dissipated much of its strength. That may be why interview-based dramas in her wake, like those devised by the Civilians and by Tectonic Theater Project (most recently “Here There Are Blueberries,” a 2022 play about the discovery of an album of concentration camp photographs), have inched toward more familiar territory with elaborate settings, projections and song [see also my reports in Rick On Theater on 26 May 2024, 29 May 2024, 1 June 2024, 4 June 2024, and 7 June 2024].

Now playwrights are fudging the line between transcription and transformation even further. Often enough, the result, like an A.I. image in which someone has extra fingers, doesn’t pass the most elementary smell test. But handled properly, the combination of “maybe real” and “Could it be?” and “OK, yes, this actually happened” feels strangely right for our time — and serves as good practice for life. When we can no longer trust what real people say, the fictional facts and factual fictions of plays like “Giant” and “Liberation” make for a new kind of realism. Like little else onstage, they feel true.

[Jesse Green is a culture correspondent for the New York Times.  He was previously the chief theater reviewer for the Times from 2020 until 2025, having been co-chief from 2017.  Previously, he was the theater reviewer at New York magazine.]

"On The Real: Documentary Theatre"

Article 4

           

[I’m doing 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

“HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE DOCUMENTARY THEATRE?”

By Amelia Parenteau

Stage works based on real material range so widely that about all they have in common is their makers’ aversion to labels.

What’s in a name?

Of the seven contemporary theatremakers I spoke to for this piece, not one was happy with the term “documentary theatre” to describe their work. All had reasons for rejecting it: it felt too clinical, or they didn’t know what it meant, or they felt that other people were pursuing it more seriously and didn’t want to falsely lay claim to it. Marianne Weems, artistic director of the Builders Association, spoke for several artists when she confessed, “I don’t relate to the scholarly aspect of the field.”

And yet each of these artists is undeniably engaged in creating some kind of documentary theatre, meaning that they draw from factual source material to craft their work and tell engaging stories in direct conversation with our present reality. Above and beyond holding a mirror up to society, as all art is charged to do, these theatremakers are finding ties to specific communities and stories, proving the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

But as these original works often defy categorization, one of the biggest shifts in the contemporary landscape of documentary theatre is a rejection of the term itself.

Admittedly, it’s usually not a good idea to force labels onto contemporary artists’ work; one of theatre’s most vibrant joys comes from the raw experience of savoring each new work as an individual experience, with each creator adapting the tools and the terms of the form to suit their own vision. But for lack of a better encompassing word in a moment of shifting terminology, “documentary theatre” will serve in this article to describe works that locate themselves in proximity to each other on the contemporary theatre scene, even if the creators are not necessarily in dialogue.

Although the definition is as contested as the term itself, “documentary theatre” tends to describe theatre that wholly or in part uses existing documentary material as a source for the script, typically without altering its wording. This source material can come from interviews, newspapers, court transcripts, oral histories, etc. Alternative labels currently in circulation include “investigative theatre,” “verbatim theatre,” and “ethnodrama.”

“Investigative theatre” entered the lexicon thanks to the Civilians, a Brooklyn-based theatre company founded in 2001. Calling it “an artistic practice rooted in the process of creative inquiry,” the Civilians define it in their mission statement thus: “Investigative theatre brings artists into dynamic engagement with the subject of their work; the artists look outward in pursuit of pressing questions, often engaging with individuals and communities in order to listen, make discoveries, and challenge habitual ways of knowing. The ethos of investigative theatre extends into production, inviting audiences to be active participants in the inquiry before, during, and after the performance.”

Investigative theatre provides a little more leeway than “documentary theatre,” blurring the lines between factual documentation and artistic sensibilities in storytelling.

“Verbatim theatre,” as one might guess, is the practice of constructing a play from the speech of people interviewed about a given topic. Anna Deavere Smith’s work provides a seminal example. Understandably, this creative process presents a set of strict limitations on writers, which makes works of purely verbatim theatre few and far between.

Aaron Landsman’s most recent project, Perfect City, is hard for even him to define. He describes it as an artistic process of inquiry in which young adults are paid to gather once a week to think, talk, and make art over a span of 20 years, with the end goal of making our cities and our lives more equitable. He concedes that parts of his shows have been verbatim, though he and his co-creators edited the transcripts they were using. He insisted, “It’s not nonfiction. We used documentary editing choices, but I wanted us to own ‘we made this.’ I worry these labels make one think the show is objective or journalistic, or that because I conducted the interview I got the only ‘real’ story.”

Landsman developed his ethnographic approach under the tutelage of Gregory Snyder. When he interviews people for his theatre creations, he doesn’t take notes or record the conversations. Instead, he listens actively, returns home, and writes what he remembers. He then presents this accounting to the person whom he has interviewed for feedback, and often has the interviewee perform their own story in the show. “It’s amazing the way the mind works—what you remember, and connections your mind makes between ideas that might have come up at different points in the conversation,” Landsman said.

Methodologically, then, Landsman dabbles in verbatim theatre and ethnodrama, but uses neither label to describe his work.

What unites all these examples is a focus on the “real”—a multifaceted attempt to unearth bare truth through theatrical storytelling and engage audiences in meaningful conversation. The “documentary” label is apt not only because creators draw from documentary source material, but also because this theatre serves to document our time, in all its specificity and contradictions.

It may not be just the term that makes artists reluctant. The implication that a documentarian assumes responsibility for other people’s stories—and is some kind of arbiter or moral authority—is fraught in these times of increased social consciousness. Cultural appropriation is a cardinal creative sin, and artists are more aware than ever of the burden of responsibility that comes with telling other people’s stories. It’s no wonder, then, that they shy from that perception.

Travis Russ, founder and artistic director of New York City-based Life Jacket Theatre Company, recently presented part of his company’s upcoming work about sex offenders in Florida, America Is Hard to See, at New York University’s Forum on Ethnodrama [Program in Educational Theatre at New York University’s Steinhardt School, 21 and 22 April 2017]. Though Russ has a background in ethnography, he is reluctant to put Life Jacket’s work in a particular box, insisting that he is not a journalist and avoiding clinical terms that might make audiences assume they’ll hear a lecture or history lesson at Life Jacket’s shows.

Said Russ, “Our goal is to tell a story and make it engaging; [journalists’] is to report facts and help readers draw conclusions based on the facts. We uncover truth, not just facts, which makes theatre different.” Several artists interviewed described a similar objective: access to essential human truths via “real” source material, all the while protecting their creativity, and disavowing presumed authority, by eschewing the documentary label.

Ideally, documentary theatre is more of an invitation to open a conversation with the audience rather than to teach them. The Builders Association in Brooklyn is currently developing several projects, one of which takes the idea of opening a conversation with the audience literally. In a new piece with the working title AYN RAND: Trauma Response [5 October 2017, PRELUDE Festival; Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, Graduate Center of the City University of New York], the first half will be a theatrical meditation on Rand’s life, the second half a house-lights-up discussion with the audience.

When the Builders tested the concept at the Performing Garage in SoHo earlier this year, Weems reported, the audience would not leave the theatre even after the discussion portion was over, they were so hungry for the opportunity to engage in dialogue in response to the work they had just seen. Particularly in light of much of the Tea Party Right’s idolization of Rand, the Builders Association is eager to delve deeper into her personal history and encourage a conversation with audiences.

Even in less overt forms of audience engagement, the relationship between actor and audience is often a key element of documentary theatre. In the case of Life Jacket’s America Is Hard to See, set to premiere at NYC’s HERE in January 2018, Russ is acutely aware that he’s asking actors to channel another real human being live onstage. “It is critically important for practitioners who make work based on real people and events to be clear with audiences on what is real and what is not,” Russ said.

Russ does not give his actors access to the transcripts or recordings of the interviews used to create the show. Instead, he explained, “I always want to know, as a human being, what [actors] can bring to the table and infer from what’s given.” Russ trusts that the verbatim speech in his script will provide enough material for the actors—and the audience—to unearth the truth of each character and empathize with them. When telling the personal stories of sex offenders, this empathic engagement is essential, as it gives audiences room to confront their own preconceptions and leave with more questions than they entered with.

Another way to approach the dividing lines between what is real and theatrical is to have the subjects of the show portray themselves onstage. Landsman, who describes his own work as “socially engaged art,” had audience members reenact real transcripts of city councilmembers’ meetings in his piece City Council Meeting [performed at HERE in 2011 and 2012, Houston in 2012, and Tempe, Arizona, in 2013], which he created with Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay. Audience members were also encouraged to participate in the show, which has installed itself in local city councils from Bismarck, N.D., to San Antonio, Texas, Portland, Ore., and NYC. Sitting somewhere between performance and politics, City Council Meeting is a formal experiment in that it draws not only from source material but also real-life, present engagement. By blurring the distinction between politicians and citizens, audience members and participants, City Council Meeting is intended to spur a reconception of the limitations and opportunities for political engagement on a local level.

Liveness and personal engagement obviously distinguish documentary theatre from documentary film: Physical proximity creates an opportunity for more immediate engagement with the subject at hand. Both documentary film and theatre may set out to educate and motivate their audiences, but there is something necessarily more personal about the liveness of theatre.

Sam Green came sideways at documentary theatre from a background in film, and doesn’t use the term to describe his work; he prefers “live documentary” when presenting his work in a film-screening context, and “lecture performance” in the performance world. Green’s ouevre includes works on the Weather Underground, the Kronos Quartet, and R. Buckminster Fuller, in which he live-narrates a series of projected images, accompanied by live music. “Coming from the film world, liveness isn’t in the equation,” said Green. “It’s funny to be between the two, seeing through both eyes. But you can’t deny with these pieces that liveness gives the frisson. The energy in the room is a current running through it.”

Green is explicit in his desire to always be performing, not acting. He explained: “This form has antecedents in film history, before cinema became a popular form of public entertainment in the late 1800s. There was a huge lecture tradition in the United States, and in the early days of film, people did lectures with films.” Japan had a similar tradition called Benshi, used when American films were first screened there, in which narrators “would guide the audience through the film, sort of like a play-by-play sports announcer. Some Benshi narrators became very popular, sometimes even more famous than the films.”

When narrating his own live documentaries, Green is not interested in dominating the audience’s attention, but rather performing one role in the larger mechanism of the action onstage.

Perched on another edge of the form are the Neo-Futurists, an experimental company founded in Chicago in 1988. They have been eliding the difference between “performing” and “acting” for decades, and between fiction and reality as well. Their statement of purpose alludes to “strengthening the human bond between performer and audience” by “embracing a form of non-illusory theatre in order to present our lives and ideas as directly as possible. All of our plays are set on the stage in front of the audience. All of our characters are ourselves. All of our stories really happened. All of our tasks are actual challenges. We do not aim to ‘suspend the audience’s disbelief,’ but to create a world where the stage is a continuation of daily life.”

With their emphasis on indeterminacy and immediacy, the Neo-Futurists are feeding off the same human gravitation toward the “real” that draws us to documentary theatre. When a Neo-Futurist performs a scene from their life—from something as mundane as grocery shopping to something as momentous as a first declaration of love to their partner—an audience of strangers is granted access to a personal narrative typically reserved for close friends and family. As in a piece of verbatim theatre, audiences often regard material drawn from real life, whether it derives from the performer onstage or from unseen interview sources, with heightened reverence and empathy.

This October, the Neo-Futurists are scheduled to premiere Tangles & Plaques [12 October-18 November 2017, Chicago], a new work from their “Neo-Lab” created by ensemble member Kirsten Riiber and memory care therapist Alex Schwaninger, which attempts to demystify the experience of dementia through interviews and personal narratives about the life and death of memories. The Neo-Futurists, like many documentary theatremakers, discard the notion of suspension of disbelief, welcoming audiences with the full truth of themselves, absurd or difficult as it may be.

Clearly there is a widespread cultural interest in seeing and hearing “real” stories in our contemporary entertainment. “We learn about life through hearing other people’s stories,” said Russ. “We’ve seen a resurgence of podcasts; human storytelling events are thriving. We’re living in tumultuous times, and people want to learn what strategies people are using and emotions they are experiencing as a road map for their own lives.”

Green agreed: “People are hungrier for ‘the real.’ We’re all junkies, needing more and more emotional power in our culture, and real stuff is more powerful. When you’re really scared watching a movie, you say, ‘It’s only a movie,’ and that power goes away. But that power doesn’t go away with documentaries.”

Of course, wielding the power of “truth” can be a double-edged sword for artists who want to both do justice to their sources and build trust with their audiences. The hunger for the real—for “reality” TV, for StoryCorps podcasts, for fictional TV series “based on real events,” for documentary film—has been both sated and created by popular media. But this appetite swings both ways, as the more we know, the more we have to worry about—and the more we crave and take comfort in shared human experience. As our global perspective expands and in-person exchanges become rarer, our craving for interpersonal interaction intensifies. At its best, documentary theatre can feed our insatiable thirst for information as well as our need for something more personal, less quantifiable.

When Weems is asked, “Why theatre rather than film or other media?” she said she replies, “There’s still something to be said for creating spectacle. The pleasure of making and doing is still specific to live performance.”

Another opportunity afforded by the liveness presented by this kind of theatre is its vital application as a tool for activism, for speaking to the political tensions of the present moment. Socially engaged art can shine the spotlight on those in the margins, bringing their stories to a wider audience. The safe space created by the remove of the stage opens an opportunity for audience members to give increased consideration to stories they might otherwise avoid.

Moreover, the intimacy of live performance lets the audience feel they are in on the conversation simply by listening. “If I as an audience member know that the person being depicted onstage is real, I can’t deny their reality, story, or existence in the world,” said Russ. “It makes me lean in more, listen more closely, because maybe they’ll say something that helps me understand their world better, express my own thoughts and feelings better, or helps me learn about myself.”

Liza Jessie Peterson’s solo show The Peculiar Patriot depicts one woman’s experience visiting incarcerated family members. Though the characters in the play are all invented, Peterson based them on newspaper stories, prison reports, real prisoners’ stories, and her own experiences teaching in prison. Peterson wrote the show in 2003, at a time when, she said, theatres seemed “cagey” about presenting “politically, racially charged content, because it makes people uncomfortable.” So she toured it through 35 prisons across the country. Now, she said, “Mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex are in the zeitgeist,” pointing to the book The New Jim Crow [Godfrey C. Henry; Xlibris, 2005] and the documentary film 13th [2016 documentary by director Ava DuVernay], which means that The Peculiar Patriot is “getting a different reception.” It’s slated to have its New York premiere at National Black Theatre Sept. 13-Oct. 1.

Peterson doesn’t use the word “documentary theatre” to describe her work, preferring just “theatre” or “political satire.” That said, her thorough research and unique perspective render The Peculiar Patriot a record of America’s prison-industrial complex, and opens up an empathetic conversation around the personal effects of having loved ones incarcerated. “When there’s social unrest, art—theatre—is most essential,” she said. “It gives people hope, language, what they can’t articulate, provides road maps, reflections, is a mirror and a lighthouse in dark times. Artists push culture forward.”

Kemi Ilesanmi is executive director of the Laundromat Project in New York City, which works with artists across multiple disciplines to create community-based art. Among the dozens of works the Laundromat Project has commissioned and presented since 2006, many projects draw source material from the local community to create conversations between neighbors. “We are always trying to follow the artists, shamans in this setting, to see what they are talking about, and what issues are they raising and questioning,” said Ilesanmi. She cited “the power of stories to be a site of resistance, a grounding for communities being displaced, or afraid of being displaced. The power of story amplifies and it’s important, because it helps shift narratives from the inside.”

The Laundromat Project has launched several youth projects collecting oral histories of elders from their communities, which is not just a way of preserving local history but also of changing the narrative these young people learn about what is possible and how they envision themselves in relation to those who came before. This expression of documentary theatre takes place in the streets and in community spaces, yet achieves the same truth-telling purpose.

“People of color have been figuring out how to do this [community engagement] work for such a long time, before it became the center of the academy,” said Ilesanmi. “The Laundromat Project will continue to really be able to invest and give artists the opportunity to be the creative change agents they can be in collaboration with their neighbors in a real genuine way. The challenges of the world keep reminding us this is something we need.”

As artists and citizens grapple with understanding, articulating, and reflecting the ever-shifting truth of the moment, documentary theatre continues to provide a platform for social, political, and personal exploration. Call it what you will—or just call it 
theatre.

[The print version of this article, in vol. 34, no. 7 of American Theatre, is entitles “Truth, Not Facts.”

[Parenteau defined all of her alternatives to “documentary theater” except one: ethnodrama.  As it’s not a term I’d encountered before, I went in search of a definition.  Finding a satisfactory one wasn’t easy, it turned out.

[The symposium the author mentions above, NYU’s Forum on Ethnodrama, says ethnodrama is “the practice of creating a play script from materials such as interview transcripts, field notes, journal entries, and/or print and media artifacts.”  But that’s no more than a general definition of documentary theater.  Besides, this definition merely describes the form’s methodology, shared widely by pretty much all types of documentary performance.  What makes it “ethno”?  The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods, an on-line reference work, describes ethnodrama as “the written transformation and adaptation of ethnographic research data (e.g., interview transcripts, participant observation fieldnotes, journals, documents, statistics) into a dramatic playscript staged as a live, public theatrical performance.”  I suspect that’s accurate, but it’s so loaded with jargon and academic-sounding terms, I can’t unpack it.  It may be correct, but it's useless.

[A website called Medanth (for Medical Anthropology) says: “Ethnodrama is an arts-based methodology for presenting participants' personal stories which are often centered on social issues and traumatic, or significant, events.”  That seems to be getting closer; the “personal stories” distinguished the form from run-of-the-mill documentary theater.  (Ethnography, a branch of anthropology, is, after all, the scientific study of people and cultures.)  From the examples Parenteau presents in her article, it sounds as if the researching and enacting of “personal stories” is the key distinction of ethnodrama.]