Theater

Reality Show

The Diverging Paths of Documentary Theater

by Meg Arader

A woman conducts interviews with people ranging from a Hasidic housewife to the Reverend Al Sharpton, and then portrays them onstage. A group of New York actors travel to Wyoming to question the citizens of a town reeling from a brutal murder. An alternative theater company finds itself with a defense contract. Documentary theater may not be new, but in the last decade, several high-profile productions have brought new focus to this loosely defined theatrical form.

On May 1, 1992, Fires in the Mirror, created and performed by Anna Deavere Smith, premiered at the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City. The play focused on the Crown Heights Riots of the previous summer, events of racial strife between the African-American and Hasidic communities that resulted in both communities charging the city and the NYPD with bias.

Since the early 1980s Smith had been developing theater pieces by interviewing people and "later performing them using their own words," Smith explained in her introduction to the published version of Fires. Fires was created from dozens of interviews Smith conducted with people from both the center and periphery of the events in Crown Heights.

The reaction to Fires was huge and immediate. Some reviewers credited Smith with inventing a new form of theater based on documentary filmmaking. Others saw her work as a new knot in a string that stretched back to the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, the Living Newspaper pieces of the Depression-era Federal Theater Project, and the "theater of fact" of 1960s Germany. Fires and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,a later piece by Smith about the riots in L.A. following the acquittal of the white police officers charged with beating black motorist Rodney King, were deemed important not only as theater but also as social commentary.

Also known as documentary drama, reality theater, and theatrical journalism, today the term documentary theater seems to indicate that most of the dialogue for a piece is verbatim transcription of what people actually said. Beyond that, documentary theater may take many of the same dramatic licenses allowed fiction pieces.

With documentary theater, the audience should expect factual accuracy, but only up to the point the artist committed to provide it. For example, Smith never claimed that Fires told the complete and total history of every event that happened in Crown Heights that hot August week in 1991. Even if such an undertaking were possible, it would never work theatrically. As far as documentation goes, all audiences can expect from Fires is an accurate rendition of some of what a person said during an interview.

While documentary theater is limited as a factual document, its powers lie in the ability of the art form to delve into the emotions, issues or lessons behind the facts. The past decade has seen several documentary plays produced, some with startling success. Two examples indicative of the varied directions documentary theater is moving are The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, and Charlie Victor Romeo, created by Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory.

In November of 1998, Moisés Kaufman, artistic director of New York City’s Tectonic Theater Project, accompanied by several actor/writers from the Project, went to Laramie, Wyoming, and began interviewing citizens about the October 1998 kidnapping and murder of Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming college student. Shepard was gay, and his murder focused national attention on sexual orientation "hate crimes," and on Laramie itself.

Kaufman and company spent over a year traveling back and forth to Laramie, eventually conducting over 200 interviews. They fashioned these interviews into The Laramie Project, which premiered in Denver in March of 2000, moving Off Broadway in May. They played to full houses and received excellent reviews. In 2001, Kaufman directed a film version for HBO, which will premiere at the 2002 Sundance film festival.

The similarities between The Laramie Project and the work of Anna Deavere Smith are obvious – a play culled from interviews with the people closest to a traumatic and controversial event, later performed by the interviewers in a presentational style, where the characters talk primarily to the audience. The Laramie Project uses several actors instead of one, but, like Smith, each actor takes on several roles. However, The Laramie Project is distinctive from Smith’s work in an important way.

In The Laramie Project, the writer/actor/interviewers become characters in the play: their thoughts and opinions became part of the script, and in the original productions they played themselves. Critic Steve Oxman found this element both honest and off-putting. "The material refers frequently to the cast members themselves," he wrote in a review of a production by the original cast at the La Jolla Playhouse in California. "The theater company acknowledges that its members can’t be pure observers, that by descending on Laramie during this time of trauma they in fact became players in this story as well." However, Oxman found that these "self-referential elements occasionally become a bit self-congratulatory."

Where the actor stops and the character begins is a question that has intrigued performers throughout the history of theater. German director/playwright Bertolt Brecht sought to shake his audiences out of complacency by clearly delineating that line. For example, he might have his actors step out of character and comment on the action, perhaps with a cynical song. In the 1920s, Brecht began to formulate his theories of "epic theater," sometimes called "theater of alienation." "Brecht manipulated esthetic distance to involve the spectator emotionally and then jar him out of his empathic response," theater historian Oscar C. Brockett wrote in his textbook The Theater, an Introduction. Brockett suggested that Brecht wanted the spectator to "actively judge and apply what he sees on the stage to conditions outside the theater."

In the 1960s, a new generation of German playwrights inspired by Brecht began creating theater that posed moral questions against the backdrop of actual events. Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss is the most famous example of this work, although a later piece by Weiss, The Investigation, is closer to what we would call documentary theater today. The Investigation used excerpts from testimony given at the inquiry into the concentration camp at Auschwitz as dialogue.

Dramatizing real events to effect social change was also behind the Living Newspaper productions of the Federal Theater Project. Similar to documentary films, these pieces were so adamant in their social reform point of view that in 1939, Congress stopped funding to the Federal Theater. The Laramie Project is similar in the sense that it makes arguments for hate crime legislation.

In the fall of 1999, the New York City theater company Collective: Unconscious opened Charlie Victor Romeo at a small, way-off Broadway theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The script consists entirely of excerpts from transcripts of "black box" sound recordings of flight crew conversation during air disasters. The title came from the phonetic alphabet representation for CVR, the abbreviation for Cockpit Voice Recorder.

Charlie Victor Romeo enacts the last moments of six actual air disasters, both commercial and military. The actors portray the flight crews as they attempt to deal with what is happening to their aircraft. The reviews were ecstatic, the run was extended five times, and in 2000 CVR won Drama Desk awards for "Outstanding Unique Theatrical Experience" and for the play’s "Outstanding Sound Design" by Jamie Mereness. It also won two awards at the 2000 New York International Fringe Festival. But the cast and creators of Charlie Victor Romeo soon discovered that their work was destined to have an effect far beyond their initial goal of creating gripping theater.

Word of the play spread through the aviation community, and pilots and controllers frequently appeared in the audience. Initially apprehensive about how a bunch of downtown actors were going to portray such a technically complicated and emotionally sensitive subject, these professionals found the play realistic and even educational. In an interview with The Reader, co-creator Robert Berger remembered being floored when told by an aviation professional that CVR had value as an educational tool. He recalled being told "if CVR was seen by the right people, ‘you are going to save a lot of lives.’" Military and commercial aviation trainers began bringing their students to see the play. Eventually, Major John Varljen, an Air Force global mobility operations training manager at the Pentagon, arranged with Collective: Unconscious to have CVR video-taped for use in training.

"The purpose of the video is to show the interaction and communication of aircrews under duress," Varljen said in an interview with the Air Force Print News. Examining air crises situations had previously involved reading the transcripts while simultaneously trying to re-create exactly what the crews were doing technically. While the creators of CVR strove to accurately portray the words and behavior of flight crews, they did not attempt to create exact replications of cockpit instruments or plane crash pyrotechnics. "Special effects" of that order are not only impossible to achieve realistically in a theater, they were never even considered. "We wanted to focus on the psychological and the interpersonal aspect of these events," Berger said. Air safety professionals found CVR useful as a training tool precisely because of this focus.

Having a defense contract and seeing your play reviewed in Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine are unique experiences for theater professionals. "It’s one thing to make a piece of art, another thing to have something useful to the aviation community," Berger said. But the strong sense of responsibility the creators feel toward the material has been there from the beginning. "The most important thing in our minds was to do it the right way. We wanted to keep it appropriate and focused," Berger said. That sense of responsibility has kept the creators from publishing the play. For now, Collective: Unconscious is touring CVR themselves. "It’s a sensitive subject, and we would rather do it until we are done, before we publish it," Berger said.

The Laramie Project is documentary theater that is unapologetically subjective. By combining honesty about the artifice of the documentary process with the thoughts of participants and onlookers, the performers mine for deeper societal truths. Charlie Victor Romeo is far more objective, yet its power still lies in the combination of the real and the theatrical, a combination that allows the audience to gain insight about what happens to people trying to do their jobs under incredible stress. These plays show that while a document can only record an event, documentary theater can inspire and educate.

Author’s note: The Laramie Project will be staged in Omaha by SNAP! Productions in August-September of 2002.

After February performances in Sydney, Australia, Charlie Victor Romeo will be touring across the U.S. Charlie Victor Romeo may be booked by contacting Pomegranate Arts at (212) 228-2221 or at http://www.pomegranatearts.com/.