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1 Theatre of the Real: an Overview

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1 Theatre of the Real: an Overview Notes 1 Theatre of the Real: An Overview 1. In her essay ‘The Promise of Documentary,’ Janelle Reinelt (2009) cites Stella Bruzzi on the awareness of the spectator of the status of reality, implicitly making the case that quotation marks need not accompany the word ‘real’ every time it is written. I agree and will not place the word ‘real’ in quotation marks through the rest of this book. ‘Real’ in quotation marks insinuates that the real is not real. Real (without quotation marks) insinuates that the real is real. Since much of my discussion is precisely about the real’s ambiguity, I have elected not to use quotation marks. 2. There are many, many published dramatic documentary texts that compete with more conventional historical accounts. Some of these texts that are explicitly about history include: The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth (first per- formed and published 1963) about Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church’s complicity in the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people; The Investigation (first performed in 1965, English publication 1966) by Peter Weiss about the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, In White America (first performed in 1963, pub- lished in 1965) by Martin Duberman about racism in America, famously per- formed in 1964 by The Free Southern Theatre in the still segregated and racist Deep South; Inquest (first performed in 1970) by Donald Freed about the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; Year One of the Empire (first published in 1973 and first performed in 1980) by Elinor Fuchs and Joyce Antler about the US’s first land war in Asia, the Philippine War fought between 1899 and 1902; and, Emily Mann’s Annulla, An Autobiography (1977) and Still Life (1979) about a Holocaust survivor and the Vietnam War, respectively. Further, Between God and Man: A Judgment on War Crimes (first performed in 1970, published in Japanese in 1972, translated and published in English in 1979) by Kinoshira Junji about the Tokyo war crimes trials after World War II is an important and little mentioned contribution to documentary literature from Japan. 3. Jefferson Mays interview, 29 November 2011. 4. Jefferson Mays interview, 29 November 2011. 5. Dancing does not have the same real/performed binary as theatre as it directly engages the body by employing weight, volume, force, rhythm, and velocity, without having to use either text or character. It is experienced immediately in real time and place without the necessity of referring to other times and places. See Martin (1994). 6. The New York Times headline, ‘Reality, Fiction and Points Between,’ is an example of reality and fiction rather than fiction and nonfiction as the oppo- sitional reference points. See Hale (2009). 7. A wonderful example of a popular culture history of ideas ably staged via the use of technology is exemplified in the production of Romeo and Juliet by The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma. The performance was created from a series of phone calls to people who were asked to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet from 177 178 Notes beginning to end. Not one person interviewed was able to remember the plot precisely, resulting in a revelation of attitudes toward the play, Shakespeare, classicism, and love that, when taken together, created a new and hilarious plot about our relationship to plays, poetry, and performance, and whose instruction is considered necessary for knowledge and enlightenment. I saw Romeo and Juliet on 28 December 2009 as performed by Anne Gridley and Robert M. Johanson, and conceived and directed by Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, with set design by Peter Nigrini. 8. See http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/ (accessed 28 December 2011). 9. According to Gary Dawson, documentary theatre evolved from a neoreal- ist production style, which can be traced to paradigm shifts stemming from Charles Darwin and naturalism and its cause-and-effect logic. In the nineteenth century novelist Emile Zola wanted artists to search for truth with the detachment of scientists. 2 The Theatricalization of Public and Private Life 1. ‘We rejected realism as passé artistically, and as a function of “The State,”’ writes Joan MacIntosh, a founding member of The Performance Group. 2. The status of the real informing the object (documents, photographs, film footage, newsprint, Internet, audiotape, and so forth) depends on a realist epistemology, knowing based on the assumption that reality exists. 3. The Stonewall riots were spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of 28 June 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. In a dramatic resistance to police that overflowed into the streets, gays and lesbians fought back against a police raid and the government-sponsored system that supported such raids. The Stonewall riots became the defining event that marked the start of the gay rights movement in the United States. 4. The Connection ran off-off-Broadway for 722 performances and won three Obies. 5. In the winter of 2009 the theatre company Rude Mechanicals reconstructed Dionysus in 69 and played it in Austin, Texas. The work was a critical success with sold-out houses and much audience participation. 6. Joan MacIntosh, personal correspondence with the author, 26 July 2011. ‘Bill Finley wrote his text, including his scenes with Pentheus, based on the idea (and RS [Richard Schechner] may have a different memory of this) that Dionysus represented the ecstatic, inchoate, fluid, androgynous, polymor- phous perverse, wine, drunkenness, etc., whereas Pentheus was ‘The State,’ order, tradition, etc.. The idea was that Pentheus should speak the Greek and Dionysus speak in the contemporary vernacular, since we were drawing direct parallels to the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the late 60’s, and the pitfalls of such unchecked passion and ecstasy.’ 7. While Schechner did a few devised productions with The Performance Group – such as Commune (1970) – most of his directing has consisted of staging well- known plays. 8. Joan MacIntosh, personal correspondence with the author 27 July 2011. Notes 179 9. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,840426-1,00.html, accessed 2 September 2011. 10. In the case of Martin Luther King Jr., whose assassination was not recorded on film, the company began with his ‘I have a dream’ speech and portrayed King’s assassination after the first phrase. 11. Chaikin worked with The Living Theatre when they were performing Jack Gelber’s The Connection at their theatre on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, New York, on 15 July 1959. 12. In 1967 Katz wrote his first two documentary plays, both about fugi- tive slaves: Inquest at Christiana and The Dispute over the Ownership of Anthony Burns. Both works were broadcast on radio station WBAI-FM (New York). 13. In Kaufman’s 1997 production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, a chorus of young men in Victorian underwear held up the books from which they were quoting. In The Laramie Project Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Company narrated the story of traveling to Laramie, Wyoming, to conduct the interviews that made up the work, as they related the many stories of the citizens of the town where Matthew Sheppard was murdered for being gay. 14. In a personal correspondence with the author on 26 December 2009, Katz wrote that he remembers the director of Coming Out! David Roggensack telling him in 1972 that Joe Chaikin had seen the play and was impressed by the ‘fluidity and the originality of the staging.’ Katz ‘was surprised and skeptical, because however much I liked the look of the milk crates and the fluidity they allowed, I thought that this was already an old staging technique in off off off-Broadway theaters’ (Katz 2009a). 15. In a personal correspondence with the author on 19 November 2009, Katz wrote, ‘It seems relevant that I had read about Martin Duberman’s play In White America, though I don’t believe I’d seen it. But that was the model for Coming Out! (I am not sure if Marty used poems and other literary materials, but his compilation of “documents” in a broad sense was my inspiration)’ (Katz 2009b). 16. Feingold includes in his list of sources for documentary plays ‘excerpts from news reports, speeches, historical commentary, and documents, interspersed with first person reminiscences, excerpts from relevant works of fiction, and so forth’ ([1972] 1975). 17. Paula Kay Pierce directed productions in small theatres in New York until the mid-1980s. 18. In a personal correspondence with the author on 26 December 2009, Katz wrote, ‘I wanted a pseudonym that suggested it was a pseudonym’ (Katz 2009a). 19. Akalaitis, David Warrilow, and Ellen McElduff received a Village Voice Obie Special Citation for Southern Exposure in 1979. 20. I saw Southern Exposure: A Theatre Piece at least twice at The Performing Garage on Wooster Street in Soho, New York, in 1979. 21. Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road 180 Notes There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman – But who is that on the other side of you? The Waste Land, lines 359–65 22. I saw Rumstick Road at The Performing Garage on Wooster Street in Soho. 23. Gray enlisted LeCompte as his director, Ron Vawter and Libby Howe as his co-performers, Jim Clayburgh as designer, and Bruce Porter as technical operator. 24. ‘Drama, Script, Theatre and Performance’ was first published in TDR 17, 3 (1973).It was first republished in Essays on Performance Theory 1970–1976 (1977: Drama Book Specialists).
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