In By Heart, Rodriguez does not tell his stories of memory as abstract or historical parables. Instead, he involves the audience as active witnesses and cocreators of meaning. The collaborative witnessing achieved, through listening to stories and reciting the poem, has the effect of expanding the meaning of collective memory to acknowledge the trauma of fascism and also hope: the ability of people to unify in a common purpose and achieve something larger than the sum of their parts through the joint act of memory and witnessing. The memorization and recitation of “Sonnet 30” by the end of the show felt like an achievement, and every time I have recited it since, it invokes my memory of that act of witnessing, as well as summoning to mind the potential for audiences who want to remember to make a difference.
By Heart embodies and enacts so many of the principles of witnessing that underpin my optimism about theatre, and memory plays in particular. Yet it is in many ways a very different play from those discussed in this book: though there are stories in By Heart about oppression and sadness, it is a comic show. Rodriguez enlists the audience’s support through humor and the shared experiences of laughter, rather than tears. This is deliberate—indeed, one of the funniest jokes of the show is when a volunteer’s memory falters and his line is forgotten; Rodriguez turns to the volunteer and says “if you forget something, don’t worry—it’s very good for the performance; the audience always loves to watch failure.” The laugh of recognition (and culpability) resounds in the theatre. So it is perhaps salutary to note that this witness play relies for its impact on the joyful practice of creativity and collective remembering. Does this mean we were not witnesses, though, in the sense I have discussed up until now? Does witnessing only count if it is to suffering? I think not—the principle of By Heart is the recognition of the joint importance of attention and memory, and so while it may not ask us to witness current injustice, it does answer Vladimir’s painful demand in Waiting for Godot that the powerless be witnessed with compassion and care. And it also provides the audience with evidence of their own ability and power as witnesses, rather than simply as consumers.
By Heart revolves around making the audience visible—as a core part of what is being performed, and how that performance is witnessed. Another theatrical moment that made the audience visible came on November 19, 2016, during a curtain call to the US Broadway hit musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Actor Brandon Victor Dixon stepped forward on the stage and quieted the audience’s applause. Speaking directly to the auditorium, and deliberately going “off script,” Dixon spoke on behalf of the cast of Hamilton to address one of the show’s spectators: US vice president-elect Mike Pence. Dixon called on Pence, saying: “We, sir—we—are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. . . . We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”124 Dixon’s statement was greeted with a further standing ovation and went viral via traditional and social media. Clearly this was another moment when the audience realized their role as witnesses and the concomitant necessity for them to cocreate and remediate the theatrical message.
The next day US president-elect Donald Trump responded on Twitter: “The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!” The cast did not apologize. It is significant that the cast of Hamilton, as makers of a hit Broadway show, have a platform in the loud and crowded cultural marketplace that allows their voices to be heard, and that they choose to use this platform, and their symbolic capital, to speak up for the diverse others who are not enfranchised in the same way. It is also significant that they understand the potential of a history play to “inspire” future action, implicitly identifying the power of cultural memory to act as an ethical catalyst. Most of all, they recognize the importance of making theatre an “unsafe” space where radical things can happen. My point here is not just that theatre matters but that witnessing matters as an act in itself. Certainly, neither Pence nor Trump have showed any signs that this theatrical intervention was meaningful to them—but for the audience Dixon’s act of witness from the stage, and their witnessing of this moment, was meaningful. So while this moment does not demonstrate that theatre can change the political sphere, it does show how theatre can positively shape the witnessing sphere. And since this moment has now taken on iconic status, it has not only shaped cultural memory (both of Hamilton and of the weeks following the US presidential election) but continues to act as an exemplar of how artistic intervention, voice, and witnessing are vital in the cultural and memory marketplaces.
Witness plays call on their audiences to act as moral witnesses, and to assume the responsibility for collective memory and thereby to shape and define the memory marketplace along ethical lines. As the examples of By Heart and Hamilton demonstrate, these calls to action do not have to be based on trauma. However, as this book will explore, these are exceptional moments—as pain and suffering are the current default modes for memory work in the theatre (and arguably culture more generally). The ethics of how painful memory is deployed as a tool for generating ethical remembering, and as a marketing tool, will be debated in the chapters that follow. There is a fine line between witnessing and appropriation, between ethical memory and entertainment consumption, and much depends on the aesthetic and performative decisions and strategies used by the theatre companies as to where on the line their depictions of pain fall. As Winter argues, not only silence, but also speech, can be used in “morally deplorable ways.”125
It is valuable to note here that responsibility works in two directions—memories of brutality and injustice deserve to be heard and witnessed, but we must not forget that scenes that depict brutality are a burden to the audience. The performance of painful memory creates an ethical imperative to remember and an equal need to forget. In a crowded marketplace, novelty and increasingly intense physical and emotional experiences drive consumption. Yet these experiences, which are the very ones that need witnessing, may become so normalized that they blend into a generalized trauma culture that reduces the capacity for witnessing as traumatic cultural memory reaches a saturation point. In some senses, then, it is not simply that these plays act out past trauma, but that they actually enact a traumatized relationship to the past. This relationship also requires witnessing.
THIS BOOK
This book focuses on the production and consumption of painful memory in contemporary Irish and international theatre. The chapters that follow examine how memories of pain are staged by playwrights and theatre companies, how they are communicated to audiences, and how that audience, in turn, both consumes and witnesses. Each chapter considers the message being sold to the audience, the possibilities for reception and remediation, the effects of different levels of social and cultural capital on the status of the witness, and how theatrical strategies can highlight competition, or create solidarity, through recognizing different forms of capital, and involving the audience in mnemonic labor. In deciding what plays to discuss, I have chosen to focus on testimonial and memory plays—witness plays—that stage the personal experiences of subjects who traditionally do not enjoy social and economic capital, as a way of understanding whether theatre can function as an intervention in the marketplace. As such, this book takes its cue from a long history of feminist performance (both in theatre and performance art), which has used the autobiographical as a mode to “reveal otherwise invisible lives, to resist marginalisation and objectification and to