Witnesses to Painful Experience
We might not go to Macbeth for history, but we do go for heightened drama, conflict, and catharsis. So what can the docu-verbatim play offer its consumer? The answer is: access to the voice of the disenfranchised, victimized, traumatized individual. In isolating the voices of the disenfranchised, this platform nominates them as particularly important and gives the audience time to consider their memories apart from the usual social context. While this can increase attention, it’s also possible that this apartness can make it difficult for audiences to then connect what they are prepared to listen to appreciatively in the theatre, with the social world outside, with other issues competing for their attention and sympathies.
These plays are not easy to witness. The memories and histories of vulnerability discussed in this chapter make for uncomfortable watching and listening. Many of the experiences described—child abuse, rape, and murder—are still taboo social facts that are hard to hear and, as a result, are all too often underlistened to. However, as these productions, and their reception, show, audiences can be attentive and responsive. We can therefore identify these shows as potential utopian moments of ethical and collective witnessing, moments that are not usually available in the marketplace. Yet in buying a ticket for these kinds of productions, the audience may be self-selecting consumers with an interest in the area, who are particularly amenable to listening to vulnerability. Are these then taboo issues for the audience, or is it—more likely—that the docu-verbatim play is pushing at an already open door? We will also see, in relation to plays that deal with suffering, that audiences respond empathetically, and so a follow-up question is whether the way that audiences respond to painful memories of suffering is temporary catharsis or whether the utopian moment can continue outside the theatre, after the show? These docu-verbatim productions thus offer important opportunities for us to consider how to stage and respond to vulnerability.
This chapter considers three productions. In part one, I focus on the Irish play No Escape (2010) by Mary Raftery, first produced by the Abbey Theatre, which dramatizes the story of institutional child abuse in Ireland. This is a traditional documentary play based on a public archive that stages the testimony in a combination of direct address and tribunal-style interviews. In part two, I consider two plays by New York–based Tectonic Theater Company, The Laramie Project (2000) and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (2010). These two shows, created by the ensemble, respond to the homophobic hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Both plays are based on interview material created by the company, with small elements of other documentary material, such as court records. Like No Escape, these two plays are staged as a blend of direct address and onstage interview scenarios, though Tectonic takes a different approach in constructing its own testimony archive. In linking these three plays, I aim to show the international appeal and applicability of docu-verbatim theatre, as well as divergences in subsidized versus commercial theatre. Though they emerge from different national contexts, what unifies these three plays is the consistent use of docu-verbatim theatre as a style to respond self-consciously and ethically to violence against vulnerable individuals in order to deliberately build social and memory capital for the victims.
PART ONE
Capital in the Marketplace: No Escape
No Escape (2010) is the first-ever documentary play commissioned by the Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre. Compiled by Mary Raftery, the play is traditionally documentary in its approach, based on the archival material and published text of the 2009 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse under Judge Ryan (henceforth the Ryan Report), which investigated the abuse of children in residential institutions administered by the Catholic Church in Ireland over a seventy-year period. Raftery’s play combines the tribunal approach in staging some of the interviews between the commission’s legal team and the religious congregations, presided over by Judge Ryan, with the direct address more common to verbatim theatre, as individual abuse-survivor testimony is delivered face on to the audience. The play’s dependence on the official report suggests what Caroline Wake has described as a version of “history as it has been recorded in the archive.”14 What the docu-verbatim play brings to the archive, though, is the further potential for representation and explanation.
No Escape is a highly interventionist version of the archive and, as such, reflects a particular political agenda, and equally political representation and explanation of this history. Raftery’s work on this archive refutes any idea of these documents as a static or fixed narrative of the past; indeed Raftery’s editing technique profoundly illustrates the ability to make the archive seem a contested and lively space from which multiple and conflicting histories can emerge. Though the weight of written material in the archive, including records and log books and so on, belongs to the religious congregations, the play’s script moves this quantitative material to the background, bringing the voices of the survivors and their oral histories to the foreground, consistently prioritizing their voices, embodied experience, and formerly suppressed memories.
The set for the first production (Abbey Theatre 2010), directed by Róisín McBrinn, bisected the stage with two glass screens onto which Judge Ryan (played by Lorcan Cranitch) wrote place names, dates, and figures. This schoolroom aesthetic affirms the didactic approach of the play, with Ryan playing the role of teacher as much as judge. Behind the screens, stacked boxes of files represented the original interviews and research conducted by the commission, and the historical records of the religious congregations and the state, so that the audience saw onstage part of the material history of the abuse. This didacticism and the “weight of history” connoted by the stacked file boxes both support the truth claims of the docu-verbatim play and reinforce its message and investment in the voice and memory capital of the victims.
The commissioning of No Escape illustrates a significant shift in the marketplace status of the play’s constituent witnesses—religious congregations and abuse survivors—and further indicates the relative and constantly shifting value of social capital in the marketplace; as public confidence in the Catholic Church decreases, so the investment in survivors’ stories increases. This is not a story that is limited to Ireland, as internationally we have seen a widespread shift of cultural capital and status—both of which equal credibility—from religious figures to survivors with the direct effect that allegations of abuse are now believable in ways that they weren’t two decades ago.15 This effect is, of course, in part due to the accumulation of proven cases of clerical abuse, which render new allegations increasingly believable, and in part due to the connected shift in attitudes to abuse that mean these memories are no longer unspeakable. In the case of No Escape, the legitimacy of the play is guaranteed by the generic authority of the official state report while the Ryan Report’s social and juridical capital also creates an audience amenable to hearing these stories in the forum provided by the National Theatre.
In