Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (review)

Archive. Documentary. Paradocumentary. Witness. Testimony. Expert. Verbatim theatre, theatre of fact, documentary theatre, documentary performance, reality theatre, nonfiction plays. These terms color the genre that Carol Martin's new collection of essays addresses. As those of us who have been following the story know, verbatim theatre isn't just for trials anymore, nor is it for boring theatre, nor is it, increasingly, even called verbatim. Theatre and performance makers have been both pointing to the past — where "documentary performance," as I like to call it, has come from — as well as looking critically toward the future, with an eye on how to both better express the "real" and more astutely think through "documentary" in order to conceive of something less like a genre and more like a paradigm. As Polish playwright Pawel Demirski explains in an interview included in the book: "Documentary theatre is not only a technique; it's a way of thinking and above all an instrument for acquiring knowledge about the world" (195). Martin has gathered a rich set of examples that vary along geographical, cultural, and political lines. Her choices allow for a conversation among world artists who deal with the "dramaturgy of the real" in very different ways as well as an acknowledgment of how artists can and do look beyond past and future to each other for inspiration. Thought of as a paradigm, "dramaturgy of the real" can become helpful as an inclusive yet critical way of looking at the line between art and life, fiction and reality, facts and lies and truth.

Some of the material in Dramaturgy of the Real comes from the TDR special issue guest edited by Martin in 2006. Although that collection also included both critical essays and performance texts, what is nice about the book (and what distinguishes it from other recent work in the area, such as the Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson 2009 collection, Get Real) is the nearly two-to-one emphasis on performance texts. Part 1: Essays includes a few of the best selections from the TDR special issue, including Martin's own "Bodies of Evidence," Janelle Reinelt's essay on the Steven Lawrence case, and Wendy Hesford's juxtaposition of the photographic exhibit Inconvenient Evidence and the verbatim play Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. Hesford's use of two examples from different artistic genres, which are both representations of the so-called war on terror, suggests the benefits of thinking beyond "theatre" when thinking about "documentary."

The other essays in Part 1 are new and consider innovative contributions to documentary performance: Yvette Hutchison's piece on South Africa deals with the specificity of "documentary" in the South African context, in which "a story is no less true for being fictional or constructed" and the emphasis in performance remains on a "recognizable, lived truth" (62). In "Reality from the Bottom Up," Agnieszka Sowińska traces a history of Polish documentary from the "fact-montage" theatre of Leon Schiller through "paradocumentary" theatre in contemporary Poland. In the paradocumentary method, "interviews, facts, and newspaper reports" — what Martin describes as "evidence" — become "points of departure" which "inform and inspire the creation of the text" (72). Finally, Florian Malzacher's essay on Rimini Protokoll is straightforward in its analysis of the German-Swiss collective's "theatre of the instant," which "brings characters together from our time and for a time, arranging them sometimes by fields of knowledge, sometimes by occupation, by age, by destiny — and then disperses them again" (86). Rimini Protokoll's attention to detail, refusal to separate reality from fiction, and use of "experts" — that is, regular people whose expertise in their own lives finds voice in Rimini's performances — all work to enable a particular type of "moment" in the theatre.

Ending Part 1 with Rimini Protokoll works well because their brand of theatre addresses so many of the issues the book raises around the "dramaturgy of the real." The performance texts...