Theatre of the Real by Carol Martin (review)

From the first scene of Aeschylus’s The Persians some 2,500 years ago, in which a messenger graphically recounts the bloody outcome of the Battle of Salamis, to the rapping Founding Fathers of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton currently running on Broadway, the theatre has long served as a forum for a public’s consideration of the historical and political events that shape its contemporary consciousness. The theatre has even more pointedly brought outer reality into its walls as technology has allowed for innovations like those of Erwin Piscator, who incorporated film footage into his mise-en-scène in the 1920s to make particular truth claims. In more recent decades, as Carol Martin trenchantly argues in Theatre of the Real, documents, testimonies, court records, interviews, photographs, YouTube videos, and other presumed conveyers of facts have come to play a more complex, dual role in the performances they serve: they present apparently sound evidence of real-world occurrences even as they reveal that such representations are constructed. In high-tech fashion, they update and complicate a theatrical paradox at least as old as Shakespeare: “ocular proof” can be as unreliable, and consequential, as a maliciously planted handkerchief. Works of theatre of the real that metatheatrically disclose their own means of production, Martin suggests, participate in “an aesthetic and analytical discourse that represents the real in order to call it into question” (174).

This is one of the insightful ideas that Martin expands upon in Theatre of the Real, building on an already significant body of work on performances variously described as documentary theatre, verbatim theatre, and theatre of witness, among other names. Indeed, Martin’s rubric “theatre of the real” alone has sharpened the field by shedding light on the aesthetic strategies and political goals diverse works share. As the editor of Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) (an extension of a special issue of TDR that she guest-edited in 2006 [TDR 50:3]), Martin collected compelling essays and play texts by an international group of scholars and artists, making an enormous contribution to our awareness and understanding of the range and reach of such work. In Theatre of the Real—first published in 2013 and now out in paperback with a new preface—she bores down more deeply into questions she first took up in the introduction and in the chapter she wrote for Dramaturgy of the Real; now she explores new questions through close readings of some 16 works that, each in its own way “enacts social and personal actualities by recycling reality for the stage” (4).

Pivotal to Martin’s analysis here is her illuminating discussion of how experimental theatre of the 1960s and 1970s opened the way to today’s theatre of the real. Works like Jean-Claude van Itallie’s Open Theater play The Serpent (1966), Jonathan Ned Katz’s Coming Out! A Documentary Play about Gay Life and Liberation in the U.S.A. (1972), Spalding Gray’s Rumstick Road (1977), and JoAnne Akalaitis’s Southern Exposure (1979), Martin demonstrates, drew from diaries, memories, phone messages, and other documentary materials for the building of their texts. What’s more, they made new demands on actors, requiring them not to dissolve into traditional characters, but to be—to present—their authentic selves onstage. At a time when activists and journalists were seeking to pull away the curtain hiding what was really happening in Vietnam and in the corrupt Nixon White House, this effort corresponded to a larger theatrical (and political) project of peeling away layers of façade and fakery to reveal the truth.

But over time, like culture more generally, theatre of the real became suspicious of a knowable, definitive truth (Martin points to Rumstick Road as a transitional work in this regard)—a sensibility that has only intensified as the daily (or, perhaps, more-than-hourly) curation of an online self has blown apart the notion of...