Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater

Introduction: Legal Representation

1 Introduction: Legal Representation The most sensational United States trials of the late twentieth century offer an amazing array of dramatic spectacle, plot twists, and shocking finales. Courtroom antics by both Yippie defendants and Judge Julius Hoffman transformed the 1969 Chicago Conspiracy Trial into a farce. Charles Manson’s determination to loose helter-skelter on Southern California by directing his followers to kill a group of wealthy Los Angelenos was followed by a trial with grisly murder details and an account of Manson’s plan to stir the underclass, inspired, as he claimed, by Bible verses and Beatles songs. He and his accomplices came to embody the kind of violent drug-induced social revolt that mainstream America most feared. During Dan White’s 1979 trial for the murders of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk, the “Twinkie defense” provided an unexpected variation on a classic narrative of crime and punishment. But criminal trials were not the only sources of newsworthy legal proceedings: the 1990s are bookended by congressional hearings that held a nation spellbound, as Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and impeached president Bill Clinton faced testimony about the personal sexual proclivities that had allegedly led them to transgress legal boundaries on workplace harassment and perjury. I N T R O D U C T I O N 2 Furthermore, the public events that preceded or surrounded these trials are themselves part of the performance record of contemporary American history: theatricalized moments of political discord, violent outbreaks of urban violence, and incendiary debates about minority rights. The justice system, designed to serve as a neutral platform for the resolution of private and public discord, often fails to achieve or maintain proposed neutrality, fostering skepticism about whether courtroom procedures and decisions can produce both just and satisfactory denouements during times of major social conflicts. Politically explosive and emotionally charged issues that called for justice resisted the closure that legal decisions are expected to foster, the court proceedings and the attending press only increasing community polarization, fueling difference rather than resolving it. Such trials make visible that justice is rarely uncomplicated, and that our legal system ought not be the only recourse we have for settling disputes or for healing the individual and collective trauma that remains after a crime has been committed, a verdict has been rendered, and court is adjourned. The cases mentioned joined the ranks of legal proceedings from earlier in the century, all of them at one time or another hyperbolically dubbed “trial of the century”: the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, the Leopold and Loeb murder case, State of Tennessee v. John T. Scopes. While the phrase may be overused, it conveys something significant about a trial so categorized: that it is newsworthy and culturally polarizing, but perhaps more importantly , that it has a clear connection to its historical moment and conveys information about its era. Legal scholar Robert Ferguson defines such high profile trials as “a distinct phenomenon at the nexus of the legal system and public life,” in part because they “surprise by attracting massive attention beyond the locality in which they take place and by influencing social thought generally.”1 While high profile trials, Ferguson argues, may “come in many different forms and situations,” they “share qualities that aid the interpretation of history and culture,” and as such, they lend themselves to representational reenactments.2 Although congressional hearings are not considered trials, they are legislative actions that proceed along similar lines and share many components of a criminal or civil courtroom case: questioning, evidence, the possibility of censure or punishment, the polarization of public opinion. They also have the capacity, as did the many “trials of the century,” to underscore the fissures that are an intrinsic part of the structure and values of a pluralistic society. They thus provide a kind of detailed history, formed with equal parts court or hearing documentation and news coverage or other commentary, of the episodes and events that have reflected or affected social change in 3 L E G A L R E P R E S E N T A T I O N the contemporary era. They contain fundamental cultural narratives that are noteworthy in their inherent drama and in their persistent repetition. Not surprisingly, then, the controversies that prompt or result from these proceedings, fired as they are with narrative tension and ambiguity , have not languished in historical archives but have...