Documentary Solo Performance: The Politics of the Mirrored Self

In mid-1995, shortly after the final disintegration of the five-member post-Wall directorate of the Berliner Ensemble that left Heiner Müller sole leader, I asked him whether Brecht would continue to be central to that theater's repertory. "Absolutely," he said. The German critics who were then loudly insisting (along with some former members of the directorate) that Brecht was an outdated paradigm were "idiots," and Müller had half a dozen exciting Brecht projects in mind that he hoped to begin in the near future (pending approval by the recalcitrant Brecht heirs) to maintain his theater's provocative political profile. I felt compelled to justify my question, explaining that in my country, Brecht was not only currently out of fashion but had never been properly in fashion, even during his lifetime, not even among the theatrical intelligentsia. Puffing on his cigar, Müller said quietly, "That's because Americans are all innocents." The most difficult audiences in the world, and "the most dangerous people," are "those who feel innocent of everything."

The whiff of intellectual bigotry in these remarks aside, they contain a truth that reaches beyond Brecht to the general challenges of political theater in the United States. It has been thirty-three years since Guy Debord coined the term "society of the spectacle" for the conditions of sweeping, media-driven trivialization and perpetual public distraction that began to emanate from the United States to the rest of the consumerist world after the Second World War. ¹ By now these conditions are familiar on every continent, making the primary preoccupations of political theater in many countries the restitution of elided memory and history and the canny yet tentative reintroduction of critical thinking as a species of fun. Müller pinpoints one of the biggest enduring hurdles in America: for much of its history, our culture's congratulatory self-image as the world's benefactor, as well as our deeply ingrained myths of optimism, possibility, and self-reliance, have made us doggedly resistant to any theater based on guilt.

This essay is an appreciation of a particular group of contemporary American solo performers--some of whom do and some of whom don't acknowledge their ties to the idea of documentary--as a powerful response to this and other challenges. These artists seem to me to fuse a psychological and political appeal, linking compassion and identification with objective scrutiny in a way that, though Brecht might not have approved of it, amounts to a new, peculiarly American form of individualistic Verfremdung.

The primary artists I have in mind are Anna Deavere Smith, Marc Wolf, Danny Hoch, and Sarah Jones: not an immediately harmonious grouping, perhaps, for those who know their work. My linkage of these artists depends on being able to steer the discussion of solo performance away from its usual emphasis on identity politics and toward a more elementary debate about the public's receptivity to politics and critical thinking per se. It also depends on loosening the definition of documentary to a point where it could apply as well to John Leguizamo, Eric Bogosian, Eve Ensler, David Cale, Lisa Kron, Pamela Gien, Spalding Gray, Dael Orlandersmith, Whoopi Goldberg, and dozens of other soloists whose work may not be a product of field research but is unthinkable apart from the performers' experiences in some degree of firsthand witnessing.

Guilt and Cunning

Solo performance is, of course, a field rife with self-indulgence and incipient monumental egotism, and I have sat through as many shows demonstrating this as anyone--typically performed by frustrated and mediocre New York actors trying to jump-start their me-machines with sitcom-shallow autobiographical monologues. Over the years, though (as Jo Bonney has marvelously documented in her recent collection Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century), a critical mass of serious work has appeared that amounts to much more than a passing trend. Cheap, convenient, and seemingly...