Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real by Jenn Stephenson (review)

Jenn Stephenson’s Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real examines constructed boundaries of certainty and uncertainty in types of performances that western theatre and dance practitioners might label as site-specific, documentary, and auto-drama. These are a few of the genres that Stephenson describes as “Theatres of the Real” (7). With Canadian drama as her focus, Stephenson questions how theatrical elements comment on authenticity and make claims about what is real or fake, and how audiences perceive this. The categories themselves are of less concern to Stephenson; her primary question is what ontological and perceptual potential there might be when audiences are asked to encounter what they do not know. In performance, the question of what is “real” is constantly in flux. Therefore, theatrical work that contains “real” words, “real” people, and “real” places become even more productive spaces for audiences to analyze the process of what “real” is and can be. Stephenson foregrounds her expertise in theatrical form alongside a broad but necessary range of epistemological, feminist, and perceptual underpinnings.

Stephenson’s Introduction articulates the book’s core thesis that working with certainty and uncertainty in “Theatres of the Real” provides one way forward in our age of post-reality by building on performance scholars Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford’s definition of “productive insecurity.” This phrase “describes the results of an affective technique that creates a performance rupture, when real or nonfictional elements are introduced to the theatrical frame, such that the audience experiences acute postdramatic indecidability about whether one is dealing with reality or fiction” (15). “Productive insecurity” thus frames the majority of Stephenson’s analysis of what “indecidability” can offer. The act of being able to evaluate and create meaning is the “productive insecurity” that Stephenson argues Theatres of the Real provide.

The book then follows categorically grouped performances to explore a range of theatrical choices that best demonstrate these destabilizing strategies. The first three chapters analyze autobiographical performances, followed by a chapter on site-specific work, and finally, the last two chapters examine immersive theatre. The Coda situates the analyses from the book within our current cultural moment of “fake news.”

In chapter 2, Stephenson examines the productive insecurity and autobiographical instability within the production Winners and Losers, James Long and Martin Youssef’s two-person scripted debate with moments of improvisation. By inviting questions of truth, Stephenson’s analysis of Winners and Losers questions the productiveness of uncertainty: if everything is a construction, whose constructed narrative do we, the viewers, trust? How do we determine validity? Living with uncertainty, Stephenson argues, provides a constant questioning of how things are valued, made, and seen. Therefore, performances that blur theatrical constructs with autobiographical constructs can highlight and examine flawed value systems or judgments, potentially teaching us generous and new ways to move forward.

Chapter 3 provides three case studies of community-based documentary theatre, 100% Vancouver (Theatre Replacement after Rimini Protokoll), RARE (created by Judith Thompson and the ensemble), and Polyglotte (by Olivier Choinière), along with common pitfalls within the genre. Stephenson argues that “these projects are, as all autobiographical performance is, at some level, always doomed to failure” (89). However, for Stephenson this failure is productive: it highlights how audiences should be wary of believing any one portrayal since performance can easily essentialize identities. The failure, in this case, keeps the question and value making open, especially, and more importantly, when a topic is viewed as unfamiliar by the intended audience. As a practitioner of documentary-based and community-based performance, it is encouraging to hear Stephenson’s critical consideration of the ethical responsibility in these genres, especially when considering categorization. Identities shift, some identities resist forms of categorization intentionally, and other identities are in constant negotiation with socio-historical constructs.

Looking at verbatim and site-specific theatre in chapters 4 and 5, Stephenson explores the potential philosophical and contextual limits of...