History
Documentary theater can be used as a way to promote understanding and dialogue between people with differing points of views and deeply ingrained histories of conflict. It is used to get the entire picture of what has occurred in a specific event through the process of interviewing people involved. Its purpose is to adhere to the emotional aspect of a specific situation and portray all sides of an event. The value of theater lies in its ability to emphasize the differences between people and begin building bridges between those distinctions.
Documentary theater sits at the intersection of art and politics and can be seen as a catalyst for social change. Documentary theater, or theater of fact, is a genre that uses dramatic representation of societal forces through the use of pre-existing documentary material (i.e.. newspapers, government reports, interviews, etc.) as source material for the script. It is common in this type of theater that each actor take on several roles and the script be written as verbatim theater or the playwright’s use of exact interviews in the script.
Documentary theater plays typically lacks a set and the actors change costumes and use body language in order to portray a multitude of characters on stage. The events are not acted out but told from the point of view of the person being interviewed. Documentary theater plays tend to not have a lot of background music, allowing the audience to focus on the words that were spoken by the interviewees. Also, no interview or newsource is weighed as more important or more dramatic than another. The actors convey what they know is accurate and allow the audience to develop their own political points of view. Documentary theater is difficult to define in advance. It is a complicated, experimental and conceptual. In addition, the effects of documentary theater on society are wide-ranging and hard to measure.
Documentary theatre has existed as a genre for as long as theatre itself has existed. Attilio Favorini, professor of Theater Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, dates the first dramatic documentary impulse back to 492 BC when the ancient Greek playwright Phrynicus produced his play The Capture of Miletus about the Persian War. He traces the genre through to European medieval mystery plays, Elizabethan England and Shakespeare's historical tragedies, French revolutionary patriotic dramas, British and American 1930s Living Newspapers and German plays about the Holocaust.
In its modern form, documentary theatre was pioneered by two famous German authors and directors – Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator in the 1920s, focusing on issues of social conflict, class tensions and power structures. Essentially derived from Brecht and Piscator's Epic Theatre, Piscator developed his own 'Living Newspaper' in the 1930s.
In his documentary anthology, Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theater, Favorini collects the most important 20th century examples of the genre and demonstrates that documentary theatre is highly relevant and resonant in societies that create and consume contemporary news as aggressively as we do.
Read more about this topic: Documentary Theatre
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