Documentary theatre
[1] While fact-based drama has been traced back to ancient Greece and Phrynichus' production of The Capture of Miletus in 492 BC,[2] contemporary documentary theatre is rooted in theatrical practices developed in Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s.
In the years after the Russian Revolution, the USSR's Department of Agitation and Propaganda employed theatre troupes known as the Blue Blouses[3] (so called because they wore factory workers' overalls) to stage current events for the largely illiterate population.
[10] In the United States, the form was adapted by Hallie Flanagan Davis and Morris Watson into the large-scale Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.
[11] Initially conceived as an "animated newsreel", the form evolved into a distinct theatrical genre; practitioners used spectacle and vaudeville techniques in addition to agitprop and Piscatorian conventions to tackle issues such as labor, housing, and agriculture during the Great Depression.
[12] Often, they included characters such as Little Man and Loudspeaker to stand in and speak for and to the audience during the action, fusing fact with dramatic symbol and clarifying the narrative arc.
He also identified many potential sources for documentary theatre, including minutes of proceeding, files, letters, statistical tables, stock-exchange communiques, presentations of balance-sheets of banks and industrial undertakings, official commentaries, speeches, interviews, statements by well-known personalities, press, radio, photo, or film reporting of events and all the other media bearing witness to the present.
[15]This type of documentary drama was exported to Israel and the Middle East by Nola Chilton, whose theatre of testimony focused on marginalized groups in the area and later influenced the work of American practitioners.
[17] Plays also became more experimental, leading to documentary-style performances, as artists such as Joseph Chaikin and The Open theatre used historical documents as source material for improvisations (Viet Rock)[18] or Luis Valdez combined verbatim text from newspapers, transcripts, and correspondence with a fictionalized story and characters in Zoot Suit.
[22] In Eastern Europe, new German documentary theatre also focused on the importance of the artist as interpreter through the development of media-driven non-narrative creations of auteur directors like Hans-Werner Kroesinger.
[6] Contemporary documentary theatre is defined by its privileging of subjectivity over universality and questioning of the definition of truth in an age where digital and physical realities collide.
Similarly, documentary theatre continues to rely on a democratic process of interview gathering and multiple artistic perspectives to create new narratives.
[citation needed] A verbatim (word-for-word) style of theatre uses documented words from interviewees or records, such as court transcripts, to construct the play.
In Someone To Blame (about the miscarriage of justice related to teenager Sam Hallam[36]) the words were taken solely from witness statements, court transcripts, media headlines, and interviews with those involved.
8, a play by Dustin Lance Black, is an example that uses interviews and courtroom transcripts in order to reenact the legal argument and witness testimony of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case.
