Fragmenting the Subject: Creating Community Narratives in Documentary Theatre, Lecture notes of Theatre

Download Fragmenting the Subject: Creating Community Narratives in Documentary Theatre and more Lecture notes Theatre in PDF only on Docsity! Spring 2003 95 Ryan M. Claycomb is a Ph.D. candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, where he teaches courses in dramatic literature and literature by women. He is currently at work on a dissertation on life writing in contemporary feminist drama and performance. (Ch)oral History: Documentary Theatre, the Communal Subject and Progressive Politics Ryan M. Claycomb Some of the hottest tickets to a theatrical event in the 1990s provided entrance not to the bombastic Disnified musicals that have come to define Broadway, nor to the intense, intimate, family psychodramas of playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or Sam Shepard. In fact, some critics may be hard-pressed to call the creators of these pieces "playwrights" at all, since the texts are taken almost entirely from "real life" in the forms of interviews and court transcripts. That docudrama and oral history performance have migrated from film and television to occupy a prominent space on the American stage speaks to a changing perception of and heightened urgency to rethink conventional notions of community, subjectivity, and even what constitutes human drama. And that much of the body of 1990s American docudrama is assembled by playwrights with progressive social agendas—including feminism,^ queer theory, critical race theory, and Marxism— indicates the degree to which progressive ideologies and sympathies are at work in revising these notions. These oral history plays take the discourse of history- and life-writing, and shift their discursive conceptions of the subject from the single protagonist to the greater community. This radical approach to subject formation not only dismpts the empowered status of the subject's authority, but also encourages the integration of the audience into the tenuous sense of community created by the theatrical event itself. This still-forming category of documentary theatre can be dated as far back as Georg Biichner, whose play Danton 's Death (1835) "rightly should be the beginning point of inquiry into this field of drama,"^ according Gary Fisher Dawson. More recently, documentary theatre's roots derive from the 1920s theatre work of Bertolt Brecht and, more directly, Erwin Piscator, whose epic theatre tactics used "film, music, epic successions of tableaux and the immediacy of news coverage [to invigorate] the stage with new techniques while simultaneously calling for social action."^ In the United States, these ideas were adopted by the American Living Newspaper, an initiative of the New-Deal-era Federal Theatre Project that staged fictionalized versions of contemporary social debates, often with a Marxist- materialist thrust. The formal and political influence of Piscator and the Federal 96 Journa l of Dramat ic Theory and Criticism J Theatre Project on contemporary staged oral histories caimot be underestimated. I Even though many contemporary playwrights using docudrama (particularly Anna Deavere Smith) often hide their ideological sympathies in claims of political neutrality, the leftist politics of radical 1930s documentary theatre inform the stances of these new playwrights as much as they influence their form. More recent German post-war documentary theatre frequently drew fi-om court transcripts to expose what playwrights saw as miscarriages ofjustice. Peter Weiss's The Investigation (1965), Heinar Kipphardt 's In the Matter of J. Robert' Oppenheimer (1964), and Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy (1964) critically examine Nazi war-trials, Oppenheimer's contested loyalty to the United States, and the| complicity of Pope Pius XII with European fascism, respectively. Each draws on diaries, court documents, letters, and interviews to reconstruct a distilled version of events that challenges the accepted truths of their initial context."^ The genre that has grown out of these works and has taken root on the contemporary American stage is, like the documentary theatre of the sixties and seventies, drawn from "real life" sources, most often interviews, but also occasionally court documents and other documentary material. But unlike these plays, contemporary oral history plays tend to focus less on "what happened" than on the discourse that surrounds crisis events. And as Melissa Salz points out in her dissertation on what she calls "theatre of testimony," "documentary theatre since 1980 often represents multiple points of view rather than a single point of view."^ Salz divides theatre of testimony into two camps: the social/political and the personal/autobiographical. Following John Brockway Schmor's concept of confessional performance,^ theatre of testimony features the self-reflexive presentation of admittedly subjective accounts of the recent past, tying the genre to postmodem notions of identity and history. Yet both "theatre of testimony" and "confessional performance" are broader categories than I intend to explore, and the term docudrama, which describes "based-on-a true-story" tales commonly found on television, is slightly inaccurate in describing the mode I want to examine. Perhaps more accurate is the movement that Dawson identifies as a new form of documentary theatre, exemplified by the work of Emily Mann. This category, he suggests, features plays that draw upon "private oral histories and testimonies that, in the process, give platform to larger societal concerns in the public arena."^ Therefore, I will use the term "staged oral history," which closely corresponds with both Dawson's description of the new phase of documentary theatre and Salz's social/political theatre of testimony as she describes it in two statements: theatre of testimony is "aestheticized documentary drama that dramatizes oral history in the form of fractured and fi-agmented memory"^ and, more specifically, "social/ political contemporary documentary drama combines interviews, trial transcripts and muhi-media materials to create a kaleidoscope of images, perspectives, and memories."^ Spring 2003 99 the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone—and Having our Say (1995), takes documentary theatre as its formal inspiration with subjects ranging from a single interviewee (Annulla) to the courts and people of San Francisco {Execution of Justice). Here I will concentrate on Mann's most recent work, Greensboro, which remembers the massacre that occurred at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in the title city in 1979. It draws on interviews and court proceedings to create a dialogue some seventeen years after the event. The work of Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project is most closely aligned with queer theatre, and like Smith's and Mann's, Kaufman's work utilizes a stmcture^^ that is influenced by a progressive aesthetic. Kaufman's most famous work (by which I mean the collaborative work of the Tectonic Theater Project) includes the two recent plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), and The Laramie Project (2000), both of which use a format similar to Mann's in Execution ofJustice^^ and Greensboro, compiling interviews and court transcripts, among other documents, to create dialogue onstage. The Laramie Project, an exemplar of the staged oral history, covers the brutal 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard and the subsequent media blitz that surrounded both the murder and the trial of the assailants. Laramie is of particular interest here because of the way that the community of performers integrates with the community represented in the piece, a phenomenon that I will explore more fiilly below. In terms of their ideological positioning, the staged oral histories of these playwrights—and indeed of the genre at large—almost necessarily claim a stance in opposition to the dominant discourse of their cultural context, and that stance is jfrequently a politically leftist one . 'Lanse r notes that "unlike authorial and personal voices [which in life-writing correspond to biography and autobiography, respectively] the communal mode seems to be primarily a phenomenon of marginal or suppressed communities; I have not observed it in fiction by white, ruling class men, perhaps such an ' I ' is already in some sense speaking with the authority of a hegemonic 'we.'" '^ Indeed, when we apply Lanser's observations on narrative fiction to the stage, the same holds true: historically, from Piscator on down, documentary theatre has often fiinctioned as a mouthpiece for leftist thought, at least in part because of the traditionally leftist leanings of avant-garde theatrical practitioners. And while Gary Fisher Dawson notes that documentary theatre can be both de-politicized to a certain degree and used for conservative or totalitarian purposes, in many instances, he identifies "the anti-hegemonic purpose that documentary theatre serves."'^ Therefore, because the ideologies presented in staged oral history are often not "official," the "truths" that these plays advance are often similarly altemative ones. Staged oral histories often seek to reveal a hidden truth, to give voice to silenced voices, or to expose what has been kept hidden. This 100 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism challenge to official authority and patriarchal discourse suggests a certain sjnnpathy between staged oral histories and the progressive aims they frequently espouse. Oral History and Community Throughout this argument, I suggest that the creation of some notion of community is central to the progressive political goals of the staged oral histories that I examine. However, we need first to interrogate the term "community," which can be applied in at least four different ways in this discussion: 1) as the larger represented community of all voices in the play; 2) as smaller represented communities that can be grouped together by perspective or by ideology; 3) as the community of actors who represent these first two communities; and 4) as the conununity of audience members and actors who together experience an individual theatrical event. At the widest level, the notion of community can serve as the most heterogeneous collecfion of voices represented by these texts: Laramie, Greensboro, Crown Heights, or Los Angeles serve as tangible locales that provide the communities for the texts of Kaufman, Mann, and Smith. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the names of these geographical communities all appear in the titles, at once defining the boundaries of community as the city itself, and setting that community off fi-om larger, more universalized, categories. The first "moment" in The Laramie Project defines this explicitly, calling upon many of the characters in the play to define the town in which they live, and providing definitions ranging fi-om "a good place to live"^^ and "a beautiful town"^' to "Now, after Matthew, I would say that Laramie is a town defined by an accident, a crime. We've become Waco, we've become Jasper. We're a noun, a definition, a sign."^^ Inherent in each of these definitions is a commonality located in a connection to place, and yet the differences between them signals a polyvocality, a dialogical nature that encompasses difference even as it asserts that commonality. We must note that this notion of community is different from the ones that follow inasmuch as it is an accidental community, a community forced together by place, but one not inherently defined by the connections between people that it harbors. This notion of community more closely resembles what German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies termed Gesellschaft (often translated as "society"), a space in which people congregate to do business, but not Gemeinschaft, a community with a self-edifying membership in which actual connections, personal exchanges, and conununal ties are established.^^ Yet while this notion of community may by definition be little more than a shared space, a commonality defined by place, part of the goal of these plays seems to endow the Gesellschaft with features of the Gemeinschaft: to establish in the city at large a dialogue that engenders more meaningful connections across the smaller, more insular communities that it harbors, a goal that many of these plays, in fact, accomplish. Spring 2003 101 The second possible meaning of community is a subset of the first, and more naturally corresponds to the Gemeinschaft where these plays fmd the greatest potential: self-identified communities within the larger site-specific communities of these plays. In Smith's Crown Heights, we might locate the Lubavitcher and African-American communities as distinct parties within the larger debate. In Maim's play, the communities break down along political lines, and in Laramie, a, local detective. Sergeant Hing, breaks the town into three groups: "What you have is, you have your old-time traditional-type ranchers, they've been here forever— Laramie's been the hub of where they come for their supplies and stuff like that And then you got, uh, the university population And then you have the people who live in Laramie, basically."^^ While The Laramie Project does not define communities as gay/straight, there is some sense that university conununity contains a radical element. And yet Kauffrnan's choice to pose the communities along lines other than ideological ones suggests how much these communities blend and intermingle. To varying degrees, these plays ofi;en try to represent dialogue between these different communities, if not by representing an actual dialogue, then by placing their monologues in close proximity to one another Indeed, this might be the art by which we call these artists playwrights: if their words are not always theirs, the context they give to the words represents their greatest achievement, both aesthetically and politically. Take, for example, the section entitled "Territory" in Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which contains a monologue from community activist Michael Zinzun, who talks of his experiences with and work against police bmtality—a monologue in which he refers to policemen as "pigs."^^ It is immediately preceded by a monologue from former LAPD Police Commisioner Stanley Sheinbaum who, while he maintains, "This city has abused the cops," also wonders, "Why do I have to be on a side? / There's a problem here."^^ The same section also contains a monologue from Comell West (who wrote the Foreword to Fires in the Mirror), in which the Afiican-American scholar places blame on both the police and the oppressed, black male for buying into a machismo cowboy mentality. In short, while various characters place blame on one another, many also often acknowledge the complicity of their own community, and when placed up against one another, they create a dialogue unlike what is typically heard in the streets. This juxtaposition is another marker of the sympathies between feminist politics and the art of playwrights like Mann, since the tactic works against the monologic nature of the interview—in which a single speaker engages in a one-sided discourse with a captive interviewer—and places the monologue of the speaker in dialogue with a range of other conflicting voices. By placing these smaller communities in discursive conflict with one another on the space of the stage, these playwrights not only disrupt the monologic control inherent in the form of the interviews from 104 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism project. One character makes sure to tell a company member, "I love you honey,"^"^ while another seems interested in auditioning for the play. And more than once, company members in the text of the play speak of their emotional responses to the voices around them, which in tum encourages the audience to invest themselves in the dialogue being represented onstage. The final notion of community is the one created anew each time the curtain rises: the ad hoc community established in the theatre itself, one that can encompass difference and similarity in much the same way as the broadest notion of community discussed above. Indeed, Smith's early performances in her On the Road series were site-specific performances, generated for the audiences for whom they were to be performed, so the community represented in the play was ofi:en the community who witnessed the play. In most oral history performance, however, the goal of the playwright is to create in her audience the kind of community that she imagines onstage, so as to create extra-textual dialogue. Anna Deavere Smith notes in her introduction to Fires, for example, that post-play discussions were a crucial element of the performance process, for "When the audience talks, they are talking as much to each other as they are to me."^^ And in her introduction to Twilight, she similarly notes, "I played Twilight in Los Angeles as a call to the community. I perfomied it at a time when the community had not yet resolved the problems. I wanted to be a part of their examination of the problems. I believe that solutions to these problems will callfor the participation of large and eclectic groups ofpeople.""^^ The degree to which Smith wants to involve her audience in these dialogues speaks to her imagining of the audience as its own community. This last category of community, which conforms closely to what Victor Turner calls communitas, seems to be the goal of these oral histories: to create in the audience a sense of community that encourages dialogue, that allows for the peaceful confrontation of individual identities and that incorporates them all into the Utopian space of the theatre. Turner (often quoting his own earlier writings) defines it as " 'a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities,' a deep rather than intense style of personal interaction. 'It has something "magical" about it. Subjectively there is a feeling of endless power.'"^^ It is important to note that Tumer's definition both incorporates the confrontation of identities—Jew/Black, Communist/Conservative, homosexual/heterosexual, male/female—^that these plays embody, and also accounts for the empowerment of the disempowered that Cornell West identifies in Anna Deavere Smith's performances. West writes, "Fires in the Mirror is a grand example of how art can constitute a public space that is perceived by people as empowering rather than disempowering,"^^ noting the historical disempowerment that African Americans in particular have experienced in the public sphere. In short, this notion of communitas sees the clash of communities and empowers each of them in the space of the theatrical event. Spring 2003 105 Tliis affective notion of community can be experienced in what Jill Dolan calls the "Utopian performative," for which she locates the potential in all theatre, but which she identifies as exemplary in the feminist/queer performance art of Holly Hughes, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin.^^ This notion is not precisely a model for what should happen on stage, but for how what happens on stage should feel, its experiential element for the audience, one that resists hierarchy, encourages community, and in its very definition, imagines human interaction as it should exist, but not as it does in the world at large or has in the recent past. These plays seem to be creating theatrical Utopias by representing real world dystopias, a commitment to social change that ties these plays to progressive ideology whether, like Anna Deavere Smith, they purport to be impartial chroniclers, or like Mann, are clearly positioning their audience to band against repressive groups like the KKK and the American Nazi Party, in a move that both creates community in the audience and points to a renewed urgency for action. Moreover, the emphasis of these plays on multiple viewpoints and multiple communities enveloped into a broader notion of conununity creates a safe space for dialogue within the audience. These plays specifically encourage the audience to configure themselves not only as a community of spectators, but also as members of the various ideological and identity-based communities represented on the stage. Such boundary-crossing is made possible for the audience in these plays because it begins with the performers onstage, for as Smith imagines it, "The spirit of acting is the travel from the self to the other ""̂ ^ Janelle Reinelt links the performers' boundary crossings explicitly to those of the audience: The relationship between interviewer and speaker is mobile—it changes— and since the audience is positioned in the direct address sequences to "be" Smith, they are positioned to experience the activity of bridging, working with difference. This effect is the most radical element of Smith's—it engages the spectator in radical political activity to the extent that the spectator grapples with this epistemological process."^^ With this fourth notion of community, then, we can begin to see how each of these configurations of conununity—^the community represented, the ideological sub- communities, the community of performers, and the audience community—^begin to bleed into one another. Since ideological communities make up the Gesellschaft of the play, the audience can place themselves within these smaller ideological communities; the audience and the performers can imagine themselves as a separate community within the theatrical space; and the performers (especially Kaufman's) can begin to imagine themselves as part of the larger community being represented onstage, even as they are doing the representation. Angela Davis's metaphor of the rope and the anchor becomes radically realized in these plays; an audience 106 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism member can come into the theatre allied with one specific community, but during a performance, can imagine herself traveling through multiple communities, including the ad hoc community created each night in the theatrical space. The ultimate result is a narrative theatrical experience that lays the groundwork for progressive political action through acknowledgement and consideration of the other through dialogue about community. Oral History and the Communal Subject Perhaps the closest connection between staged oral history and feminism is not found in the notion of community itself, but in the way that the narrative emphasis on community configures subjectivity. Indeed, many critics have identified something significantly feminist in these plays' staging of subjectivity. Melanie Smith, for example, notes that "Mann's characters continue the feminist work of defining women in the subject position,"^^ and later asserts that Still Life in particular "counters the omission of woman in the historical, social and cultural world.'"^^ Many critics of Mann (Melanie Smith included) also note how Mann roots the aesthetics of her theatre of testimony in women's experience. In an ofl- quoted 1987 interview. Maim says: Women sit aroxmd and talk to each other about their memories of traumatic, devastating events in their lives. Even women who don't know each other well ! . . . Most of what I know about human experience comes from listening. That's why it's very natural for me to believe in direct address in the theatre. It is an extension of listening. When I put these stories on stage, the audience experiences a direct interaction which is in the moment."^ Whether or not Emily Mann's formal innovations are specifically feminist, they, like Anna Deavere Smith's, seem to have had a distinctly feminist effect on the debates they address, and by extension, on how we conceptualize the parties in those debates. Cornell West writes: Smith explodes this narrow framework by taking us into the private spheres of American society where the complex discourses of women often take place in patriarchal America. This is especially so in Hasidic and Black America where the access of women to public space—especially major leadership roles—is frowned upon. Yet Smith neither romanticizes nor idealizes Hasidic, Black, or secular Jewish women. Instead, she humanizes the Black-Jewish dialogue by including the diverse and often conflicting voices within Black and Jewish America. . . . In short the gendered character of the Black Jewish Dialogue often produces obstacles that Spring 2003 109 subject. For example, while Greensboro may in part create a powerful theatrical experience because of the multiple performers on stage, a representation of the connections and dialogue that the play hopes to encourage, Anna Deavere Smith's performance on the other hand, more fully illustrates the conflicted nature of these subjectivities. In this case. Smith's body represents a single subjectivity, one that contains within it many fragmentary identities.^^ This is in part facilitated by Smith's skin color (she is a light skinned African American) and by her skills as a performer. Nonetheless, in simultaneously appearing to an audience as a single body and multiple voices, the communal subjectivity is made explicit. Furthermore, the communal nature of the subject onstage is in part realized in the style of acting that such pieces demand. In most cases (Mann's work is an exception), these plays require their performers to shift from role to role, acquiring the character of Brecht's actor in "The Street Scene" who is always working in gest to show what happened, instead of to become the character to whom it happened. As a result, the characters appear primarily as surfaces.^^ And because they appear in a play of surfaces, these individual characters are not afforded a complete and M y developed subjectivity, but merely fragments of—the extemal markers of— subjectivity. Coupled with the comparative invisibility of the actors' extemal markers of subjectivity—and in the case of Anna Deavere Smith, her consistent refusal to make her own position known—a central subjectivity, or even a fiiUy conceived subjectivity seems remarkably absent (even though it operates powerfully behind the scenes). And yet what so many critics call the overwhelmingly human character of these plays is created by the cumulative effect of those fragments, a subjectivity that arises from the body of voices, the many voices of the local community being presented by each piece. It is perhaps this tension that defines contemporary oral history: the tension between community and fragmentation, the tension between chorus and polyphony. We are in one room, this genre declares, but we speak in different voices. The collective yet diverse nature of the subject onstage in these plays seems to grow out of a feminist critique of the subject and theorizations of subjectivity and voice that look toward investing women and other marginalized groups with the authority that hegemonic discourse has traditionally denied them. Indeed, this conception of the subject as a balance between unity and diversity is a hallmark of progressive politics: issues of equal representation across ethnic, gender, and class categories signal a singular concern for egalitarianism that is rarely found in other formal categories. This radical version of polyvocality allies staged oral history itself with progressive politics not just because it espouses something of a democratic form, but also because it works to level the marginalized and the center and gives voice to the typically silenced. While, as I explore more fully below, the evaluative project of selecting and arranging voices is clearly at work and speaks to the power of the playwright not as neutral observer, but as ideologue, the range of voices 110 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism presented in these plays stages a communal conversation that makes dialogue more possible for the audiences in attendance. Oral History as History Given that the label I assign to this genre is "staged oral history," it becomes important to imagine how history plays out in the politics of these performances. While revisionist history is a common element among oppositional texts, these plays do not primarily attempt to re-envision what happened in the past. They are not unearthing information that was not previously made available, nor are they doing revisionist literary history the way retellings are, nor are they even deconstructing an event the way that many performance artists do. Instead, these plays are enacting a formal revision, choosing instead to recapitulate how the past is handled, considered, and presented. More specifically, in choosing to create a dialogue of actual voices from the pages of the past, staged oral histories do not attempt to change the substance of what we know about, say, the Los Angeles riots. But they do change how we look at them. By reframing the past not as a series of individually held views, but rather as the kind of dialogue that can prevent friture misunderstanding, these plays are revising the discourse around the past. They are creating dialogue around violent events where none existed, and the dialogue is being presented as a remedy for the moment of violence itself And of course, this is how they are doing their political work: instead of revising the events that happened, they are (re)constructing a dialogue that never existed in the hopes of inciting new dialogue. ^ This is an explicitly stated goal of The Laramie Project. University of Wyoming Theatre Professor Rebecca Hilliker says of her initial reaction to the proposal to create the play: When you first called me, I wanted to say, You've just kicked me in the stomach. Why are you doing this to me? But then I thought. That's stupid, you're not doing this to me. And, more important, I thought about it and decided that we've had so much negative closure on this whole thing. And the students really need to talk. When this happened they started talking about it, and then the media descended and all dialogue stopped.^'' Don Shewey, in his article m American Theatre, links this phenomenon specifically "to Greek Tragedy, in which the outcome is known from the beginning and the play provides an opportunity for the community to talk about the things that are on its mind."^^ And Kaufman himself echoes this goal in his article in the same issue, noting, "Many questions have been answered and many more will be posed. And that is a good thing."^^ Nor does this dialogue extend merely to the members of the Spring 2003 H I Laramie community who went to Denver to see the premiere, for the play not only grapples with how the town itself handled the event, but poses larger questions about hate crimes, about how much homosexuality is or is not accepted in the range of American moralities, about the role of the media in creating a martyr, and even broader questions like the ones posed by New York Daily News writer Albor Ruiz: "What makes a community, what can tear it apart and what needs to be done to hold it together?"^^ The (re)construction of dialogue is perhaps a less explicit but even more crucial goal of Mann's Greensboro, since the event in question was not being talked about at all, nor had it ever really been. Early on in the play, the interviewer, whom we take to be the playwright herself, asks one of the original protesters why the American public had not heard more about the massacre, and he notes that the hostages in Iran were taken the next day. And so the massacre "got pretty much pushed off the front page."^^ In a sense, this concern with recovery places the rhetorical situation of Greensboro as much in line with feminist biography plays, which are working to resurrect a lost history, as with oral histories; but the goal seems to be different, for as Athol Fugard notes in his introduction to Mann's plays, "There was an even deeper process at work. The word that immediately came to mind was 'healing.'"^^ This is what we hear from the characters in the other plays of this genre: that these plays are not trying to revise what happened, but rather to come to some kind of healing through giving testimony, through memorializing the event, through replacing the violence with words. Indeed, in an interview with Melissa Salz, Mann pointedly notes, "I think what I rather do is provoke discussion . . . Now there are multiple points of view given in the Greensboro piece, multiple, but I 'm not validating them. I want people to hear them."^° One of the Greensboro widows notes specifically that "we were fighting armed men with ideas, with words,'"^^ and this commitment to words as political action resonates throughout the play. Caveats: the Hegemony of " W e " The notion of Mann's play as rhetoric and political action marks a significant difference between her work and that of Smith, since Mann is willing to choose sides. Speaking with Salz, Mann admits that despite her refusal to specifically validate one position or another in Greensboro, she is steering the audience toward a conclusion. She explains, "Well 1 guess I 'm hoping that the decision is so obvious , bu t I s u p p o s e I come down on the s ide of the good guys There are bad guys and good guys in this. The bad guys aren't all bad, and the good guys aren't all good, but still you can make value judgments and 1 have made value judgments. So yes, 1 suppose I am leading people."*^^ This willingness to lead the audience immediately calls attention to the tension in these plays between form and substance. That is, if the playwright chooses to privilege 114 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism the context of these voices is powerful, the impulse to protest, "But these voices are real, and there are so many of them!" is almost irresistible. And yet these plays clearly have a set of values that go virtually unquestioned—not the least of which is the privileging of dialogue over either silence or unquestioning submission to authority—all of which by extension inherently question existing power structures. There is a temptation for progressive activists to take this as a sign that we can trust the geiure; if the assumptions of the formal structm-es are anti-hegemonic, then the subjectivity behind them should be similarly so. But there is no guarantee in this correlation; to assume so grants even greater power to the playwright. As Lanser reminds us, "form is only possibility, the necessary but never sufficient means for transforming both fiction and consciousness."^^ Therefore, analysis of staged oral history must be constantly aware of the values that underpin the dialogue being crafted before us. So how is the playwright to proceed? Where does one cross the line from challenging hegemony with an open form and constituting hegemony by hiding behind the guise of an open form? Emily Mann's solution in Greensboro seems to be to overtly contextualize the subjectivity of the interviewer onstage.^' She essentially becomes Behar's vulnerable observer when we see her outrage on behalf of CWP organizer Nelson Johnson, and we witness her discomfort with Eddie Dawson's racism. But she also exposes her own rhetoric by showing us her handling of Dawson in interviews. For example, when Dawson inquires about the purpose of the interviews, the interviewer vaguely replies: " I 'm writing about the Greensboro even t . . . maybe a play . . . ""̂ ^ When he replies "Yeah? I like plays," her only response is "Good"^^ which does not even remotely point to the fact that he certainly will not like this one. And yet, while she does lay bare her own subjectivity, there are certainly elements that are left unquestioned: a privileging! of education and articulate speech, for example. Dawson is revealed to be not only racist, but stupid, misspelling "Titan," T-I-T-I-A-N.^^ Mann foregrounds this stupidity in the titles to her scenes, an element to the play that remains uncontextualized, left intact in its documentary codes. The first interview with Dawson is labeled "An Escape Goat,"^^ after his own malapropism.^^ This is contrasted with the previous interview, entitled "Extremist Informant," with the very intelligent and articulate Nelson, who uses this phrase to characterize Dawson's relationship with both the Klan and the EBI.*̂ ^ When confronted with this same moniker, Dawson interprets it as applying to his feariessness: "We had a reputation. They needed anything done—cross-burning, intimidation—^they called James Buck and Eddie Dawson . . . If anything had to be done, they'd call the extremist. You didn't scare me. I put up a good front.""^^ By relentlessly exposing and highlighting Dawson's low level of education, Mann positions the audience to look down upon him, and to identify more clearly with Nelson and the CWP. Whether or not contextualizing her own position mitigates the textual hegemony of her rhetoric in Spring 2003 115 relation to the communal voice (her voice is clearly one of many, but also the one with the most authority in encouraging audience sympathy), her rhetoric is still present, and to some degree masked by the conventions of documentary theatre that Reinelt identifies in Smith's work. But despite this similarity. Smith's work onstage configures subjectivity in almost the exact opposite manner While she hides her own subjectivity in both the guise of objectivity and in the multiplicity of voices she embodies, her claims to neutrality seem on the surface to be far more valid than any that Mann might make. While Reinek relentlessly identifies the many ways that Smith's performance quietly establishes her authority to speak for the many people she interviews, to serve as a neutral and fair-minded persona, she chooses not to expose any rhetorical ways that Smith takes advantage of this perceived authority. In fact, as I have noted above. Smith implicates her audience in radical political activity not through the substantial rhetoric of her words, but in the formal positioning that forces them to grapple with difference. Comell West praises Smith's neutrality, noting "Not to choose 'sides' is itself a choice—yet to view the crisis as simply and solely a matter of choosing sides is to reduce the history and complexity of the crisis in a vulgar Manichean manner"^^ By suggesting that the complexity of her subject matter is overlooked by a more rhetorically-charged treatment. West ties Smith's neutral appearance to her effectiveness in prompting her audience to "examine ourselves even in a moment of ugly xenophobic frenzy."^° West's praise here may succumb to an either/or fallacy, however, since Smith's rhetoric chooses sides while seeming not to, and at the very least, she employs an implicit value structure that gives greater voice to the disempowered than the empowered, which is itself a political shift from the norm. This shift, then, represents a de facto stance, perhaps less importantly on the crises themselves, but clearly on how these crises should be approached. So again, we see the dilemma for the progressive playwright: on one hand is the impulse to take a radical stance with this open communal form; but on the other, there is the danger of co-opting the communal voice in service of an ideal that runs counter to the community that is being represented. The Laramie Project handles this fine line most subtly through its choice to dramatize the integration of the community of performers into the community of Laramie itself In fact, the second "moment" of the text, entitled "Journal Entries," expresses Kaufman and his company's anxieties about the project. Yet unlike Mann, who highlights her interviewer's biases, Kaufman and company have a less obvious political agenda. True, the play villainizes the Reverend Fred Phelps and company, but the issue of hate crime legislation, which seems to have the support of the acting company members, is given an equally compelling reftitation by a poHce officer's wife,^' whose voice is, unlike that of Greensboro's Dawson, left relatively unmediated by the voices of the acting company. That is, even though the actor playing Sherry Johnson delivers the monologue, this voice is not 116 Journa l of Dramatic Theory and Criticism undermined by narration or by a staged interviewer who might challenge her claims. This moment immediately precedes a meeting of two company members with Father Roger Schmit, in which the priest implores the company to "Just deal with what is true. You know what is true. You just need to do your best to say it correct."^^ This plea from a priest acknowledges the gap between truth and performance and the ability of his interviewers to negotiate that gap. In including this meta-discursive instruction, Kaufman points out his company's own positionality in bringing these moments to the stage. Through this Brechtian gest, Kaufman and company point to the rhetoric of the many voices being presented and to their own presentation of those voices. In doing so, the play works to defuse the hegemonic danger of both the journalistic and communal aspects of these plays. Whether it does so successfully depends as much upon an individual production as it does on the tactics of the playwright. While each of these examples represents a different approach to presenting the playwright's authority, these plays also reveal an anxiety about the authority of the interview subject. I have argued that part of the work of these plays is to equalize the authority of the voices who speak and that, in doing so, the shift from the monologic to the dialogic necessarily involves leeching the privilege from some voices and empowering others. This act endows the playwright with considerable power, as I have just suggested, but it also provokes a specific anxiety in many of the interview subjects, an anxiety about how their words are going to be used. Greensboro's Dawson wants to know what the purpose of his interview is, and Laramie's Father Roger Schmit implores his interviewers to "to say it correct,"^^ while taxi driver Doc O'Connor talks about taping his interviewers firom Hard Copy as a way of fighting back lest the tabloid news program misrepresent his words. And while these figures acknowledge how much power they forfeit when they give an interview, other characters—in each case, characters who are otherwise in positions of power—clearly view the interview as a platform. LAPD Commissioner Stanley Sheinbaum commands Anna Deavere Smith's attention with verbal cues, clearly understanding his relationship to the media;̂ "^ Greensboro's David Duke speaks as he would in any political setting; and when given the chance, the Baptist Minister of Laramie moves past his initial reticence to speak, using his time with the interviewer to condemn homosexuality as he would in the pulpit.^^ These moments at once speak to a sense of privilege that these interview subjects feel they may take. But by presenting this privilege within the text of the plays, the playwrights deconstruct that privilege, essentially relying on the Brechtian gest to underscore the presumed authority of the speaker, while hiding the authority that the performer and playwright have to critique the interview subject. The best solution to this power imbalance may be the one used by Ping Chong in his Undesirable Elements series, in which the actors are telling their own stories and the stories of their families. In each case, the actor is given final edit over his or Spring 2003 m 20. Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project, The Laramie Project (New York: Vintage Books, 2001)8. 21. Kaufman and Tectonic 9. 22. 9. 23. Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper and Row, 1957). 24. Kaufman and Tectonic 6-7. 25. Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (New York: Anchor Books, 1994) 19. 26. Deavere Smith, Twilight 15. 27. It is perhaps a bit of a false dichotomy to suggest that Dawson's "monologues" are diametrically opposed to the more radically contingent context of the stage, since the real-life circumstances of his speech are also contextual and shaped by discourse. Nonetheless, there is certainly a sense that Dawson approaches his speech as if imbued with an unshakeable hegemonic authority. 28. Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror 255. 29. 27. 30.31. 31. Deavere Smith, Twilight xxix; emphasis original. 32. Kaufman and Tectonic 10. 33. 65. 34.100. 35. Deavere Smith, F i ' r e ^ / / ï e Mrror XXXviii. 36. xxiv; emphasis original. 37. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Joumal Publications, 1982) 47-48. 38. Cornel West, Foreword, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (New York: Anchor Books, 1993) xix. 39. Jill Dolan, "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative'" Theatre Joumal 53 (2001): 455-70. 40. Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror xxvi; emphasis original. 41. Janelle Reinelt, "Performing Race: Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror,'' Modem Z)ramû39(1996):615. 42. Melanie Smith, "Total Denial: Emily Mann's Feminist Techniques in the Context of Popular American Entertainment Culture," Studies in the Humanities 17.2(1990): 135. 43. Melanie Smith 136. 44. Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, eds., Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York: William Morrow, 1987)281. 45. West xviii-xix. 46. West's Utopian view of Smith's work never acknowledges that power over the conversation that Smith maintains, and that I suggest is always present when the guise of neutrality is claimed in staged oral history. Therefore, his claim that Smith completely depatriarchalizes the conversation ignores the power she does maintain. 120 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 47. Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror 3. 48. Lanser 262. '>'•> 49.264. 50.265. 5L Deavere Smith, Twilight xxiv. 52. Tania Modleski critiques the notion of Smith's body as containing multple identities as being stereotypical of the female body as container, as vessel, but ultimately finds Smith's performance radically progressive as political theatre. 53. Lyons and Lyons 48. 54. Kaufinan and Tectonic 11. 55. Don Shewey, "Town in a Mirror," American Theatre (May/June 2000): 15. 56. Moisés Kaufman, "Into the West: An Exploration in Form," American Theatre (May/June 2000): 18. 57. Albor Ruiz, "A Private Wyoming," New York Daily News 4 May 2000, final ed.: 52. 58. Mann 263. 59. Athol Fugard, Introduction, Testimonies: Four Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997) xi. 60. Qtd. in Salz 216. 61. Mann 315. 62. Qtd. in Salz 216. 63. Qtd. in Salz 215. 64. Reinek611. 65.610. 66. Modleski 110. 67. Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart (Boston: Beacon, 1996)6. 68. Lanser 26. 69. Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues (New York: Villard, 1998) 3. ^"^ê 70. Lanser 266. 71. The facts that the interviewer is a character just as Nelson and Dawson are and that the playwright herself is not an actor in any production of the play helps to further diminish the univocal quality of the interviewer's rhetoric. 72. Mann 267. 73.267. 74. 306. 75. 265. 76. Titles to scenes are projected in performance on a multi-media screen, thus taking on the textual authority of that invisible author-journalist, as opposed to the more overtly subjectified interviewer. 77. Mann 263-64. 78.310. Spring^003 _ _ j 2 1 79. West xviii. 80. xviii. 81. I offer this with its own caveat, since the 2002 HBO production ofthe play portrays this character as narrow-minded and ignorant, a sense I do not get from the text ofthe play. 82. Kaufman and Tectonic 66. 83. 66. 84. Deavere Smith, Twilight 14. 85. Kaufman and Tectonic 69. 86. Philippa Wehle, "What's Fiction When You Have Real Life?: Ping Chong's Undesirable Elements Project," Theatre Forum 21 (summer/fall 2002): 37-42. 87. Shewey 16.