(Ch)oral History: Documentary Theatre, the Communal Subject and Progressive Politics

Abstract

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 Marxismindicates 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 Marxistmaterialist thrust.The formal and political influence of Piscator and the Federal

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