Throughout this process a large portion of my project has been reading plays and journal articles. I believe the essay that I shared with Joan and Nellie on April 8th was Bertolt Brecht’s The Street Scene. I came across this essay both from the play reading side of my project and the research I was going through various journal and magazine articles. The essay was mentioned in the introduction to the Laramie Project but I had also spent a significant amount of time reading about the intersection between post WWII German History and documentary theaters’s history. The essay introduces the idea of the “street scene”, an everyday traffic accident then explained by an eyewitness. The witness’s “story” is the traffic accident but all the people listening to them remain aware that they are watching a “demonstration”, not the real accident. I have known since early in the project that the heart of what I wanted to write was about this demonstration. What did we learn from being in Harlan and how did we bring it back to New York. 

It wasn’t until I read The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler that I had an idea for how I could create my own sort of “demonstration.” Throughout the project I have been struggling with feeling like I lacked a narrative arch for my piece. Sticking with the Brecht street scene analogy, there was no “traffic accident” an eye witness had to explain. The Vagina Monologues was so helpful because it too has no single story. It is a series of monologues stringed together by a shared thematic arch and interview process. Their form is also quite freeing. Ensler doesn’t adhere to the rules of verbatim work. She writes her own language and builds on her interviee’s ideas. However her play is still based entirely on interviews (the words and stories of real people). The edition I read of the play also includes her own current thoughts throughout which supplemented material from a decade earlier. Her structure, unified by a theme rather than narrative arch, seems to make sense for my material and after reading it I was able to create my own outline.