How can theater be used to share the words and stories of real people?

My project was really about the process for me. The overwhelming majority of my final piece wasn’t even written until the sixth week of the project. Instead of slowly writing something, like I think I expected I would, I did hours of research, read lots of plays and talked through ideas with many people. Sometimes this was related to my own piece of documentary theater but often it was just working through thoughts.

At the beginning of the process this looked like reading a lot of journal articles. I fell down the rabbit hole of post war German documentary theater which is very political and rooted in the unsettledness of a war torn nation. I also read almost a dozen other plays. All of which had some historical relevance, or asked questions about other forms of storytelling such as the media or internalized narratives. This also helped me realize that a lot of my essential question wasn’t about just writing a piece of theater. It was about the intersection of theater and other ways of storytelling. 

Probably the biggest realization I had throughout this process was the connection between documentary theater’s philosophy and the pedagogy of the junior trip. Both the Junior Trip and Documentary Theater are at their core about understanding and sharing another’s person’s story. Talking with Allison, Joan and Chris about this was probably my favorite part of the process. Thinking about how theatrical storytelling relates to other forms of storytelling (in this case academic work) is something I have always been interested in but never thought would become a major part of this project. Talking with Allison and Chirs about the pedagogy of the junior trip meant that it became more than just the content of my own work. Understanding the thinking behind the trip was also a way to understand how to structure and build a piece of documentary theater.

For me I think the hardest part of the project was moving from this work around theory to actually writing my own piece. The theorizing is easier for me and feels much safer than the creative process. It wasn’t easy to take ownership of a story that is, in reality, someone else’s.  Chris pushed me to think about this and the many problems that arise from this insecurity as problems “in the piece not for it”.

Most of these problems were centered on my fear of ruining up another person’s story. The people who are in my piece are real and exist well beyond the hour or so we talked with them let alone the few minutes of their language in my piece. This brought up a lot of questions for me that are at their core the “messiness” of telling someone else’s real story. How do you not co-opt someone else’s story? What are the power dynamics at play when you tell another person’s story? Is this ethical? How can you do another person’s voice justice? What are the things I didn’t ask? Chris encouraged me to incorporate this questioning into my piece. Embracing the “messy” questions didn’t come remotely close to answering them. Most of them aren’t even directly addressed in my first draft. But, it did make it so that I could move forward in the creative process, write an outline and slowly build on it and edit together a piece of theater. 

That in some ways is an answer to my essential question–to tell someone else’s real story though theater you have to embrace the messiness inherent to this work. You have to make use of the fact that theater allows so much space for questioning without answers. In other ways I didn’t answer my question–the most important deeper questions are still unanswered.