David Hare Research Articles

Stage right (and wrong): The playwright David Hare talks to Index about a very 21st century form of censorship on the stage. Plus a poem of Hare’s published for the first time

Stage right (and wrong): The playwright David Hare talks to Index about a very 21st century form of censorship on the stage. Plus a poem of Hare’s published for the first time

MAKING MISCHIEF: DAVID HARE AND THE CELEBRITY PLAYWRIGHT’S POLITICAL PERSONA

This article examines the fashioning of the authorial persona of British playwright, screenwriter, and director David Hare through autobiographically inflected extra-theatrical interventions. Both exploratory and explanatory companion pieces that frame his artistic work, Hare’s lectures, essays, and memoir capture and stage the field migrations between art and activism that lie at the heart of his public profile as a politically engaged celebrity playwright and astute social commentator. It will be shown how Hare exploits the generic properties of non-fictional life-writing formats that raise, and ostensibly meet, audience expectations of sincerity and authenticity and therefore become ideal vehicles for Hare’s ‘autobiomyth’ of the prophetic writer-propagandist who strives to appeal to the moral conscience of his readership. Hare’s conception of the authorial persona is informed by a Romantic tradition of strong authorship that is intimately connected with truth-telling discourses and that relies on the author’s combined identities of artist and politically engaged commentator. This contribution argues that Hare’s proclivity for non-fictional life-writing formats ties in with a sense of discomfort about his position as a playwright between establishment recognition and self-declared radicalism.

Exception and the Rule: Agamben, Stuff Happens, and Representation in the Post-Truth Age

The contemporary post-truth environment imposes limitations and ethical consid erations upon the political theatre-maker’s ability to highlight political leaders’ exceptional acts of deception. By unpacking and applying Giorgio Agamben’s writing on the State of Exception to post-truth political performances, Alex D. Wilson discusses in this article how political deception is an exceptional act of sovereign power and how the state of exception is an inherently performative phenomenon. The inherent challenges this state of affairs presents to the theatre are discussed with particular reference to David Hare’s Stuff Happens (2004), which, it is argued, falls into its own state of exception in terms of its approach to truth. Alex D. Wilson is a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies at the University of Otago, who recently completed an MA which explored ethical authorship of British theatrical work produced in response to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He is the artistic director of Arcade, a Dunedin-based performing arts company.

David Hare’s Fanshen and Hannah Arendt’s Political Views on Action and Public and Private Realms

ABSTRACTThe British dramatist David Hare (1947–) is a distinguished contemporary figure in the field of historical-political playwriting. To address the issues of his age, he makes use of history and the recent past as a model. Like Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), the twentieth-century political theorist and activist, Hare conducts a pathological study of his surrounding environment and the world. Both Arendt and Hare benefit from the past, Arendt from the distant past or the ancient Greece and Rome and Hare from the immediate past, in order to understand the present better. Indeed, history is a source of inspiration to them both. This paper is a study of Hare’s historical-political play, Fanshen, based on Arendt’s political insights on action and public and private realms. The play mainly shows that, contrary to Arendt – for whom the public realm of politics and the private domain of economy are two separate fields – for Hare there is essentially an interconnection between public and private spheres.

Between Stuff Happens and Ishtar in Baghdad

كان المسرح ولا يزال أحد الأنواع الأدبية الرائدة في تسجيل وتقديم التاريخ ، ماضيه وحاضره. إنها أداة ووسيلة يستخدمها المثقفون والمسرحيون لتوثيق أحداث الحياة الواقعية ، فضلا عن دوره في الترفيه وإنتاج الأدب الخيالي. كجزء من مهمتها التوعوية ، كانت الدراما بمثابة وسيلة فاعلة في تقديم الحقيقة للجمهور ، وهي حقيقة قد تكون مخفية أو ملتوية من قبل وسائل الإعلام أو النشرات الإخبارية أو الخطب العامة وفقًا لبعض البرامج السياسية.
 بهذا المعنى ، لعب المسرح دورًا كبيرًا في تمثيل الحرب التي قادتها الولايات المتحدة ضد العراق عام 2003. إذ تناولت العديد من المسرحيات الأحداث والمجريات المرتبطة بهذه الحرب. ومن بين هذه المسرحيات ، مسرحية ديفيد هير" الاشياء تحدث" و مسرحية رشا فاضل "عشتار في بغداد".
 بينما يستعرض الكاتب المسرحي البريطاني الأحداث التي أدت إلى شن حرب إئتلافية على العراق في مسرحيته الوثائقية ، تنقل الكاتبة العراقية صورة قاتمة للبلاد في أعقاب تلك الحرب ، تخلط بين صور التاريخ الذهبي الأسطوري للعراق مع صورحديثة للدمار والفوضى ، مع إعطاء الأمل في مستقبل أكثر إشراقا وأكثر سلاما.

Memory of the Voiceless. Verbatim, Cvasi-verbatim, Mockumentary

Abstract This paper examines a series of practices circumscribed to verbatim theatre, which uses interviews or other documentary materials, in order to engage the audience in relation to urgent, controversial topics of general or local interest. Although it has just recently entered theatrical usage, verbatim has proved to be a flexible method, open to expressions from the most diverse. We will follow the approaches of some directors or playwrights, as Anna Deveare Smith, Moisés Kaufman, David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark, Richard Norton-Taylor or Alecky Blythe, who are concerned with reflecting the undistorted reality, but at the same time with providing an intense theatrical experience. In this respect, we analyze how the tensions between objective and subjective, between real and fictional, between content and form are negotiated, as well as the impact that these choices have on the artistic product, respectively to what extent the authenticity of the sources remains unaltered when it comes on stage.

In Search of Meaning: ‘The Hours’ and Meaning Construction

This paper deals with the way in which certain meanings originate from the participation of a multiplicity of cues that emerge from different modalities. The analysis is based on the implementation of specific linguistic and cognitive mechanisms that trigger the generation of the audience’s unconscious construction of meaning. The corpus of the analysis concentrates on an excerpt of David Hare’s script (2002) of the movie The Hours: three women’s lives, by Stephen Daldry, that acts as the backbone of the analysis. The analysis is cross-referenced with parallel modality inputs (Kress 2009), such as specific filmic or visual details, found either in the scene or the rest of the movie. The approach of this qualitative study is mainly cognitive making special emphasis on the three types of underspecification proposed by Radden (2007a). It also draws from Langacker’s (2008) proposals related to attention and perspective to identify figure-ground relations as determinant in the molding of the characters and their ideological standpoints in the scene.

Va in Scena il Crack Finanziario. La Crisi del 2008 nelle Drammaturgia Inglese ed Italiana

I analyse David Hare’s The Power of Yes (2009), Lucy Prebble’s Enron (2009), and Stefano Massini’s Lehman Trilogy (2012). All the three works have a relevant connection to the main topic. The paper focuses on the strategies each author employs in the dramatization of the economy and looks at their conclusions on the nature of the economic crisis. I first illustrate the reason of this specific kind of approach to the subject in the introduction; then, I analyse each play individually in the three following sections. I conclude by underlining how the interest in socio-economic structures in relation to present times remains very central in the two English plays but seems to be almost absent in the Italian play. I take this element as evidence of the more socially engaged nature of English theatre in comparison to Italian theatre.

“The Book of My Life is a Book of Voices”: Philip Roth and the Bloodlines of his Fiction

"The Book of My Life is a Book of Voices"Philip Roth and the Bloodlines of his Fiction Catherine Morley (bio) The brio, the punch, the vigor, and the rich, rude tang of Philip Roth's writing have, of course, been well documented. In the innumerable news features after his death, critics, scholars, and friends reflected on the frenetic pace of his writing, as well as the humor, the vitriol, and the anger that informed his work. And surely not even the most skeptical reader can deny that Roth's prose throbs with a uniquely caustic and savage energy, which, as his friend David Hare has observed, was directed towards skewering hypocrisy wherever he saw it. For me, though, the appeal of Roth's writing lies not just in its vigor and energy, but in its depth, its sophistication, its moral and historical profundity. People often describe his books as angry, funny, sexy, or moving; but I think the lifeblood of Roth's work is more than just an abiding wrath or lustiness. Rather it is his sustained engagement, throughout his career in fiction, with his ancestors, literary or otherwise. This energy manifests itself in two ways: in the raft of literary influences to which he was never shy of admitting, and in the various representations of characters who assess their lives in terms of those who have formed them.1 The first of these manifestations is nowhere more evident than in the book in which I first encountered Roth's distinctive voice, I Married a Communist (1998). Contemplating his life and the friendships that have formed him, an older Nathan Zuckerman reflects: What is it, this genealogy that isn't genetic? In my case they were the men to whom I apprenticed myself […] [. . .] I became Leo's willing student, and through his intercession, Aristotle's willing student, Kierkegaard's willing student, Benedetto Croce's [End Page 98] willing student, André Gide's willing student, Joseph Conrad's willing student, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's willing student [. . .] [. . .] the book of my life is a book of voices. (217, 221, 222). It goes without saying, of course, that Zuckerman's sense of the multilayered intellectual ancestry informing his existence applies to Roth, too. And indeed, what immediately greets us when we open any of his books or short stories is a cacophony of voices, from Sheldon Grossbart's insinuations of brotherhood to Peter Tarnopol's feeling that his migraines give him a kinship with Virginia Woolf, from Merry Levov's revelatory stammer to the jump rope songs of Newark children's voices in Nemesis (2010). Every story teems with voices; every life is layered upon or shaped by relation to another; every text is buttressed by an intricate lattice of palimpsests. One of Roth's abiding themes is the way in which we are shaped, for good or ill, consciously or unconsciously, by those around us: our friends, our communities, our families, our ancestry. A marvelous example comes in the story "Defender of the Faith," from the Goodbye, Columbus (1959) collection, which explores the relationship between Sergeant Nathan Marx and Lieutenant Sheldon Grossbart, retrospectively recalled by the older man. Nathan Marx, a hardened soldier (albeit also a thinker and scholar, in the very familiar Rothian combination of the intellectual and physical selves), finds himself in a training camp in Missouri in 1945, shocked to discover that he is a survivor of the war and annoyed by the overtures of an over-confident younger recruit who assumes an affinity between them, and cadges favors on the basis of their shared faith. As a thoroughly assimilated American Jew, Marx is forced to consider what he has sacrificed in pledging his allegiance to Uncle Sam. Throughout the story, he presents himself as having developed "an infantryman's heart" (149) and rejects the attempts of Grossbart and his companions to establish a personal relationship. However, as he watches three Jewish personnel walking to their prayers, Marx yields to the gentle touch of memory: I could hear Grossbart singing the double-time cadence, and as it grew dimmer and dimmer it suddenly touched some deep memory—as did the slant of light—and I was remembering the shrill...

Theatre: I'M Not Running.

National Theatre , London , until 31 January 2019 In the 2001 general election Dr Richard Taylor, previously a consultant physician at Kidderminster General Hospital, stood as an independent candidate, largely on the single issue of the closure of the hospital’s Accident and Emergency department. He annihilated the opposition, unseating the Labour member and coming in with a majority of 18 000. He remained at Westminster for 10 years. During the previous decade David Hare had written three highly acclaimed plays about British institutions — the clergy ( Racing Demon , 1990), the law ( Murmuring Judges , 1991), and politics ( The Absence of War , 1993). In 2006, The Vertical Hour opened on Broadway, not in London, because of a falling out with the National Theatre. The central topic of the play was the Iraq War. One of the characters, played …

"صوت لمن لاصوت له": دراسة في مسرحية التلقين (الطريق الدائم) لـ( ديفيد هير)

يهدف هذا البحث الى تقصي مسرح إنكليزي معاصر هو (مسرح التلقين) ، وتمّ من خلاله التركيز على مسرحية (الطريق الدائم) للكاتب الإنكليزي (ديفيد هير) . إذ عمل هير في هذه المسرحية على دمج السياسة بالفن لينتقد أداء حكومة حزب المحافظين فيما يخص خصخصة نظام السكك الحديد في بريطانيا في العام 1991. وقد ترتب على هذا القرار عدد كثير من حوادث القطارات ، التي راح ضحيتها العديد من المدنين بين الأعوام 1997 و 2002.

Theatricalizing the National Housing Crisis in Mike Bartlett’s Game and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin

Abstract Since the start of the new millennia, the words ‘national crisis’ have not been far removed from many of the plays on the British stage. The aftermath of 9/11 and the British government’s decision to aid George Bush’s Middle East invasion plans sparked plays by David Hare, Roy Williams, and the Tricycle Theatre’s The Great Game as well as verbatim theatre pieces. The Great Recession unleashed works by David Hare (again), Laura Wade, and Lucy Prebble, among others. The increasing threats of floods across Great Britain and Europe placed the crisis of climate change front and centre in plays by Mike Bartlett and Steve Waters. The housing crisis, while not as provocative a theatrical topic as the ones above, has also inspired theatrical responses, including Mike Bartlett’s Game and Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin, and these two works are the focus of my paper. More specifically, I will examine each playwright’s focus on the role of the homeless in regards to the housing crisis. Interestingly, both playwrights posit that the victimization of the homeless is the crucial solution to not only solving the housing crisis in Britain, but also maintaining the status quo of Britain’s affluent population.

Oscar on the Boards: Playwrights Represent the Playwright on Stage

In this article Roger Porter analyzes five plays about Oscar Wilde, by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, David Hare, Eric Bentley, Moises Kaufman, and Terry Eagleton. He focuses on various aspects of the three Wilde trials of 1895, and shows how, while the plays employ verbatim transcripts of the court records, they use the latter in quite different ways and with different emphases, suggesting how the several playwrights regard Douglas in his relation with Wilde, as well as Douglas's implication in the verdict. Several of the plays focus almost exclusively on Wilde's personality, while others engage with larger issues, including Victorian moral regulation of sexuality, the relation of art to society, and English attitudes towards the Irish. He also stresses how the plays’ dramaturgy relates to their perspectives on Wilde, especially on his cultural role. Roger Porter is Professor Emeritus of English, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, USA. He is the author of Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections (University of Nebraska Press), Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (Cornell University Press), and co-editor (with Sandra Gilbert) of Eating Words: a Norton Anthology of Food Writing.

Narratives with No Need for Translation?” - Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012) and David Hare (2014)

Narratives with No Need for Translation?” Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (2012) and David Hare (2014)

Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini

Reviewed by: Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini George Potter FORMS OF CONFLICT: CONTEMPORARY WARS ON THE BRITISH STAGE. By Sara Soncini. Exeter Performance Studies series. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2015; pp. 314. How theatre responds to war—and particularly the War on Terror—has garnered much critical attention since 9/11, whether it be questioning what dramatic structure such responses take, asking if there have been appropriate or sufficient responses, or examining the artistic choices that translate historical events into political theatre. Notable among recent books on the topic are Jenny Hughes's Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty (2011), Jenny Spencer's edited collection Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (2013), and Rustom Bharucha's Terror and Performance (2014). Sara Soncini's Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage enters these discussions with an emphasis on the formal aspects of theatre and the degree to which they are able to respond to modern warfare, with a focus on the United Kingdom. Specifically, Soncini argues that there is "a connection between modes of conflict and modes of representation," and sets out to explore "theatre's capacity for providing some interpretive means to enlarge our understanding of the new patterns and mechanisms of conflict" (xiii). Soncini intriguingly explores these concerns not only within the tradition of British theatre, but also within a continental intellectual and interpretive context less often considered in English-language criticism. From framing contemporary global wars as moving beyond the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz to drawing on French and Italian theorists, philosophers, and literary critics, Soncini deploys these [End Page 433] theoretical traditions to make a convincing case that we have transitioned from a period of clearly delineated conflicts to war without clear temporal or geographic boundaries, with transnational media, and with disassociation from the violence of war. Furthermore, she claims that the "British stage has shown a remarkable readiness to take up this call [to respond to these new wars] and re-examine existing categories whereby we frame and understand violence and war" (8). Given the growth of British documentary theatre during the period under discussion (1991–2011), Soncini devotes about half of Frames of Conflict to explore new forms of representations within this genre. As she writes, "[i]t is not surprising then that 9/11, a historical event which consolidated and above all made apparent the growing theatricalization of warfare, should also have acted as a watershed in the history of documentary drama" (78). While this emphasis on documentary theatre specifically within the context of war offers Soncini an angle distinct from that of earlier studies of the genre, her focus on widely discussed work by David Hare and Richard Norton-Taylor leads her to familiar ground in arguing, for example, with regard to Norton-Taylor's Called to Account about the Chilcot inquiry, that "the one truth that audiences came out with at the end of the Tricycle performance was that there is no such thing as 'hard' evidence" (99). This focus on documentary theatre is bookended by two other concerns: a chapter exploring the depiction of war in postdramatic theatre, and a discussion of the representation of translation in contemporary drama. In the former, Soncini juxtaposes contemporary drama against previous works, such as Sarah Kane's Blasted, with its clear parallels to the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and spectacular acts of stage violence, ranging from rape, to mutilation, to cannibalism. Soncini provocatively argues that plays like Caryl Churchill's Far and Away and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? remove the iconography of war from the British stage, which also forms an interesting lead-in to the discussion of documentary drama, which tends to stage inquiries rather than war itself. Some of the most engaging interpretations of well-known plays come in the last chapter, when she discusses acts of translation onstage. Within this context, Soncini argues that Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul might be viewed as a work about failed translations, both in Kushner's own linguistic limitations and the play's use of "translation as a structuring...

Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini

Reviewed by: Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini Amanda Dawson Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage. By Sara Soncini. University of Exeter Press, 2015. Cloth $100.00, Paper $35.00. xvii + 295 pages. Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage (2015) by Sara Soncini is a monograph that considers how contemporary wars are presented on the British stage. This book investigates plays, playwrights, productions, and the strategies they deploy in responding to contemporary wars and issues of representation through storytelling and performance. The book posits a correlation between real-world conflict and how it is represented on stage, assessing the impact of theatre as a tool for understanding war and violence. Through a close reading of over twenty-five plays, Forms of Conflict investigates the cultural and political relevance of these plays. Moreover, the author seeks to answer questions of how theatre provides new ways of interpreting war in a world "enmeshed in permanent war" (xiii), and how new wars influence new forms of dramatic storytelling. Forms of Conflict makes a compelling argument that, just as the landscape of war is ever changing, so is the landscape of new war plays (post-9/11 conflicts). This in-depth look at new wars on the British stage is a welcome addition to scholarship on representations of war. Soncini looks at plays that highlight new techniques and insights on contemporary warfare and global representation. These scripts were written by British and British-based writers, and even a few non-British playwrights whose work premiered in the UK, including Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp, Simon Stephens, and David Hare, among others. Some of the plays are well known while others remain unpublished. Soncini also attended productions, when possible, at [End Page 167] major theatres, as well as at smaller theatre companies. While the texts are Soncini's primary materials, she felt "more comfortable" discussing plays she saw in person or on video (xv). The monograph is divided into five chapters. In chapter 1, "Introduction: Mapping the Terrain," Soncini presents her argument about "new wars" in opposition to "old wars" (xiii). Old wars might simply be described as what is typically thought of as wars in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. "Old wars," Soncini writes, are in the "Clausewitzean modes of conflict," referencing Carl von Clausewitz and his foundational theories about war, published in On War in 1832 (xiii). New wars, on the other hand, are looser in definition, perhaps explained best as forms of organized violence, which is meant to include mass acts of violence and terrorism, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001. The plays investigated here were written and performed close to or after 9/11. Chapter 2, titled "This is Not a War," "sets out to fathom the reverberations of the increasingly virtual nature of contemporary wars on the visual and verbal textures of their dramatic reconfigurations" (19). In many of the plays discussed in this chapter, the visual, visceral imagery of war is absent, unlike in film as Soncini notes, where the violence of war is almost always present. This absence of war is not unusual in war plays at large, but is arguably more prevalent in contemporary war plays. For example, Soncini describes the 1997 production of Caryl Churchill's This is a Chair at the Royal Court Theatre in London, which began with a proj ection of a text reading "'The War in Bosnia,'" while the action on stage was of a man holding flowers as he waits for his date. This highlights Soncini's argument for how the fighting and violence of war serves as the backdrop or even the topic of the play, yet is not fully present. Soncini shifts her focus to documentary theatre in chapters 3 and 4 by engaging with playwright David Hare, a major figure in war-based theatre. Hare's 2002 article in the Guardian, "Why Fabulate?," provides the title for Soncini's third chapter, in which Hare questions whether fiction is the appropriate form for examining war. The chapter discusses documentary theatre and its reflections of reality by highlighting tribunal plays, which utilize official transcripts, such as...

Dramatic Responses To US-Iraq War :, A Study In David Hare's Stuff Happens

Contemporary War drama is described as a reaction to the profound suffering brought up by war that has, unfortunately, become a supreme language of communication in the Modern era. Hence, the English contemporary political theatre has displayed unique interconnectedness between drama and politics: interest in US-Iraq war is indeed not an exception. British playwright, David Hare, belongs to a trend of war drama that enables the world to witness the truth, trauma and the violence of US-Iraq war. Stuff Happens subtly helps show how US coercive diplomacy manipulates other Powers to fulfill the new doctrine of New American Century. In Stuff Happens, Hare documents the recent tragic history of Iraq in such an approach that blends the documentary with the fictional to display the events from 2000, till the actual invasion of Iraq in April, 2003. The play traces the origins of US-Iraq war and unveils all the attempts and the procedures undertaken by Bush and his administration team to invade Iraq.

Annawadi on the South Bank: Global Neoliberalism and Spatial Contingency in Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo’s acclaimed 2012 work of narrative non-fiction, tells the story of the slum-dwellers of Annawadi, an “undercity” in the shadow of Mumbai’s glittering international airport. David Hare’s 2014 adaptation of Boo’s book, produced at London’s National Theatre under the direction of Rufus Norris, takes a quasi-Brechtian approach, focusing on the systemic corruption that undercuts the poor. Contingency and precarity are major themes of the narrative. The interwoven emplotting of many real lives represented on stage connects to the contingency of the acre of slumland known as Annawadi, which I contrast with the plot of land on the South Bank of the Thames that houses the National Theatre complex. In particular, three representational emplotments – Boo’s book, Hare’s script, and Norris’s production – connect those two places by highlighting their spatial contingency and entangle them in the global neoliberal practices (from waste to performance to mobility and tourism) that depend on these spatial arrangements.

Forty-five Minutes that Changed the World: The September Dossier, British Drama, and the New Journalism

On September 24, 2002, Tony Blair's government released a dossier with exaggerate claims regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities. The September Dossier would become a cornerstone of Blair's case for war in Iraq, while the arguments against the claims—and their use in government and media—also became regular features in British drama. Through an examination of Richard Norton-Taylor's Justifying War: Scenes from the Hutton Inquiry, David Hare's Stuff Happens, and Colin Teevan's How Many Miles to Basra?, this article explores the critique of media and government in contemporary British theater that engages pre-Iraq war intelligence. This analysis of three genres of Iraq War drama—a verbatim play, a docudrama, and a fictional play—examines the challenges to the intersection of art and journalism. Specifically, it appears that British theater, while providing a more critical venue for analyzing the narration of the Iraq War, became a parallel monolith for a singular narrative of the war that did not create a sufficient replacement for a reliable and rigorous press.

Inspiration from the "Really Real": David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre

Inspiration from the "Really Real":David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face and Documentary Theatre William C. Boles (bio) According to David Henry Hwang, two literary influences for his Obie-winning play Yellow Face were Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, both of which rely on a stand-in character for the author as he revisits painful autobiographical memories.1 In writing Yellow Face, Hwang did not want the same thing to happen to his literary doppelgänger DHH that happened to Tom Wingfield and Edmund Tyrone, namely, paling in comparison to the rest of the play's richly defined characters. However, the more he wrote, the less concerned Hwang became: "I found that…creating a character that I actually gave my name to…liberated me to make him a character…. It's kind of counterintuitive, but by naming him after myself he became more of a character."2 Aiding Hwang in separating himself from the fictional DHH was his recent performative turn in Greg Pak's short film Asian Pride Porn, where he played himself hawking "politically correct Asian porn."3 By embracing, in part, his highly self-conscious and at times self-parodying creation, Hwang imbued his literary double with much less seriousness than Williams and O'Neill did. While the inspirational roots of the main character DHH can be traced back to two canonical American plays and playwrights, the play's format stems from the realm of documentary theatre (also known as verbatim theatre), and its influence over Yellow Face and Hwang is far more significant than that of Williams and O'Neill. Over the two decades prior to the play's premiere in 2007, the documentary play had reappeared to much fanfare. In England, London's Tricycle Theatre produced numerous [End Page 216] tribunal plays, with its most successful being Richard Norton-Taylor's The Colour of Justice, while the National Theatre produced David Hare's The Permanent Way and The Power of Yes. In the United States, docudrama was equally successful with productions such as Moisés Kaufman and his Tectonic Theater's The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project; Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992; Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues; and Anne Nelson's The Guys. This form of drama relies on myriad informational sources, including government documents, public hearings, trial testimony, media outlet transcripts, newspaper pieces, letters, and personal interviews, all of which are used as informative as well as authoritative statements about the topic being theatrically explored. The source-based format intrigued Hwang and, in turn, jump-started his creative process. He admitted: "I'd been wanting to fix my play Face Value [which closed on Broadway in previews] for the past 17 years, but I couldn't figure out how to do it."4 Face Value had been Hwang's farcical and biting response to the yellow casting of Jonathan Pryce as The Engineer in the Broadway premiere of Miss Saigon and he intended for his play to challenge multiple misguided conceptions about ethnic identity and stereotypes. In his later return to this subject matter, he "started thinking about the stage documentary form—making it a mock stage documentary that would poke fun at some of the absurdities of the multicultural movement."5 In regard to the "mock" part of his documentary play, he created a fictional narrative surrounding Marcus Gee, a white actor, who is mistaken as Asian by DHH and is cast as the lead in Face Value, whereby Gee then goes on to garner great success as an Asian-American actor. Surrounding this fictional story line, Hwang uses newspapers, magazines, and government sources to document specific incidents in the 1990s, including Hwang's protest against Pryce's casting, the critical and financial failure of Face Value, the rising sense of "yellow peril" associated with Chinese Americans in the 1990s, and his father's role in a campaign finance scandal surrounding Bill Clinton's run for President. Leigh Silverman, the play's director, noted that what "we ask people to believe in in the play is that everything...