Documentary Play Research Articles

The translator as a social activist in the digital age

Abstract This article presents a process-oriented, self-reflective study of my work translating a documentary play about anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020. It provides insights into the overlapping roles of translator, social activist and cultural mediator, and reflects on opportunities for collaboration in the digital sphere. Through an analysis of my own notes, interim versions of the translation, editorial revisions, correspondence and conversations with other participants, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the various roles, stages and relationships found throughout the translation process, as well as the translator’s role in interacting with other stakeholders to express a unanimous protest against violence and oppression made possible by cooperation across borders in the digital sphere.

Low Country Lamentations

Michael Boyce Gillespie interviews the multidisciplinary artist Jon-Sesrie Goff about his first feature film, After Sherman. He suggests that the film that can been understood as an inquiry that explores a question that has long preoccupied Goff: “What role does documentary play when it is documented or viewed outside of the experience and space it depicts?” Gillespie argues that After Sherman manifests an answer through its expansive and reflexive accounting of culture and place as well as its formal deliberation on blackness, the afterlives of slavery, land as material and cultural inheritance, and home as site of origin and foundation for possible futures.

Two Truths and a Lie: An Ethnodramatic Exploration of Resistance and Relationships Between Women in Our Current Political and Social Climate

In 2021, I created the verbatim documentary play, Two Truths and a Lie, to address how verbatim documentary theatre can serve as a springboard for dialogue regarding perceived truths around the 2016 and 2020 elections. This new verbatim documentary interlaces my connection with three of the conservative women I interviewed in 2019 around their response to “What are your thoughts about the 2020 election?” and incorporating the game, Two Truths and a Lie, to engage audience discussion around bias and perceived truth. The play emerged from a ten-day playwright retreat at The Hundredth Hill Artist Residency and was performed in Bloomington, Indiana, in the summer of 2021. This article aims to unpack and chronicle my experience in creating and performing this new work by narrowing in on the project’s methodology with excerpts from the script, performance and (in)-show discussion reflections, and future outcomes.

Commemorative Hospitality in Documentary Theatre: Revisiting the Collective Memory in Genco Erkal’s Sivas 93

Focusing on Sivas 93 (2008), a Turkish documentary play by Genco Erkal, this paper is going to explore the construction of hospitality with victimized individuals and communities, especially those who are dead and absent, through commemoration in documentary theatre. The manifestation of hospitality on stage, in which ‘the host / the sovereign’ turns into the ‘hostage’ of ‘the guest / the foreign / the deviant’ as Derrida elucidates in Of Hospitality, contributes to the development of alternative responses to the mainstream media and its impact on collective memories. In this regard, while the reinterpretation of collective memories is a fundamental function of documentary theatre, my goal is to explore how Sivas 93 as a documentary play develops its own methods to revisit the past. Commemorating the absent and victimized people through performance, the play not only refreshes the collective memory but also underlines the society’s ethical responsibility towards those who have been symbolically displaced from home.> 

Prophesizing the End of Theatre

The Chilean police keep firing pellets and tear gas bombs in the streets, blinding and injuring people by the hundreds. The people keep demonstrating. Two months before the protests of October 2019, a problematic documentary play, Animales invisibles, while distorting the genre, prophesied what was to come precisely in the way it departed from the documentary.

Describing Pain in Mary Raftery's Documentary Play No Escape

Documentary theatre is a genre in which real sources and events are used and edited to become the form of dramatic texts and performances. The personal experiences narrated in No Escape (2010), a documentary play by Mary Raftery, have shocked many people, due to the play’s multiple graphic descriptions of child abuse which took place in industrial schools and orphanages in Ireland. This article analyses how pain is presented in No Escape, by contrasting the language used, in their respective lines in the play, by authorities, victims, and representatives of the institutions. Pain, as a physical and psychological sensation, is a subject that still needs to be examined further in discussing the history of Ireland, to provide scholars and society with an opportunity to reflect upon this subject – and, perhaps, achieve healing.

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.

Uncovering the Hidden Truth in the Documentary Play, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom

Abstract Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (2004) is a documentary play written by journalist Victoria Brittain and novelist Gillian Slovo. It is compiled mostly from interviews from Guantanamo Bay prisoners and testimony from their lawyers and embittered families back in the UK. The interviews are supplemented by correspondences from detainees, news conferences and lecture material. The play contrives personal stories, legal opinion, and political debate. It firmly indicts the unlawful policies of the “war on terror” in particular the US government’s practice of turning the detention centre in Cuba into a no-man’s land for law and holding the detainees indefinitely. The explicitly political play critiques the decisions taken by Bush’s administration and discloses the persistent effort to hide, distort, and disguise the truth. کشف الحقيقة في المسرحية الوثائقية جوانتانامو: إلتزام شرف الدفاع عن الحرية ملخص : جوانتانامو: إلتزام شرف الدفاع عن الحرية مسرحية وثائقية کتبها کل من ڤيکتوريا بريتن وجيليان سلوفو وتم عرضها عام 2004. ترتکز المسرحية على المقابلات الشخصية مع بعض معتقلي سجن جوانتانامو والخطابات المرسلة إلى ذويهم وشهادات محاميهم وأفراد أسرهم في المملکة المتحدة. وأيضا على المؤتمرات الصحفية والتصريحات التي أدلى بها رجال السياسة الأمريکيين أثناء الحرب على الإرهاب. تهدف المسرحية إلى إدانة وکشف ما قام به هؤلاء الساسة من تعمد تشويه للواقع وحجب للحقائق من خلال مجموعة من القرارات السياسية والأوامر العسکرية التي اتخذتها حکومة الرئيس الأمريکي جورج بوش والتي ترتب عليها حرمان معتقلي جوانتانامو من أية حقوق قانونية يکفلها الدستور الأمريکي والأعراف الدولية.

Screening the Past: Reflexivity, Repetition and the Spectator in Lola Arias' Minefield/Campo minado (2016)

This article examines the role performed by the autobiographical body in Lola Arias' documentary play Minefield (2016). Through a ‘hypermedial’ representation of the cultural memory archive, Arias challenges dominant perspectives towards the Malvinas/Falklands conflict by repeatedly using screens, recording devices and documentary footage to highlight the mediation and subjectivity inherent in both individual and collective memories of the past. By engaging with recent work on documentary theatre and live performance, this article reflects on how Minefield's narrative repetition and formal reflexivity demand, though ultimately confound, an empathetic connection between performer and audience.

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...

Representation of Iraqi War between Fantasy and Reality in Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at Baghdad Zoo: A New Historicist Reading

Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is among the plays which represent the Iraqi war— a prominent event in postmodern history. The play is based on a real story which happened in the Bagdad Zoo when some American soldiers killed a rare Bengal tiger. It is a documentation of this real story and it includes real names and historical places and characters, which make it qualified as a documentary play. The present paper employs the new historicist method in its attempt to show how much the play is a representation of the culture that motivates the actions, whether it is the culture of the author or that of the characters concerned, Arabs and Americans. Thus, the play could be seen both as a product of the interaction of the American culture and the Arab culture that it came in touch with. The American soldiers first saw this war as a mission of freedom, while the Iraqis saw it as ruin of their culture. However, the dramatic method reflects changes in perspectives as the characters come into contact. In this way, the present reading is a chance to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature and mutual influence of cultures.

Integrating Theatre and Geography to Develop Spatial Thinking in Youth

Integrating Theatre and Geography to Develop Spatial Thinking in Youth Becky Becker (bio), Amanda Rees (bio), Andrea Dawn Frazier (bio), and Camille L. Bryant (bio) Theatre for Youth enjoys a strong following in many communities across the country, particularly via elementary and middle school visits to local theatres and touring productions geared toward school-age children. Children are often introduced to a play, story, or theme by their classroom teachers, and then given the opportunity to reinforce its educational value by seeing the theatre production. Yet how often are theatre strategies used to explore and enhance diverse subject areas like math, geography, or science in a more integrated manner? Occasionally, schools may integrate theatre exercises into the curriculum to enhance a lesson, but the inherent qualities of theatre as an embodied art form are rarely used to draw upon spatial skills gained from theatrical practice. One of our inspirations for joining theatre with geography to access spatial thinking is the inherent body-centric nature of theatrical practice. In the following article, we hope to provide insight into a process, the intent of which was to do just that: integrate theatre and geography exercises to develop spatial reasoning skills among elementary and middle school children. The project, Shaping OurSpace, is both experimental and broad in scope, involving community planning, Lego scale models, theatre games and exercises, oral history interviews, and the eventual production of an original play. It can serve as a model for others who may wish to integrate theatre as a means of developing children’s spatial reasoning and social skills that may not be elicited in a traditional classroom setting. Shaping OurSpace was a yearlong interdisciplinary project (2012–2013) that brought individuals from the fields of geography, theatre, and education together to work with two groups of children in reimagining a three-block area in the community.1 The city and local housing agency had designated the area as a potential target for HUD funding to establish a mix of subsidized and full market rate apartments. Faculty from three different [End Page 67] departments, history and geography, theatre, and education, all from Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia, developed a program to engage elementary children to assess and reshape a three-block area using geography concepts and theatre exercises. During the process, the children learned and practiced cardinal directions, participated in a variety of theatre games and exercises, learned to read and notate Google Earth images, and eventually reimagined the neighborhood using Legos to create a scale model of a three-block area. The culminating activity was a short documentary play, created using interviews with family members and the local housing authority, and collected by the children. Through a process-oriented discussion of the project and its implications, we provide details concerning four facets of our work—the theoretical underpinnings of geography and theatre that led to the project’s inception, a definition of spatial thinking, an overview of our process, and, finally, a description of what we learned and why it is a useful way of thinking about theatre for youth. Our goal in sharing is threefold. First, because spatial thinking is an area of struggle for certain populations, specifically girls,2 we theorize that theatre and its kinesthetic engagement can improve this perceived deficiency. Second, our contention is that although interdisciplinary pedagogy may be advocated as an engaging way to involve students in learning new skills, it has a social impact on the children involved that extends to the wider community. More specifically, we observed a unique attention to power dynamics that was fostered in the children. Third, we hope Shaping OurSpace might inspire similar interdisciplinary projects that intertwine theatre pedagogy with that of other disciplines, such as geography, since theatre has a unique capacity for facilitating social growth and embodied learning. Theoretical Underpinnings of Geography and Theatre In joining the disparate disciplines of geography and theatre, it may be somewhat surprising that both fields share a similar path toward developing a social conscience. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the experiences of disenfranchised peoples began to make their way into the academy, practitioners in geography included them in their research. William Bunge, a theoretical geographer...

Responding to Rupture

The 2014 confessional documentary play, A Wake: Kids Killing Kids present a unique opportunity to investigate rupture. It was a collaborative production by Australian company Too Many Weapons and Filipino company Sipat Lawin, which sought to address the limitations of a 2013 performance, Kids Killing Kids, created and performed solely by the Australians. Both of these shows were investigations into their previous collaboration, Battalia Royale.Battalia Royale was an immersive promenade performance written by the Australian playwrights and staged by Filipino theatre company Sipat Lawin in 2012. It was enormously successful in Manila, attracting large audiences, online fan-clubs and glowing reviews. However, the performance was also stridently condemned for the highly physical enactments of violence by adolescent performers, and the way audiences were encouraged to become implicit in this simulated violence.Battalia Royale is itself an adaptation of the cult Japanese novel (and subsequent manga and film) Battle Royale, written by Kōshun Takami (1999). The novel provides a visceral criticism of authoritarian policy, graphically depicting a class of adolescents committing acts of violence and murder upon one another under government order.These artworks provide a remarkable genealogy of rupture, over nearly two decades and across three countries. This essay seeks to trace how rupture is sustained and transformed through performance, providing insight into the radical potential of rupture, but also the difficulty in attempting to harness it.

Staging Postmemory: Self-representation and Parental Biographying in Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s El rumor del incendio

Mexico in the 1970s was at the peak of what Vargas Llosa called its “perfect dictatorship” under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This perfection, however, did not preclude resistance from student groups, militias, and peasant movements. Decades later, theatre company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol would stage this rebellion in their documentary play El rumor del incendio (2010) and its accompanying textual and digital publications. Director and actor Luisa Pardo plays both herself and her real-life mother, Margarita, in the play. This study examines the strategies used to convey the family ties between Margarita and Pardo, which include documentary evidence, bodily relationships, and genealogical connections. It shows the way that theatrical self-representation challenges the auto/biographical genre by blurring lines between biography and autobiography, as well as redefining drama, asking spectators to consider the stage as an alternative source of historical fact.

Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage Edited by Carol Martin (review)

Reviewed by: Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage Edited by Carol Martin William Palmer Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage. Edited by Carol Martin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. vii + 309 pp. $95.00 hardcover, $29.00 paper. This anthology of essays and performance texts forms part of the Studies in International Performance series edited by Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton. The series focuses on how performance crosses borders and interacts between varying nations and cultures. Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage continues in this vein by exploring the performance of theatre of the real, sometimes known as documentary theatre, in multiple locations across the globe. This anthology offers a look into how these performances of real events are created and portrayed on international stages. Martin structures the anthology into two sections: the first includes essays that focus on theatre of the real performances, and the second features actual texts of performances in either their entirety or partial construction. Through both the essays and recorded texts of the performances, readers can gain insight into other cultures’ performances of reality. Carol Martin, in her introduction as well as her essay “Bodies of Evidence” that follows, defines theatre of the real, discussing its multiple titles from docudrama to verbatim theatre and theatre of fact, and how the slightest variation in nomenclature alters exactly what can be expected of the performance. She emphasizes that theatre of the real for an American audience is derived from actual texts and testimony. Witness accounts, court documents, and other factual evidence are used as a starting point, and the expectation of such a performance is that it offers a near reenactment of actual events. In the beginning essays, Martin notes that what is true about American theatre of the real may not be so internationally. Other cultures may view documentary theatre as witnesses telling their actual stories, as visual performance art, as commentary on the actual cultural [End Page 289] event(s), or as imagined reenactments. She also notes how today’s theatre of the real intersects both the global and the local in its creation. The first section includes essays discussing theatre of the real performances across the globe. “Toward a Poetics of Theatre and Public Events: In the Case of Stephen Lawrence” by Janelle Reinelt examines a theatre of the real performance in the United Kingdom. The Colour of Justice centers on the brutal stabbing death of a black youth, Stephen Lawrence, by five white youths, and follows his parents’ journey to gain some form of justice. Reinelt’s essay thoroughly dictates the events of the actual hate crime and its aftermath and then describes the documentary theatre performance. The following essay moves the reader geographically from the United Kingdom to the Middle East. Wendy S. Hesford’s “Staging Terror” delves into two separate performances: Inconvenient Evidence and Guantánamo. Inconvenient Evidence premiered in Tehran, Iran, in the form of multiple roadside murals depicting the abuses of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib as shown in released photographs. It later traveled to New York in the form of photographs of the murals displayed at the International Center for Photography. Guantánamo premiered in London as a documentary play based on the letters of Guantanamo detainees who were found innocent. Both of the pieces Hesford discusses display the brutal events occurring behind the “victories” of America’s War on Terror. The next essay in this section is Yvette Hutchison’s “Post-1990s Verbatim Theatre in South Africa: Exploring an African Concept of ‘Truth.’” Hutchison primarily reviews the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that worked to address the actions and wrongs of apartheid. From the TRC, actual interviews from both victims and oppressors are used to create multiple verbatim theatre pieces, such as REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony found in the text section. “Reality from the Bottom Up: Documentary Theatre in Poland” by Agnieszka Sowińska (translated by Benjamin Paloff) explores Polish theatre of the real that uses factual and historical sources as inspiration for the creation of a text. The essay explores this style through different examples, such as High-Speed Urban...

Global Theme, Local Form: Testimony, Storytelling, and Thailand: What's Love Got to Do with It?

This essay is a reflection on the play, Thailand! What’s Love Got To Do With It?, by Mairtin de Cogain and Brian Desmond, first produced in Cork, Ireland, in 2007. Thailand is both documentary play and metaphor: documentary in that it dramatizes an analysis of perspectives expressed by Irish sex tourists, and metaphor in the way that this analysis reflects the hysterical electioneering (from both government and media) during the 2007 Irish general election which saw Fianna Fail’s Celtic Tiger government elected for a third term. A reflection on practice, this essay uses postcolonial and narrative theory to discuss Thailand as an act of performance which deploys the latitudes of epic storytelling to interrogate Irish attitudes to citizenship, both national and global. It discusses ways in which Thailand interrogates Celtic Tiger Ireland’s expedient self-narratives, including those of wealth as moral currency, the disposable foreign “other,” and the anti-dialectical narratives of the Irish government (and its media allies). First produced in 2007, shortly before the Irish economy went into freefall, Thailand documents an affluent Ireland’s critical disengagement with the contradictions of prosperity or, after Jerome Bruner, its apparent inability to narrate “itself” as “other.” This essay considers how Thailand’s dramaturgy exposes some of these contradictions and, through epic storytelling, both performs and exposes an apparatus of global domination.

From Tahrir to ‘Tahrir’: Some Theatrical Impulses toward the Egyptian Uprising

In November 2011, on the brink of a new wave of conflict over Egypt's future, an obviously energized audience crowded into Cairo's Rawabet Theatre for The Tahrir Monologues, a documentary play celebrating the Eighteen Days leading to Hosni Mubarak's ouster. Apparently a premature celebration, the show turned out instead to be a self-conscious nostalgia exercise meant to register the decay of revolutionary ideals. This essay analyses The Tahrir Monologues and several other theatrical responses to the unfolding – not to say unravelling – situation in post-Mubarak Egypt. Amid the grotesque improvisations of power, I ask, what can scripted theatre still say? For an answer I turn to an American University in Cairo production of Sa'adallāh Wannūs's 1994 masterpiece Rituals of Signs and Transformations – one of three productions of this play worldwide in 2012–13. Why this play now? The answer lies in its ingenuity, its passion and, ultimately, I argue, its prophetic pessimism.

Lilies on the Land – The Forgotten Women’s Land Army of World War II – A Documentary Play

Abstract This paper centres on a play directed by Sonia Ritter and produced by the Lions part that portrays an extraordinary event in Britain’s recent history - the Women’s Land Army of World War II. It is based on real evidence given in hundreds of letters and interviews with former Land Girls. The anecdotes of their shared experience and strenuous work are presented by a female quartet - Margie, Peggy, Poppy and Vera - in a sparkling, captivating and emotional way.

Global Feminism from Page to Stage: Teaching <em>Half the Sky</em> and <em>Seven</em>

Imagine a dark stage with, one by one, seven women stepping forward to declare their name and country of origin. They then sit and interweave seven monologues of their individual struggles for gender justice in Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Russia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Guatemala. “What can I do?” asks Farida, an Afghani woman who feels powerless; “Maybe I can help the women of my country,” Mukhtar Mai from Pakistan realizes later in the play (Cizmar et al. 14, 27). These voices intersect, themes overlapping from speaker to speaker even as the seven stories belong to different places and times. Each woman begins by telling her story directly to the audience; but by the end, the actresses include each other in their gazes and respond to each other’s words, a symbol of their joint suffering, shared strength, and the solidarity necessary for lasting change. At the play’s conclusion, Guatemalan Congresswoman Anabella De Leon’s declaration “No more silence!” is a call to the entire audience (37). Women’s voices are heard, individually and collectively, throwing a spotlight on global gender issues and women’s crucial role in social change. What I have briefly described is the documentary play Seven, the collaboration of seven female playwrights with seven women activists connected in 2006 by the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit nongovernmental organization supporting the development of female leaders (Vital).1 The stated mission of Vital Voices, to “identify, invest in and bring visibility to extraordinary women around the world by unleashing their leadership potential to transform lives and accelerate peace and prosperity in their communities,” is well served by the creative drama Seven (Vital). Like the more well-known Vagina Monologues, Seven is an ensemble piece of documentary theatre based on interviews. Also like Vagina Monologues, the play has minimal staging—usually just seven women, scripts in hand, on a stage devoid of props or sets. Anna Deavere Smith, an actress and writer known for her “journalism-based theatre” (Pressley), interviewed Nigerian activist Hafsat Abiola, and is perhaps the best known of the playwrights attached to the project, who also include Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel, Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, and Susan Yankowitz. Each playwright interviewed

State Killing, the Stage of Innocence, and The Exonerated

Ryan's essay analyzes the coordination of the innocence argument and sentimentality in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's TheExonerated (2003), a documentary play based on interviews with people sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. The play's composition, performance, and reception reveal the challenges of creating art that is aimed at social reform and confirm the difficulty in assessing the political function or, in Fredric Jameson's sense, the political unconscious of American literature. As a celebrated example of political theater, The Exonerated also provides a forum for thinking through the contemporary terms and framework of conversations about state killing. Ryan argues that the play stimulates reform and elicits sympathy by substituting a false rhetoric of universal vulnerability for a more accurate assessment of imprisonment and judicial murder. The attempt to make the play accessible, emotional, and persuasive also sets real limits on how audience members are asked think about personal and social responsibility. Some of these efforts include a focus on the wrongly convicted instead of the guilty, a balance of white and black interviewees in the face of a racially unbalanced justice system, a rendering of pain as uplifting for audiences, and an encouragement of personal and financial solutions rather than structural and political ones.