Verbatim Theatre Research Articles

Captivating Verbatim Account of Historical Events in Ana Deaver Smith’s Fires in The Mirror

Fires in the Mirror is a play by Anna Deavere Smith that uses verbatim theatre to explore the 1991 Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn, New York. The play consists of a series of monologues in which she embodies the personas of various people involved in or impacted by the riot. Each monologue is a verbatim transcript of what the interviewee said during an interview with her. By performing these verbatim monologues, Smith authentically portrays the voices and emotions of the people she interviewed. It offers her a multi-faceted and profoundly human perspective on the Crown Heights riot. It highlights the underlying issues of racial and religious divisions while underscoring the importance of empathy and understanding in times of crisis. Fires in The Mirror as verbatim theatre shows how authentic storytelling can deeply connect us to real-life events. It reminds us that theatre can be a powerful tool for understanding others' experiences and raising awareness about important issues.

Verbatim theatre as a creative approach to health professions education research translation.

Traditionally, the impact and outcomes from health professions education research (HPER) have focused on academic outputs, whereas in the humanities, research translation is conceptualised more broadly and creatively, including research-based performances like verbatim theatre. Translating HPER findings through the emotive and embodied nature of a verbatim theatre performance provides a unique opportunity to translate research data and create alternative learning spaces for rich and valuable insights that aligns with transformative pedagogy. In this paper, we describe the background of verbatim theatre, a form of performance, which draws on a research participants' testimony and lived experience and how we used this creative approach to translate HPER findings. We discuss the experiential process of bringing an interdisciplinary team together, health professions academics and an academic playwright to craft a verbatim theatre script that provided space to honour the breadth, depth and diversity of participant voices from a large (n = 100) qualitative research study exploring professionalism and sociocultural factors in health professions education (HPE). Furthermore, we discuss the powerful potential of drawing on research-based performance to create alternative, safe and non-threatening learning spaces to resonate with and experience HPER in new and transformative ways. Finally, we offer reflexive insights on the key opportunities and challenges we encountered in translating HPER into a verbatim theatre performance. Verbatim theatre presents an innovative and creative way to communicate and translate HPER. This paper offers research and pedagogical insights in translating research into verbatim theatre to support transformative pedagogy and practice in HPE. In conclusion, we encourage other health professions researchers to consider this dynamic and creative approach to transforming HPE.

Ryan Claycomb. In the Lurch: Verbatim Theatre and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation

This book examines the political potential of the new forms of verbatim theatre that emerged in the early 1990s, exploring how the rise of populism and the political lurch to the right evident in the United States, the United Kingdom, and across Europe has shaped the political potential of this work.

Creative translation pathways for exploring gendered violence against Brazilian migrant women through a feminist translocational lens

ABSTRACT This paper explores how research on gendered violence among Brazilian migrant women in London has been translated through a range of creative engagements. It argues that these can challenge traditional forms of knowledge production, and advance intersectional feminist struggles through a logic of translocation. Yet it also challenges homogenous artistic encounters through developing ‘creative translation pathways’ which delineate different configurations of how researchers, artists, and participants using varied art forms . The paper focuses on two ‘creative translation pathways’ that capture different interpretative framings around the same research project. The first reflects a curatorial perspective through Gaël Le Cornec’s verbatim theatre play, Efêmera, which foregrounds her interpretation of Brazilian women’s stories adding a metatheatrical dimension to strengthen the narrative and connection with the audience. The second is a co-produced collaborative engagement, We Still Fight in the Dark, with community drama group, Migrants in Action, based around experimental workshops to produce an audio-visual film and installation where survivors’ perspectives and well-being are paramount. While both creative translation pathways reflected translocational feminist goals in raising awareness around gendered violence with a view to transform them, each had tensions around the individual, collective, artistic and therapeutic logics in the process of knowledge production.

Grace Under Pressure: a mixed methods impact assessment of a verbatim theatre intervention to improve healthcare workplace culture

BackgroundHealthcare workplace mistreatment has been documented globally. Poor workplace behaviour, ranging from incivility to bullying and harassment, is common in healthcare, and contributes significantly to adverse events in healthcare, poor mental health among healthcare workers, and to attrition in the healthcare workforce, particularly in junior years. Poor workplace behaviour is often normalised, and is difficult to address. Verbatim theatre, a form of research informed theatre in which plays are created from informants’ exact words only, is particularly suited to facilitating workplace culture change by raising awareness about issues that are difficult to discuss. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of the verbatim theatre play ‘Grace Under Pressure’ on workplace culture in NSW hospitals.MethodsThe intervention was conducted in 13 hospitals from 8 Local Health Districts (LHDs) in NSW, Australia, in October and November 2019, with aggregated impact across all sites measured by a bespoke survey (‘Pam McLean Centre (PMC) survey’) at the conclusion of the intervention. This study was conducted in 3 Local Health Districts (one urban, one regional, one remote), with data collection conducted in November–December 2019 and December 2020. The study design was a mixed methods assessment of the play’s impact using (1) validated baseline measures of psychosocial risk, analysed descriptively, (2) overall findings from the PMC survey above, analysed descriptively, (3) interviews conducted within a month of the intervention, analysed thematically and (4) interviews conducted one year later, analysed thematically.ResultsHalf (51.5%) of the respondents (n = 149) to the baseline survey had scores indicating high risk of job strain and depressive symptoms. Of 478 respondents to the PMC survey (response rate 57%), 93% found the play important, 92% recommended others see the play, 89% considered that it stimulated thinking about workplace behaviour, and 85% that it made discussing these issues easier. Thematic analysis of interviews within one month (n = 21) showed that the play raised awareness about poor workplace behaviour and motivated behaviour change. Interviews conducted one year later (n = 6) attributed improved workplace culture to the intervention due to improved awareness, discussion and capacity to respond to challenging issues.ConclusionsVerbatim theatre is effective in raising awareness about difficult workplace behaviour in ways that motivate behaviour change, and hence can be effective in catalysing real improvements in healthcare workplace culture. Creative approaches are recommended for addressing similarly complex challenges in healthcare workforce retention.

‘Have you seen this?’: Constructing and controlling reality in The Assassination of Katie Hopkins (2018)

In 2018, against a backdrop of post-truth politics, celebrity culture and shock journalism, Chris Bush and Matt Winkworth premiered their fake verbatim musical, The Assassination of Katie Hopkins. This musical explored the ramifications of the fictionalized death of the notorious tabloid-topper Hopkins, while questioning the authenticity of the verbatim form. In doing so, the creators considered new possibilities for musical theatre. This article will explore Bush and Winkworth’s attempt to critique the cultural and political landscape, using the already ethically complex vehicle of verbatim theatre. It will consider the musical in relation to the political promiscuity of performance and slippage between the polarities of an ever-changing political spectrum. It will consider Jannerone’s concept of vanguard performance and explore the performative responses to the musical about Hopkins in the alt-right press. As we question dominant ideologies within musical theatre and embrace the sense of being, at all times, ‘post-something’, this article considers how writers can document this time of interregnum to reflect a world where ‘change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty’.

The 60 Years of Queer and Trans Activism and Care Project: Learning to Conduct Archival Research and Write Dramatic Verbatim Monologues

This reflective essay describes a research course which provided undergraduate students with an opportunity to conduct archival research on six decades of queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) activism and care that have challenged heteronormativity, cis-normativity, and racism in Canada. While there are many ways to share the findings of archival research, we chose to teach our students how to create dramatic verbatim monologues as the arts-based research method of verbatim theatre required students to use the words of activists themselves to explain why a particular moment of activism and care was needed. Students attended three different workshops during the full-year course from September 2022 to March 2023: a workshop in conducting archival research, a workshop about centring themselves and their communities in their research, and a workshop in verbatim monologue writing. Here, we reflect upon what these workshops taught us about archival research, working with Indigenous archival material, and rupturing systems of oppression in our own bodies. At the end of the course, students reported their take-aways from the course. This included a new understanding that it was possible to conduct research on topics they felt passionate about and that theatre-based research provided them with a way to express the findings of their research in forms other than writing essays. This new-found freedom was life-changing.

Verbatim Theatre: Anguish and Theatrical Truths

In recent years, in the Romanian theater space, more and more productions have appeared that are based on verbatim plays and that successfully fit into this category. The verbatim technique works directly with the stories of ordinary people, people who are given a voice through art. More often than not, these voices tell haunting and unusual stories – stories full of anguish, social or political injustices, or painful and unknown truths. The responsibility of the verbatim creator is immense, in addition to presenting the story of his subject word for word, he must be careful not to alter the truths and authentic elements that underlie it. This theatrical technique assumes a huge responsibility on the part of the theater artist, and more than that, it has a specific and extremely rigorous methodology. For this reason, it is important to understand how this technique works, and especially, how a theater artist should relate to it.

Theatre arts in UK city of culture evaluation practices: the case for headphone verbatim

PurposeThis article's purpose is to examine the case for the use of the theatre arts in the evaluation of UK City of Culture (UKCC) programmes, specifically headphone verbatim.Design/methodology/approachThrough an analysis of secondary evidence, supported by some primary research, this article analyses past and present evaluation practices surrounding UKCC programmes and the case for headphone verbatim to be included as a method of gathering and distributing research data. The article also observes the challenges in how data may be disseminated through verbatim theatre performance practices, given the limited examples of its use in this context.FindingsThe author argues that the theatre arts can provide a different way of knowing and understanding the impacts of UKCC projects on the host city. Specifically, that headphone verbatim can bring an experiential perspective that is rarely if ever captured by existing UKCC evaluation methods and policymaking in general.Originality/valueThis article details an innovative method of evaluating social impacts associated with UKCC projects.

In Their Own Words: Exploring the Methodology and Ethics of Ethnotheatre in Qualitative Dementia Research

This article discusses the development of two short plays based on qualitative data from separate research studies related to dementia, both of which were performed in the UK in 2022. The first drama ( Voices from the front line) is a relatively standard piece of verbatim theatre, based on interview data and written accounts from a research study about the experiences of the dementia workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020–22. The second ( The Other Side of the Wall) is based on ethnographic data from a research study carried out with people with dementia living in long-term care, and it introduces elements of invention and absurdism. In both pieces, non-professional actors co-developed the performances, drawing on the spoken words of the original research participants. Using extracts and examples from the script development process, the article attempts to chart the developmental process for a novice ethnodramatist (although experienced dementia researcher) in meeting ethical, aesthetic and methodological challenges.

Migration and Opera Old and New

This article uses Eva Noer Kondrup’s chamber opera Den Rejsende (Copenhagen 2018) to examine the challenges and opportunities provoked by the operatic form when attempting to create socially responsible theatre. Focusing on how opera reflects and contributes to contemporary discourse on migration, it examines how opera’s unusual performance and reception demands differentiate it from, for example, spoken verbatim theatre. The article first considers the most common way opera companies today engage with migration – through productions of existing operas – in which socially responsible decisions are primarily in the hands of directors and designers and relate mostly to interpretation, and it explores some of the risks and opportunities of engaging with migration in recent revivals of repertoire works. It then analyses how questions of social responsibility in new operas extend to structural issues that are the field of the composer and librettist. The article examines Kondrup’s decisions as librettist-composer of Den Rejsende, demonstrating the potential for opera to use non-realist operatic techniques to engage with some of the issues with which spoken verbatim theatre has wrestled, including questions of authority, authenticity and authorship, and of empathy, engagement, and identification. The production, performed by two Swedish singers from non-refugee backgrounds in multiple roles, favoured distanciation techniques over “authenticity effects” and avoided tensions between giving voice to and speaking for contemporary refugees that can arise in spoken verbatim theatre. While the libretto contained found text, this was from historical refugee situations, and from the words of Inger Støjberg in her role as Danish Minister for Immigration, Integration and Housing. By throwing a spotlight on the words of an elected representative, Den Rejsende indicated an area in which audience members of what is often thought of as an affective theatrical form might have some influence in effecting practical change.

“There are Parts I Won’t Tell You”: Biography, Trauma and Violence in Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project

The murder of Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998, was the traumatic event that inspired Moisés Kaufman to write The Laramie Project. The author travelled to Laramie and built the play based on interviews with the townspeople. This essay examines the connection between verbatim theatre and biographical writing and the ways in which these connections and touching boundaries can be a valuable strategy in the depictions of personal and collective trauma, as well as forms of institutionalized and structural violence. The essay will explore the community’s relation to the hate crime committed and make clear the relation of the community with questions regarding homosexuality and homophobia. Through the analysis it will aim at rendering visible the community’s dealing with the shadow of intolerance cast over them and not just those directly involved in Matthew Shepard’s murder, while trying to distance themselves from a collective identity of brutality. The theoretical considerations carried throughout result from the attention to challenges that non-normativity poses on both individual and collective levels.

Dana H by Lucas Hnath, and: Is This a Room by Tina Satter

Reviewed by: Dana H by Lucas Hnath, and: Is This a Room by Tina Satter Barbara Fuchs DANA H. By Lucas Hnath. Directed by Les Waters. The Vineyard Theatre, New York City. October 27, 2021. IS THIS A ROOM. Conceived and directed by Tina Satter. The Vineyard Theatre, New York City. October 27, 2021. In a piece written early in the Trump era, Rob Weinert-Kendt argued that documentary theatre should not be constrained by its commitment to the real or prevented from rendering “a truer reflection than a mere document might.” But what if the “merely” documentary actually complicates our understanding of how narrative is constructed and relayed? What if “reflection” fails to capture the complexity of what must be conveyed? These are some of the questions powerfully raised by Is This a Room, constructed entirely out of the transcript of an FBI interrogation, and Dana H., collated from interviews with the playwright’s mother. The Vineyard Theatre’s juxtaposition of the two pieces at the Lyceum on Broadway in October and November 2021 provided the opportunity to consider how verbatim theatre, as a particular subset of the documentary, complicates our conceptions of theatrical authenticity and verisimilitude. Although the pieces were not presented as a double bill, their conjunction posed rich questions about what truth and reality might mean on the documentary stage. Is This a Room, created and directed by Tina Satter, with the extraordinary Emily Davis in the lead, was first presented at The Kitchen in January 2019 and moved to Broadway in October 2021. The piece reenacts the FBI interrogation on June 3, 2017 of intelligence [End Page 383] contractor Reality Winner (yes, her actual name). Winner, who was subsequently convicted of espionage and served five years in prison for leaking proof of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, was “visited” at her home in Augusta, Georgia, by three agents. As the program notes, “Is This a Room stages this visit word for word from the official transcript recorded that day.” Click for larger view View full resolution Becca Blackwell, Will Cobbs, Pete Simpson, and Emily Davis in the 2021 Broadway production of Is This a Room. (Photo: Chad Batka.) The play gives no sense of Winner’s eventual fate, yet the audience is well-aware of it. While we might share in the disorientation of the protagonist as the aggression ebbs and flows and the conversation distracts, we inevitably bring our knowledge of the aftermath to what becomes a chronicle of an arrest foretold. Rather than concern ourselves with the resolution, we are thus thrown back onto the process: How can this series of inane exchanges add up to such a serious outcome? Where exactly, in this bewildering conversation, does power lie? Winner shares with the men who come for her a background in compliance: she fully perceives the violence that remains implicit and therefore offers little overt defiance. Yet the tension in the theatre, sustained by the strong design of the minimalist production, was almost unbearable. Where the FBI had redacted bits of sensitive information, the lights blinked pink; when more substantial censorship was at work, the lights faded ominously to black in effective lighting design by Thomas Dunn. The light and sound design (the latter by Lee Kinney and Sanae Yamada) felt especially significant as they gestured to what lay ahead. Beyond these sound and lighting cues, Is This a Room explored how verbatim transcription obscures even as it reveals. From Winner’s visible discomfort and isolation, to her almost plaintive refrain of concern for her pets, to the awkwardness of chit-chat amid a terrifying search, Room confronted the audience with the mismatch between official records and lived experience. Much was left between the lines, expressed in the dissonance between what we saw and heard and what we knew was going on. For the most part our eyes could not be trusted: how could the slight presence of Davis, in her Converse high-tops and shorts, convey her moral courage? What to make of the avuncular Pete Simpson, who played the good cop Agent Garrick without ever breaking character? The unspoken menace of the gender imbalance in the scene was...

World Political Theatre and Performance: Theories, Histories, Practices ed. by Mireia Aragay, Paola Botham, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez

Reviewed by: World Political Theatre and Performance: Theories, Histories, Practices ed. by Mireia Aragay, Paola Botham, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. WORLD POLITICAL THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE: THEORIES, HISTORIES, PRACTICES. Edited by Mireia Aragay, Paola Botham, and José Ramón Prado-Pérez. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2020. Cloth, €105.00/ $126.00; ebook, €105.00/ $126.00. This volume arose out of the Political Performances Working Group of IFTR, offering fourteen essays concerning political performances in Finland, the United Kingdom, Malta, Turkey, Belarus, Poland, Estonia, South Africa, India, and China. It is the last two that would be of interest to readers of this journal, although the entire volume is interesting and readable. At heart, by "political theatre" the editors here refer to theatre in response to political oppression and social injustice. The volume is divided into two sections. The first considers "the relationship between performance and activism" and the second concerns "current debates in and around political theatre" (p. 4). In part one the Asianist will find two essays of particular interest. The first, Pujya Ghosh's "From Revolution to Dissent: A Case Study of the Changing Role of Theatre and Activism in Bengal," offers an historical analysis of playwrights Utpal Dutt and Debesh Chattopadhyay and the Naxalbari movement in the 1960s in Bengal. Ghosh posits that both artists emerged in the sixties as performers, activists, and intellectuals, using theatre to challenge the political and social status quo. They created a Bengali theatre that was "a component of civil society, a space in which political battles and future dreams would be reflected" (p. 40). However, as the seventies drew on, progressive [End Page 403] politics began to lose their cultural heft. Ghosh then asks, "to what extent can an intellectual/artist with a left political ideology perform his/her 'political' role under the growing pervasiveness of the capitalist order?" (p. 41). The answer, of course, is "it's complicated," but she concludes that "the parameters of theatre and activism have indeed shifted from revolution to dissent," a paradigm that reflects much theatre in the world since the sixties (p. 51). Revolution seems no longer possible and merely pointing out a different path than the status quo is now the aim of political theatre, which ultimately requires us to rethink what the term "left" means in a political sense. As historical analysis, the essay is interesting and informative, as a critique of the history of political performance in Bengal; it offers a means by which to understand the ultimate lack of efficacy in theatre as a force for social change on the macro level. A second essay from the first section, Julia Boll's "Making the Audience Cry: Witnessing Violence and the Ethics of Compelled Empathy" offers a fascinating exploration of two separate plays that each attempt to make an audience cry in response to atrocity. Boll compares the Belarus Free Theatre's 2012 production of Trash Cuisine (a play about state-sponsored violence and genocide) with Yael Farber's 2013 Nirbhaya, a play devised in response to the gang rape of a young woman on a bus in Delhi. The latter piece was devised and workshopped in India under the direction of Farber, a South African playwright best known for her post-apartheid works that engage and deconstruct that nation's historic racial and gender traumas and explore the politics of witnessing and restorative justice. The play was subsequently toured to Edinburgh, Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore. An example of verbatim theatre, using the words and stories of witnesses, the play attempts to evoke empathy, horror, and ultimately tears from the audience. Boll's essay effectively explores the ethics of doing so, and Farber's role as an outsider engaging with an Indian atrocity; Boll then compares it with Free Theatre's show in one of the strongest essays in the volume about the role and purpose of the artist in dealing with political violence, making it as personal as possible, especially for those who have not suffered from it. Lastly, one essay in the second section engages Chinese political theatre. Wei Zheyu's "The Touring Grass Stage: Staging the Site-Specific Dilemma of Globalization...

Verbatim Voices: An Investigation of Housing and Development in Kingston

Verbatim theatre is a sub-genre of the documentary theatre movement committed to authentic representations of ordinary people and events. As such, it has become a popular tool for Canadian theatre artists to examine contemporary political issues by presenting a plurality of perspectives on the same issue. Through the creation of an original verbatim play on housing in Kingston, I hope to test the effectiveness of verbatim in shaping people’s understanding of Kingston’s current housing crisis. By showcasing the perspectives of a diverse range of citizens, this play will consider the toll the housing crisis is taking on different people. This article examines the ways verbatim is especially well poised to represent Kingston’s housing crisis.

Introduction: Patriarchal backlashes to feminism in times of crisis: plus ça change, moins ça change

ABSTRACT Susan Faludi’s feminist classic Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women was first published in 1991, thirty-one years ago, and yet its message seems to resonate more clearly than ever. The current issue focuses on present-day Europe and the last few decades, covering a very wide spectrum. There are surveys of countries or their crucial sectors (Bulgaria, Italy and France). The social media are dealt with in a separate essay and various subchapters. The literary works studied include Ali Smith’s Summer and verbatim theatre. Prominent examples are Angela Merkel’s 1993 review of Backlash and the Spanish Manada case. In conclusion, an intergenerational dialogue highlights recent controversies and tries to find pathways forward.Part I of the Introduction argues that one of today’s major aspects of the patriarchal backlashes against women remains rooted in biological, deterministic socio-political constructions of women’s bodies, which aim to deprive women of their agency as human beings. After a critical discussion of the backlash concept, Part II briefly characterises the structure of the issue and the individual articles.

Flawed arguments, structural misogyny and rape culture: court cases in contemporary literature

ABSTRACT This article highlights the persistence and violence of rape culture not only insofar as it pertains to sexual aggression but also in reference to arguments used in court cases. The language and body language used by defence attorneys add to the psychological pain suffered by the victim in having to face her aggressor(s) and relive a traumatic experience. I will analyse some contemporary British and Spanish works of literature that bring to the fore the structural misogyny women face today. Louise Doughty’s novel Apple Tree Yard and Jordi Casanovas’s play Jauría (Wolfpack) are particularly explicit in their treatment of court cases concerning rape while drawing on certain characteristics of verbatim theatre. The gang rape and subsequent trials that are at the core of Wolfpack attracted international attention because they clearly signalled towards a persistent loathing of and disregard for women.

“I Felt I Got to Know Everyone”: How News on Stage Combines Theatre and Journalism for a Live Audience

ABSTRACT Journalism has been suffering a crisis of trust in recent years and in order to re-engage with disconnected audiences, media organisations have turned to creative forms of communication. Some of these draw on the concept of “live journalism”, where both journalists and their stories are presented to a live audience. Various examples in the US and Europe have already been examined; this paper looks at the emergence of live journalism in the UK, and its potential in creating engagement in the public sphere. The authors reflect on two online events they produced as part of their “News on Stage” project during the Covid-19 pandemic, in which journalists presented previously unpublished stories, using dramatic techniques such as verbatim theatre, stand-up comedy, and soundscapes. Using creative, practice-based research, considered relevant to the study of journalism today, they discuss the experience of staging these events to analyse themes of dramatisation, truthfulness, and connection. The authors use ethnographic research, supplemented with audience and participant feedback, to show that this kind of fusion of journalism and theatre can increase interest and trust in journalism and build closeness with audiences.

Truths, fakes and the deserving queer migrant

This article explores the role of truth within queer migration. By analysing a host of cultural production – including the verbatim theatre performance Rights of Passage by Claire Summerskill, the short film Crypsis by Christopher McGill, the ethnofictional film Samira by Nicola Mai, and the film The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela by Olaf de Fleur Johannesson – I will challenge the necessity of attempting to discover the truth of queer migrants as sexual and gendered subjects, particularly as related to asylum claims. Yet if questions are raised about the importance of truth, this also demands analysing the role of faking sexuality and gender, and ‘fake’ queer migrants more broadly, referring to those who allegedly fabricate their sexuality and gender to claim asylum. Instead of suggesting faking implies the possibility of undeservingness, I use faking as a theoretical tool to understand the demands of truth, and how faking may become means to subvert the grounds of who is considered a deserving queer migrant seeking asylum. By disrupting the binary between truths and fakes, the very notion of there being truths of queer migrants (and the subject more broadly) will be questioned.

Understanding moral empathy: A verbatim-theatre supported phenomenological exploration of the empathy imperative.

Several studies have measured a decline in empathy during medical training, speculating that factors within the formal, informal and hidden curricula are responsible for this phenomenon. Although the medical education literature describes the moral domain of empathy as most fundamental to the empathic response, most research into the decline has examined the cognitive, affective and behavioural domains. This study distinguishes itself by focusing on how moral empathy is affected through training. Ten medical residents from core education specialties at McMaster University participated in lightly structured interviews concerning their training experiences. Interview transcripts were analysed by way of a descriptive phenomenological approach. Analyses afforded descriptions of the way medical training influences moral empathy. These descriptions were then used to generate a verbatim theatre play that was performed for an audience of residents, educators, learners, researchers and scholars. Following the play, audience participants completed a survey to member-check the descriptions and to glean other reflective experiences in resident training that impact moral empathy. The survey results informed revisions to the codebook that was subsequently used to re-analyse the interview transcripts. This resulted in a final, refined version of the influence of training on learner moral empathy. The findings suggest that a resident's sense of moral empathy relies upon the notion of an innate capacity for empathy, and is influenced by their clinical and classroom education, and specific experiences with patients during training. Importantly, these factors are rarely experienced as having a direct deleterious impact on residents' moral empathy but rather are experienced as challenges to their ability to act on their moral empathy. The study promotes reflection of what it means to experience empathy in the moral domain. The description offers a new perspective from which to view empathic declines that have been previously reported, while also highlighting a moral-behavioural tension that has implications for competency-based assessment and the way empathy is conceptualised in medical education.