Theater in a Post-Truth World

Texts, Politics, and Performance

William C. Boles, William C. Boles, Anja Hartl, William C. Boles

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350215863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This is the first book to examine how the concept and disagreements around post-truth have been explored in the world of theater and performance. It covers a wide spectrum of manifestations and expressions-from the plays of Caryl Churchill, Anne Washburn, and David Henry Hwang, to the inherent theatricality of press conferences, FBI interviews and protests that embrace the confusion created by post-truth rhetoric to muddy issues and deflect blame, to theatrical performance, where the nature of truth is challenged through staged visuals which run counter to what the audience hears, provoking a debate about where the truth actually lies. With contributions by scholars from around the world, Theater in a Post-Truth World considers a wide array of examples from American and British drama and politics, Australian theater, and the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic. Together these provide a glimpse into how the theater in its many forms provides a venue to raise awareness and encourage critical thinking about the contemporary ubiquity of post-truth.

Part One Text

1 Post-Truth but Not Post-Race: The Repeating Realities of Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

Heidi E. Bollinger

We live in an America that is post-truth but not post-race. This is strikingly clear in the conflicting interpretations of cellphone videos documenting the disfigurement and death of Black Americans at the hands of police. Viewers who do not want to believe that racism is still devastatingly alive search in the video footage for evidence of criminality, recalcitrance, and conspiracy to rationalize police violence perpetrated against unarmed Black citizens. The deeply divided public reaction to these brutal encounters reveals that Americans exist in starkly different racial realities without a shared language of facts or truth. In this post-truth but not post-race America, Anna Deavere Smith’s work of documentary theater Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994, 2003) remains hauntingly resonant and relevant.

Smith’s play offers a medley of perspectives on the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, the legal trial of the officers in the white suburb of Simi Valley, and the violent uprising in South Central Los Angeles that followed their acquittal in April of 1992. These events remain eerily familiar today when protesters continue to chant “No Justice, No Peace!” following another incident in another American city while commenters on social media debate the simple premise that “Black Lives Matter.” To compose Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Smith interviewed approximately two hundred witnesses from the Los Angeles community across dividing lines of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and geography (Smith 1994: xvii). From her collection of witness testimonies, Smith selected approximately twenty-five to perform as a series of loosely connected monologues in her one-woman show. As such, Smith’s solo performance gives voice to a cacophonous collection of conflicting truths. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 juxtaposes contradictory and often dubious perspectives without a definitive verification or refutation. The play anticipates the public’s susceptibility to the rampant conspiracy theories and fake news of our post-truth era, and it debunks our nostalgia for an earlier time of unanimity. Smith’s exploration, as an African American dramatist, of conflicting truths following the Rodney King incident reveals that Americans have never shared a common reality. At the same time, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 reveals the impossibility of a post-race era by voicing past racial grievances that return and repeat without end. Ultimately, Smith’s play does not offer a model for helping us to “all get along,” in the words of Rodney King, but instead challenges viewers to confront the recurring consequences of living in utterly disparate racial realities.

Background Context

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is part of Smith’s ongoing series of performances, On the Road: A Search for American Character, which also includes Fires in the Mirror (1993), her examination of the 1991 riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Ironically, the first performance of Fires in the Mirror was canceled because of “events in Los Angeles and concern that the unrest might spread to New York” in April 1992 (Wright 1992). Because of the acclaim that Fires in the Mirror garnered, Smith was commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to “create a one-woman performance piece about the civil disturbances in that city” (Smith 1994: xvii). As a discordant chorus of witnesses to the violence, the play resembles a trial in which many testimonies are heard, and no verdict is reached. As theater critic and playwright Damon Wright has observed, “that they [Smith’s interviewees] might be in direct contradiction of one another does not mitigate their utter conviction that what they say is truth” (1992). Justice means something different to each witness whose testimony Smith voices, and the beating of Rodney King is only one of the injustices put on trial during the play. The complexity and scope of the injustices far outreach the ability of any legal trial or work of drama to achieve resolution, as witnesses connect the police brutality against Rodney King to a multitude of other race-based and class-based injustices. These other incidents include the 1991 killing of African American teenager Latasha Harlins by Korean American shop owner Soon Ja Du, and the beating of Caucasian truck driver Reginald Denny by African American protesters of the Simi Valley trial verdict, events that were both sensationalized by the news media and widely debated in the public sphere.

Documentary theater, the tradition with which Smith is often associated, blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. Sometimes called found theater, journalistic theater, or living history, documentary theater is composed from historical documents, including newspapers, diaries, interviews with witnesses, government records, and filmed events. In Theatre of Real People, Ulrike Garde and Meg Mumford describe what they call the “Authenticity-Effects” of incorporating verbatim interviews or nonprofessional performers into documentary theater. They argue that incorporating these elements creates the impression of “the sincere and genuine and therefore credible, in the sense of honest and free from pretense or counterfeit, or really originating from its reputed maker or source … and that of unmediated and intimate contact with people who actually exist or have existed” (2016: 70). In this vein, Smith, who has described herself as a “repeater,” claims to reproduce the exact words of each witness in her performances and, through her technique of repetition, to invoke the bodily persona of the witness through their characteristic gestures and mannerisms (Pellegrini 1997: 71). As an interviewer and performer, Smith is particularly interested in repetition: in the moments when her subjects repeat themselves and stammer over words as they struggle to articulate their sense of racial grievance. Smith attempts to inhabit her interview subjects through these vocal patterns: “Her interest lies not so much in what is said as how it comes out. She rehearses with earphones on and plays back unedited talk and speaks the words until images and gestures emerge from [speech] rhythms” (Connor 2001: 167). As such, Smith has been cited as the “seminal example” of verbatim theater (Parenteau 2017). As a dramatist, Smith presents herself as a transparent medium or instrument. In terms of authorship, she resembles a mixologist who samples audio tracks, or a sculptor who constructs assemblages from found objects.

The seemingly unedited, raw aesthetic of Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is created in large part by comments that the speakers address to Smith, which continually remind us of the play’s genesis from interviews. Television writer Joe Viola interrupts his account to give Smith advice about whom to interview: “This is the one you ought to track down!” (Smith 1994: 92). Real estate agent Elaine Young gives Smith explicit permission to impersonate her: “You can repeat whatever I say / I mean I will tell you exactly” (Smith 2003: 36; emphasis in the original). With these self-referential statements, Smith capitalizes on the truth-value associated with witness testimony, and the compelling yet misleading idea that testimony offers direct access to historical events. At the same time, these meta-remarks highlight Smith’s role as a dramatic intermediary between the witnesses and her audience. The effect of hearing Smith repeat another person’s words and imitate their affect has a kind of uncanny effect, of something being “off”—like watching a film where the audio is slightly out of sync, or the subtitles do not match the dialogue—that subtly undermines their claims. In Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real, Jenn Stephenson identifies this paradoxical blend of authenticity and artifice as a possible avenue for interrogating truth: “What theatres of the real are producing instead of reality is insecurity. It is through insecurity that we are impelled to move past simply noting the proliferation of free-floating realities and ask how realities are constructed” (2019: 233–4). Stephenson urges viewers to move beyond a sense of realities multiplying, exploding, and collapsing on the stage to question the genesis of what we think we know. When the matter in question is racial justice, the stakes for interrogating “how realities are constructed” are high. Rather than providing access to a stable and singular truth, documentary theater, like Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, makes viewers conscious of the gestures that invoke our credulity or doubt, destabilizing our certainties.

Smith’s work gains power from her claim to revoice verbatim witness testimony as she heard it; yet Smith has published multiple and conflicting versions of the play, further underscoring the elusiveness of a stable, shared reality. She adapted Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 each time she performed it live in Los Angeles and New York, published two very different print versions, and starred in a film adaptation that diverges yet again. In each iteration, Smith selected different characters to perform, altered the sequence of monologues to reshape the dramatic arc, and even edited the transcription of monologues to change the dramatic emphasis. From the over two hundred interviews Smith conducted, endless versions of the play could be constructed. Smith’s repeated claim that the language of the play is verbatim draws attention away from her creative activity of shaping and arranging that material. Through her artful sequencing and juxtaposition of witness testimonies, Smith heightens the tensions between witness perspectives on racial violence and thus dramatizes the discord of the divided communities she has visited.

Post-Truth Polarization

Based on recent studies, the Pew Research Center has concluded that “Americans have rarely been as polarized as they are today” and that our political divisions on matters like racial justice and law enforcement are becoming “increasingly stark” (Dimock and Wike 2020). Their research demonstrates that Americans inhabit strikingly disparate realities in terms of their perceptions of race and justice. In Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre argues that people refuse to accept facts “when we are seeking to assert something that is more important to us than the truth itself” (2018: 13). This is to say, when a strongly held feeling or belief does not mesh with verifiable evidence, it becomes necessary to discredit those facts to maintain one’s ideological framework. Interestingly, this sort of confirmation bias, which McIntyre identifies as symptomatic of a post-truth culture, is often seen among “police detectives, who identify a suspect and then try to build a case around him, rather than search for reasons to rule him out” (2018: 45). Thus, questions of truth and facts are intimately bound up with questions of crime, justice, and racial bias. If, to take a trivial example, “sports fans from opposing teams can look at the same piece of videotape and see different things” (McIntyre 2018: 46), what can we expect when viewers encounter grainy footage of police subduing a suspect?

In her plays, Smith creates confrontations among witnesses living in disparate racial realities through her strategic sequencing of monologues. These witnesses may never have met in real life but because of Smith’s canny sequencing of monologues, they seem to hear and respond to each other. As theater critic Vinson Cunningham has noted, “editing is key to Smith’s art; she makes distant world views sometimes painfully proximate” (2020). Smith’s sequencing of the monologues initially suggests connections among characters, but ultimately reinforces the individual speakers’ commitments to their irreconcilable views. Smith’s juxtaposition of their monologues creates a set of “competing and contradictory narratives that make it difficult for the audience to take sides or to form a united community sure of where justice lies” (Jay 2007: 120). Characters are so deeply entrenched in their own racial realities that when Smith juxtaposes their monologues to create dramatic exchanges, they speak at cross-purposes, undermining themselves and each other.

False equivocation is a dangerous fallacy of the post-truth era, and one might think that by juxtaposing divergent witness perspectives without comment Smith engages in false equivalence. As McIntyre documents in Post-Truth, the insidious ubiquity of false equivocation arose from corporate lobbyists for industries like tobacco and coal. They supplied their own “experts” to undermine critics and promote the false idea that we do not know for sure whether these industries are harmful to the public. When the news media presented these industry-funded experts on the same level as independent researchers, their false claims were given credence, leading to public misconceptions about what is known about the fault of those industries and the harm they cause. In presenting witnesses on this kind of level field of debate, Smith may be making a sly comment on the role of the news media in creating controversy and confusion rather than supplying truthful information. Indeed, she challenges the supposed objectivity of the news media through her monologue as reporter Judith Tur, who provides her helicopter film footage of the beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny. Tur admits that “each time I see this / I get angrier” and she refers to one of the rioters as an “animal” (Smith 2003: 85). As Tur walks Smith through the video footage, her objectivity burns away and her profound racial and class-based grievance as a white woman is laid bare.

At the same time, Smith’s theater operates under a definition of truthfulness different from what the news media or legal sphere claims to uphold. She amplifies and perhaps even tacitly celebrates the unreliability and bias of her witnesses rather than smoothing it over. Smith is interested in the voi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Post-Truth: A Brief Introduction
• Part One Text
• Part Two Politics
• Part Three Performance
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page