Creating Verbatim Theatre from Oral Histories

Clare Summerskill

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429594861
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Historia
• Sous-sujet: Historiografía

Offering a roadmap for practicing verbatim theatre (plays created from oral histories), this book outlines theatre processes through the lens of oral history and draws upon oral history scholarship to bring best practices from that discipline to theatre practitioners.

This book opens with an overview of oral history and verbatim theatre, considering the ways in which existing oral history debates can inform verbatim theatre processes and highlights necessary ethical considerations within each field, which are especially prevalent when working with narrators from marginalised communities. It provides a step-by-step guide to creating plays from interviews and contains practical guidance for determining the scope of a theatre project: identifying narrators and conducting interviews, developing a script from excerpts of interview transcripts and outlining a variety of ways to create verbatim theatre productions. By bringing together this explicit discussion of oral history in relationship to theatre based on personal testimonies, the reader gains insight into each field and the close relationship between the two.

Supported by international case studies that cover a wide range of working methods and productions, including The Laramie Project and Parramatta Girls, this is the perfect guide for oral historians producing dramatic representations of the material they have sourced through interviews, and for writers creating professional theatre productions, community projects or student plays.

PART I
Overview

INTRODUCTION

Increasingly, playwrights employ oral histories to create verbatim plays. Theatre created from interviews uses first-person narratives to tell a big story through a finely focussed lens, and oral history uses personal testimonies to balance the historical record by documenting the experiences and opinions of everyday people. Together these approaches offer exciting possibilities for addressing social justice issues, community engagement and personal growth.

Paul Thompson, who founded the journal Oral History in 1969 and played a key role in the formation of the British Oral History Society in 1971, was one of the first to identify connections between the two practices, observing that:

Oral history and theatre make natural partners. Interviews are a form of performance in themselves. […] So it is not surprising that oral history projects have often turned to drama to present the stories they have recorded, or that theatre has taken to oral history to reach out to groups and communities who may not often cross the foyer threshold.¹

Verbatim literally means ‘in exactly the same words as were used originally’, and verbatim theatre refers to theatre processes in which narrators’ stories, linked by universal themes, are gathered in the form of interviews, excerpts of which are then included in a script. Production and scripting methods by theatre practitioners vary enormously, but the process of creating verbatim plays, as outlined in this publication, involves interviewing individuals, usually from a particular group or community and often about a matter of political or social interest, and then creating a script from interview excerpts. The script is performed by actors who play the parts of the ‘real’ individuals whose words are related in the production.

Both oral history and verbatim theatre rely upon the spoken word, and both practices frequently seek testimonies from members of marginalised, vulnerable or previously silenced populations which are then documented, either in the form of oral recordings and interview transcripts, or by the inclusion of interview excerpts within a script. Where oral history and verbatim theatre projects diverge is in their intended goals. Traditional oral history methodology dictates that oral history interviews, collected to supplement or challenge the existing historical record, be archived and made available for public access and research. Information gathered by playwrights through interviews is developed into scripts and then performances. In both areas of work, either in public archives or through theatrical productions, personal testimonies are made accessible to wider audiences.

For the past twenty-five years, I have worked as a playwright, a theatre director and an oral historian. Much of my work has involved using interviews as source material to create theatre productions that have engaged audiences. Over the last two decades, in particular, the public’s distrust of mainstream media has appeared to increase and people have also become wary of government spin. During this period, attention has turned to seeking alternate versions of events and information provided in the form of personal narratives. This has resulted in a growing enthusiasm for the use of verbatim theatre to address social and political concerns in a format that is not only entertaining but also makes an impact by educating, creating visibility and encouraging activism.

I have observed first-hand the connection between oral history and verbatim theatre, since both practices are centred in similar methodologies, subjects and ethical concerns, utilising the recorded interview as a common foundation to achieve their respective goals. These related practices have rarely been discussed together in any depth; this book reflects upon their close relationship, and I draw upon my own experience and that of my colleagues in both oral history and theatre to create a roadmap for practising oral history-based verbatim theatre from interviews.

The aim of this book is to address this topic from both practical and scholarly perspectives. It offers oral historians and theatre practitioners, both novices and professionals, a step-by-step guide for creating plays from interviews. It also considers existing debates within oral history scholarship, examining ways in which those discussions can inform the creation of verbatim theatre scripts and productions.

Part I introduces verbatim theatre history and explores related practices in the field. This is followed by a discussion on the close connections between verbatim theatre and oral history, and an examination of existing debates within oral history which have relevance to verbatim theatre processes. Although the disciplines of oral history and verbatim theatre have differing final objectives – one to create a broader historiography and the other, a theatrical production – both place a critical emphasis upon the practical techniques and ethical implications of the interview situation. Oral history methodology, particularly relating to the interview process, has been debated rigorously on an international level for several decades, and these discussions have led to the kind of detailed guidelines developed by organisations around the world, most notably, the American Oral History Association (OHA).²

In contrast to the extensive advice offered on oral history methods through publications, websites and training provided by oral history organisations, verbatim theatre practitioners have notably less scholarship and practical advice upon which to draw when seeking guidance for their own productions. The reasons for the disparity in the availability of prescriptive guidelines between oral history and verbatim theatre will be examined in Chapter 2. But, in short, the lack of practical advice undoubtedly stems from the fact that the role of the playwright is to gather personal testimonies for a work of art, often created with the aim of raising social or political awareness, while the purpose of oral history is to seek interviews and to preserve them intact, as a direct representation of the narrators’ words, for the historical record. The playwright as an artist therefore has more license to interpret than the historian whose work must be evidence-based.

Part II discusses ethical considerations that arise in verbatim theatre work. Creating plays from interviews with ‘real’ people involves gathering information from interviews that playwrights develop into scripts. Although the narrator should ideally always be given the opportunity to approve their contribution to the script, the playwright has final editing control. This fact, in itself, raises ethical concerns relating to the agency and the representation of the narrator. Furthermore, working with narratives from members of marginalised or vulnerable communities – as much verbatim theatre work tends to do – means that playwrights can be susceptible to accusations of appropriation. Appropriation is generally understood as either the act of taking something that belongs to someone else, sometimes without permission, or taking an idea, custom or style from a group or culture that you are not a member of and using it yourself. In both senses, there are negative connotations attached to such action. In verbatim theatre work, personal stories are indeed ‘taken’, or at least ‘borrowed’ from narrators, excerpts of which are employed in a script by theatre practitioners who, admittedly, use the interview content for their own purposes. Such work could consequently be viewed as appropriative. But when informed consent has been secured from narrators who understand the aims of the theatre makers, and an explanation has been provided about how interview excerpts might be employed in the play then, arguably, this becomes less of an appropriative process, and more of a collaborative one. However, a thin line exists between this slightly more benign understanding of the term ‘appropriation’ and one which leans towards ‘exploitation’, where playwrights might be accused of using narrators unfairly for their own advantage. Theatre practitioners must consequently tread carefully in this work.

Part III provides step-by-step guidelines for creating a play based on interviews. If you are a theatre professional – a playwright or a director or an actor – and you wish to create a play based on interviews, then turn to Chapters 1–5 for basic information about oral history practice and theory. Your own theatre work will benefit from that understanding. If you are an oral historian, educator or leader of a community group interested in making a play based on interviews then, once you have settled upon the subject of your research and gathered the interview content, you and your colleagues can work AS IF you are theatre company members, allocating roles such as playwright, director and actor to participants in your project.

Topics addressed in this ‘How To’ section include determining the subject of your theatre project, finding narrators and interviewing them, transcribing the interviews, editing and scripting your play and settling upon one of a variety of final production options. If you are an oral historian who has collected a number of interviews which you believe would make an engaging piece of theatre, then there will be a point in your work where you will become a ‘theatre maker’. At this stage, you will need to determine who will script the piece, who will direct it, who will act in it, who it will be performed to and where it will be staged. Forms of verbatim theatre are constantly evolving, and there are numerous ways of producing dramatic projects based on interviews. Chapters 6–12 provide a detailed outline of one way in which a verbatim play can be created which involves working with oral histories employing word-for-word content from interviews in a theatrical script with actors then speaking those exact lines. Throughout the book, however, you will find descriptions of the work of playwrights and theatre companies around the world which can serve as a springboard for your own verbatim theatre project.

Some of the plays to which I refer are ones that I have seen myself, some are ones that I have read about in theatre scholarship, some are ones which I have read in script form, some I have written for theatre companies and others are my own productions. These, I have mentioned several times, simply because I can speak with personal knowledge and a degree of authority about them, rather than because they are exemplary pieces of work! Detailed documentation of verbatim playwrights’ working methods is limited and information about their relationship with their narrators is sparse. In drawing upon my own plays, I am in a position of being able to share my experiences of working with narrators, interview material and production options.

The subjects that my own plays have addressed (namely, experiences of working-class older people, older LGBT people, disabled LGBT people, people with mental health problems and asylum seekers and refugees) demonstrates only a handful of topics and issues which verbatim theatre is perfectly suited to cover since many members of these populations are from the margins of society, rather than the mainstream. But, as you will see throughout the book, the variety of matters about which narrators can be interviewed probably reflects the amount of events and experiences any number of people go through in their lifetimes, and there are really no limits to the topics which either verbatim theatre or oral history can investigate.

Part IV offers detailed examples of verbatim theatre, documentary theatre and oral history performance projects and practitioners, drawing on work from the US, Australia, South Africa and the UK. These productions, which have been performed variously by professional actors, students and community groups, demonstrate a range of working methods employed by theatre practitioners in the creation of plays from interviews addressing social, political and historical topics, i.e. verbatim theatre. Whilst some have been...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor Foreword
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Overview
• Part II Ethics and Verbatim Theatre
• Part III Creating a Play from Interviews
• Part IV Examples of Work by Verbatim Theatre Playwrights and Companies
• Appendices
• Index