Verbatim theatre needs defending, but bad verbatim theatre has no defence. VT (as the cool kids would call it) can be dry as fuck. Picture five wankers dressed in black and standing in line and reading from a court transcript for two and a half hours. Yikes.
I had no relationship with verbatim theatre when I was approached by then Empire Theatre Project’s Company Artistic Director Lewis Jones in Toowoomba, Queensland. I had a passing interest in the form. We’d discussed it for a few minutes in one of our theatre history classes at uni. I’d watched the obligatory production of The Laramie Project that all theatre students must attend (or at least read, it is excellent). But apart from that, I was green and eager.
I was twenty-one when I received the commission, making me only two years older than the play's subject: Kristjian Terauds, a local young man who died tragically from illicit drug use. I dove into Kristjian’s community as best I could, amassing over twenty-four hours of interviews in a few months. I wrote it relatively quickly and subjected it to two creative developments.
In one of those, as an aside, I worked with an actress who I developed a crush on. A few years later, we were married.
The play toured South-East Queensland and received acclaim. In 2012, it went on a national tour. When verbatim theatre appeared on the high school drama curriculum, April’s Fool was listed as a primary example of the form. In 2019, Grin and Tonic Theatre Troupe began touring an edited version of the work, and its been doing the rounds ever since.
It remains the play I am most asked about and is the most popular thing I’ve ever written.
I can’t help but note here, in parallel to the post from a while ago about Queensland arts, that April’s Fool was the first and only time Empire Theatre commissioned and produced a new work from a new Queensland writer. April’s Fool was an astronomic success in every regard, but Empire Theatre made no attempts to replicate its success.
Still, it wasn’t the play’s production or reception that shook me. They seemed almost irrelevant to the creative matter that created April’s Fool: the interviews—those twenty-four hours spent sitting across from Kristjian’s community and listening taught me more about playwriting, human nature and relationships than I could’ve found in any other way. It was the most profound gift for a privileged twenty-one-year-old white guy who wanted to make art.
Verbatim theatre methodologies - a fancy term that basically describes performing arts tools most often found in verbatim theatre -became a large part of my doctoral thesis and then the spine of the new book I’ve co-written with fellow researcher and verbatim playwright Sarah Peters (Verbatim Theatre Methodologies for Community-Engaged Practice).
But for me, it’s really all about emotionally authentic conversations between people and then the impossible creative task of mirroring those conversations on stage. The audience takes the interviewer's place - inquiring, observing, and listening. The actors replace the interviewee - expressing, story-telling, and exploring.
And guess what? Shock horror, but every piece of research we can find says this type of conversation, and ergo this type of theatre spreads empathy. It’s also replicated in other fields. Brene Brown’s rock star research into shame and vulnerability has led her to define ‘rumbles’ for us in professional workspaces:
A rumble is a discussion, conversation, or meeting defined by a commitment to lean into vulnerability, to stay curious and generous, to stick with the messy middle of problem identification and solving...and, as psychologist Harriet Lerner teaches, to listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard.
Since writing April’s over a decade ago, I can identify these conversations as more critical than ever. For me, verbatim theatre is at its most boring when it’s lazy agit-prop: didactically stating one point of view. Better to acknowledge VT’s historical roots in the theatre-makers that inspired it, Brecht and Boal, who were obsessed with revealing the ‘messy middle’ of any argument or issue.
This approach forces the theatre-makers to reach beyond their own narratives. For the sake of good theatre, everyone must understand all sides of a discussion. Empathy is easy when it’s people we agree with. It’s an act of spiritual practice to find empathy for those whose actions we find (at least on the surface) unpalatable.
Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s under-rated book Strangers In Their Own Land charts her sojourn into the profoundly conservative corners of America in the years leading up to Trump’s election. It’s an impressive diary of someone reckoning with their empathy.
Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don't know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt…We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.
For Hochschild, her empathy is nurtured by her capacity to have authentic and difficult conversations with those different from her. As she points out, this is where the truly important analysis can actually begin.
For our book, Sarah and I interviewed a handful of Australian verbatim playwrights, including Claire Christian, Campion Decent, Matt Scholten and Dan Evans. Dan, whose work straddles classical adaptation, commercial television, and collaborations in making new theatre works from verbatim materials, articulated:
You are in servitude of the community. That’s the primary difference from narrative based playwriting, which exists in a hierarchy that we’ve inherited from our English forebears. What this work has taught me is that amazing cultural experiences aren’t hierarchical or vertical, they’re horizontal. If you can be vulnerable and can meet someone else’s vulnerability, then what you’ll get is a democratic piece of theatre, that can speak with more sparkling clarity to more people more quickly in a meaningful and robust way. I think it gets right back to what theatre was supposed to do, which is catharsis. It’s empathy. Because of that, it can’t be dismissed. Love it or hate it, it can’t be dismissed. It’s irrefutable.
That’s the best statement on why verbatim theatre is worth the time we put into it I’ve found. Not only did verbatim theatre introduce me to my wife, it also changed my life in countless ways. It led me to a community-engaged practice that meant my playwriting began to intersect with therapy, social services and political activism. While I can never state with certainty if I’ll produce a strict ‘verbatim theatre’ piece like April’s Fool ever again, I can’t imagine not utilising verbatim theatre methodologies in my projects for the rest of my career.
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