utopian moments of ethical and collective witnessing, moments that are not usually available in the marketplace. Yet in buying a ticket for these kinds of productions, the audience may be self-selecting consumers with an interest in the area, who are particularly amenable to listening to vulnerability. Are these then taboo issues for the audience, or is it—more likely—that the docu-verbatim play is pushing at an already open door? We will also see, in relation to plays that deal with suffering, that audiences respond empathetically, and so a follow-up question is whether the way that audiences respond to painful memories of suffering is temporary catharsis or whether the utopian moment can continue outside the theatre, after the show? These docu-verbatim productions thus offer important opportunities for us to consider how to stage and respond to vulnerability.
This chapter considers three productions. In part one, I focus on the Irish play No Escape (2010) by Mary Raftery, first produced by the Abbey Theatre, which dramatizes the story of institutional child abuse in Ireland. This is a traditional documentary play based on a public archive that stages the testimony in a combination of direct address and tribunal-style interviews. In part two, I consider two plays by New York–based Tectonic Theater Company, The Laramie Project (2000) and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later (2010). These two shows, created by the ensemble, respond to the homophobic hate-crime murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Both plays are based on interview material created by the company, with small elements of other documentary material, such as court records. Like No Escape, these two plays are staged as a blend of direct address and onstage interview scenarios, though Tectonic takes a different approach in constructing its own testimony archive. In linking these three plays, I aim to show the international appeal and applicability of docu-verbatim theatre, as well as divergences in subsidized versus commercial theatre. Though they emerge from different national contexts, what unifies these three plays is the consistent use of docu-verbatim theatre as a style to respond self-consciously and ethically to violence against vulnerable individuals in order to deliberately build social and memory capital for the victims.
PART ONE
Capital in the Marketplace: No Escape
No Escape (2010) is the first-ever documentary play commissioned by the Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre. Compiled by Mary Raftery, the play is traditionally documentary in its approach, based on the archival material and published text of the 2009 Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse under Judge Ryan (henceforth the Ryan Report), which investigated the abuse of children in residential institutions administered by the Catholic Church in Ireland over a seventy-year period. Raftery’s play combines the tribunal approach in staging some of the interviews between the commission’s legal team and the religious congregations, presided over by Judge Ryan, with the direct address more common to verbatim theatre, as individual abuse-survivor testimony is delivered face on to the audience. The play’s dependence on the official report suggests what Caroline Wake has described as a version of “history as it has been recorded in the archive.”14 What the docu-verbatim play brings to the archive, though, is the further potential for representation and explanation.
No Escape is a highly interventionist version of the archive and, as such, reflects a particular political agenda, and equally political representation and explanation of this history. Raftery’s work on this archive refutes any idea of these documents as a static or fixed narrative of the past; indeed Raftery’s editing technique profoundly illustrates the ability to make the archive seem a contested and lively space from which multiple and conflicting histories can emerge. Though the weight of written material in the archive, including records and log books and so on, belongs to the religious congregations, the play’s script moves this quantitative material to the background, bringing the voices of the survivors and their oral histories to the foreground, consistently prioritizing their voices, embodied experience, and formerly suppressed memories.
The set for the first production (Abbey Theatre 2010), directed by Róisín McBrinn, bisected the stage with two glass screens onto which Judge Ryan (played by Lorcan Cranitch) wrote place names, dates, and figures. This schoolroom aesthetic affirms the didactic approach of the play, with Ryan playing the role of teacher as much as judge. Behind the screens, stacked boxes of files represented the original interviews and research conducted by the commission, and the historical records of the religious congregations and the state, so that the audience saw onstage part of the material history of the abuse. This didacticism and the “weight of history” connoted by the stacked file boxes both support the truth claims of the docu-verbatim play and reinforce its message and investment in the voice and memory capital of the victims.
The commissioning of No Escape illustrates a significant shift in the marketplace status of the play’s constituent witnesses—religious congregations and abuse survivors—and further indicates the relative and constantly shifting value of social capital in the marketplace; as public confidence in the Catholic Church decreases, so the investment in survivors’ stories increases. This is not a story that is limited to Ireland, as internationally we have seen a widespread shift of cultural capital and status—both of which equal credibility—from religious figures to survivors with the direct effect that allegations of abuse are now believable in ways that they weren’t two decades ago.15 This effect is, of course, in part due to the accumulation of proven cases of clerical abuse, which render new allegations increasingly believable, and in part due to the connected shift in attitudes to abuse that mean these memories are no longer unspeakable. In the case of No Escape, the legitimacy of the play is guaranteed by the generic authority of the official state report while the Ryan Report’s social and juridical capital also creates an audience amenable to hearing these stories in the forum provided by the National Theatre.
In Ireland, the momentum behind the revolution in market status of the survivor-witness had a long development from the 1980s and 1990s, when perceptions of narratives of institutional child abuse began to change due to the growing body of memories and stories of abuse available in the public sphere. In 1999, the government issued an apology to institutionalized children for the state’s “collective failure to intervene, to detect their pain, to come to their rescue,”16 signifying an official authorization that led to memories of institutional abuse becoming increasingly normalized and accepted.17 As a result of this shift, the pattern of social memories related to these institutions, and the groups of people incarcerated within them, has changed significantly. We might argue then that this docu-verbatim play is simply confirming a linked change in both memory culture and social capital that has already happened. Yet docu-verbatim theatre and the witnessing it produces is still a necessary step in the process of changing social attitudes and the power dynamics in the memory marketplace, and this is where the enactment of representation and explanation is most productive.
Docu-verbatim Responds to the “Big Lie”
After the publication of the Ryan Report, the Abbey directors met to discuss how best the National Theatre could respond to its significance; their decision was to commission a documentary play. The Abbey had previously hosted the Tricycle’s touring production of Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Saville Inquiry (2005), but had never before commissioned documentary work. Aideen Howard, then literary director of the Abbey, suggested that the documentary form would do justice to this history in a more direct way than a fictionalization could.18 Though the media coverage was widespread and thorough, the Ryan Report itself was twenty-six hundred pages long, so this theatre piece was a chance for audiences to access in more depth some of the detail and individual testimony of the report.
The Abbey was astute in asking Mary Raftery to create the play, as Raftery, an investigative journalist whose work over the previous two decades had pioneered and championed the case of survivors of abuse, had an exhaustive knowledge of the institutional system and an authoritative public identity and cultural capital as a campaigner. Raftery’s 1999 television documentary series, States of Fear, was a major factor in the government’s official recognition of the abuse and then Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern’s
