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Ryan M. Claycomb is a Ph.D. candidate in English Language and Literature at the University of Maryland, where he teaches courses in dramatic literature and literature by women. He is currently at work on a dissertation on life writing in contemporary feminist drama and performance.
(Ch)oral History: Documentary Theatre, the Communal
Subject and Progressive Politics
Ryan M. Claycomb
Some of the hottest tickets to a theatrical event in the 1990s provided entrance not to the bombastic Disnified musicals that have come to define Broadway, nor to the intense, intimate, family psychodramas of playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or Sam Shepard. In fact, some critics may be hard-pressed to call the creators of these pieces "playwrights" at all, since the texts are taken almost entirely from "real life" in the forms of interviews and court transcripts. That docudrama and oral history performance have migrated from film and television to occupy a prominent space on the American stage speaks to a changing perception of and heightened urgency to rethink conventional notions of community, subjectivity, and even what constitutes human drama. And that much of the body of 1990s American docudrama is assembled by playwrights with progressive social agendas—including feminism,^ queer theory, critical race theory, and Marxism— indicates the degree to which progressive ideologies and sympathies are at work in revising these notions. These oral history plays take the discourse of history- and life-writing, and shift their discursive conceptions of the subject from the single protagonist to the greater community. This radical approach to subject formation not only dismpts the empowered status of the subject's authority, but also encourages the integration of the audience into the tenuous sense of community created by the theatrical event itself.
This still-forming category of documentary theatre can be dated as far back as Georg Biichner, whose play Danton 's Death (1835) "rightly should be the beginning point of inquiry into this field of drama,"^ according Gary Fisher Dawson. More recently, documentary theatre's roots derive from the 1920s theatre work of Bertolt Brecht and, more directly, Erwin Piscator, whose epic theatre tactics used "film, music, epic successions of tableaux and the immediacy of news coverage [to invigorate] the stage with new techniques while simultaneously calling for social action."^ In the United States, these ideas were adopted by the American Living Newspaper, an initiative of the New-Deal-era Federal Theatre Project that staged fictionalized versions of contemporary social debates, often with a Marxist- materialist thrust. The formal and political influence of Piscator and the Federal
96 J o u r n a l of Dramatic Theory and Criticism J Theatre Project on contemporary staged oral histories caimot be underestimated. I Even though many contemporary playwrights using docudrama (particularly Anna Deavere Smith) often hide their ideological sympathies in claims of political neutrality, the leftist politics of radical 1930s documentary theatre inform the stances of these new playwrights as much as they influence their form. More recent German post-war documentary theatre frequently drew fi-om court transcripts to expose what playwrights saw as miscarriages ofjustice. Peter Weiss's The Investigation (1965), Heinar Kipphardt's In the Matter of J. Robert' Oppenheimer (1964), and Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy (1964) critically examine Nazi war-trials, Oppenheimer's contested loyalty to the United States, and the| complicity of Pope Pius XII with European fascism, respectively. Each draws on diaries, court documents, letters, and interviews to reconstruct a distilled version of events that challenges the accepted truths of their initial context."^ The genre that has grown out of these works and has taken root on the contemporary American stage is, like the documentary theatre of the sixties and seventies, drawn from "real life" sources, most often interviews, but also occasionally court documents and other documentary material. But unlike these plays, contemporary oral history plays tend to focus less on "what happened" than on the discourse that surrounds crisis events. And as Melissa Salz points out in her dissertation on what she calls "theatre of testimony," "documentary theatre since 1980 often represents multiple points of view rather than a single point of view."^ Salz divides theatre of testimony into two camps: the social/political and the personal/autobiographical. Following John Brockway Schmor's concept of confessional performance,^ theatre of testimony features the self-reflexive presentation of admittedly subjective accounts of the recent past, tying the genre to postmodem notions of identity and history. Yet both "theatre of testimony" and "confessional performance" are broader categories than I intend to explore, and the term docudrama, which describes "based-on-a true-story" tales commonly found on television, is slightly inaccurate in describing the mode I want to examine. Perhaps more accurate is the movement that Dawson identifies as a new form of documentary theatre, exemplified by the work of Emily Mann. This category, he suggests, features plays that draw upon "private oral histories and testimonies that, in the process, give platform to larger societal concerns in the public arena."^ Therefore, I will use the term "staged oral history," which closely corresponds with both Dawson's description of the new phase of documentary theatre and Salz's social/political theatre of testimony as she describes it in two statements: theatre of testimony is "aestheticized documentary drama that dramatizes oral history in the form of fractured and fi-agmented memory"^ and, more specifically, "social/ political contemporary documentary drama combines interviews, trial transcripts and muhi-media materials to create a kaleidoscope of images, perspectives, and memories."^
98 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism traditional narrative of life-writing by shifting its focus from a linear subject-oriented trajectory to a multi-voiced community-oriented one.
Oral History as Progressive Theatre The relationship of staged oral history to progressive ideologies is a difficult one to parse out, since the form is not inherently politically-charged, nor does every play of the genre take any one specific ideology as its primary subject. And yet contemporary oral history plays are, as I have described, both amenable to progressive ideologies and influenced by feminist and other oppositional discourses. The narrative form of these plays virtually presupposes an ideological opposition to the dominant discourse, employs non-traditional, narrative trajectories, emphasizes the notion of community over the individual, and redefines the notion of the subject to denote that emphasis. The result is a form that is, if not by definition progressive, at least distinctly compatible with the narrative demands made by the theories of many oppositional discourses. In short, by examining staged oral history l as a category inflected by progressive ideologies, we begin to see the political uses of narrative structure as rhetoric; this is a form whose very nature can be used to reinforce the political claims it contains. Aima Deavere Smith's work is perhaps the most famous of this geme, and she is the most firequently invoked when discussions of the form emerge. Her work in the 1980s developed into a series of site-based performance pieces entitled "On the Road: A Search for American Character." In this series. Smith would travel from commission to commission, creating pieces based on her interviews with members of the various communities that employed her. She would then invite her subjects to the performance to see themselves being p e r f o r m e d. S h e only gained national acclaim in the early 1990s, however, when she brought this format to two contemporary moments of cultural and physical violence: the Crown Heights riots of 1991 and the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The resulting pieces. Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), are hallmarks of contemporary, staged oral history, dramatizing as they do a remedy to the polarization of these communities by presenting Smith's interviews in dialogue with one another. Indeed, while Smith works very hard to present an ethos of neutrality in any debate, many feminists have been eager to claim her work, as an interview with Carol Martin, the critical work of Tania Modleski, and the critical work of Charles and James Lyons all demonstrate.'^ Perhaps more easily aligned with feminist ideology—although certainly not directly so—is the work of Emily Mann, which she calls "Theatre of Testimony," the term that Salz adopts. Mann's body of work extends back to 1980 with Still Life, a play that she describes in her production notes as being "about violence in America. The Vietnam War is the backdrop to the violence at home."'^ This and other plays, including Annulla (1985), Execution of Justice (1982)—conceming
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the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone—and Having our Say (1995), takes documentary theatre as its formal inspiration with subjects ranging from a single interviewee (Annulla) to the courts and people of San Francisco {Execution of Justice). Here I will concentrate on Mann's most recent work, Greensboro, which remembers the massacre that occurred at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in the title city in 1979. It draws on interviews and court proceedings to create a dialogue some seventeen years after the event. The work of Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project is most closely aligned with queer theatre, and like Smith's and Mann's, Kaufman's work utilizes a stmcture^^ that is influenced by a progressive aesthetic. Kaufman's most famous work (by which I mean the collaborative work of the Tectonic Theater Project) includes the two recent plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), and The Laramie Project (2000), both of which use a format similar to Mann's in Execution ofJustice^^ and Greensboro, compiling interviews and court transcripts, among other documents, to create dialogue onstage. The Laramie Project, an exemplar of the staged oral history, covers the brutal 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard and the subsequent media blitz that surrounded both the murder and the trial of the assailants. Laramie is of particular interest here because of the way that the community of performers integrates with the community represented in the piece, a phenomenon that I will explore more fiilly below. In terms of their ideological positioning, the staged oral histories of these playwrights—and indeed of the genre at large—almost necessarily claim a stance in opposition to the dominant discourse of their cultural context, and that stance is jfrequently a politically leftist o n e. ' L a n s e r notes that "unlike authorial and personal voices [which in life-writing correspond to biography and autobiography, respectively] the communal mode seems to be primarily a phenomenon of marginal or suppressed communities; I have not observed it in fiction by white, ruling class men, perhaps such an ' I ' is already in some sense speaking with the authority of a hegemonic 'we.'"'^ Indeed, when we apply Lanser's observations on narrative fiction to the stage, the same holds true: historically, from Piscator on down, documentary theatre has often fiinctioned as a mouthpiece for leftist thought, at least in part because of the traditionally leftist leanings of avant-garde theatrical practitioners. And while Gary Fisher Dawson notes that documentary theatre can be both de-politicized to a certain degree and used for conservative or totalitarian purposes, in many instances, he identifies "the anti-hegemonic purpose that documentary theatre serves."'^ Therefore, because the ideologies presented in staged oral history are often not "official," the "truths" that these plays advance are often similarly altemative ones. Staged oral histories often seek to reveal a hidden truth, to give voice to silenced voices, or to expose what has been kept hidden. This
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The second possible meaning of community is a subset of the first, and more naturally corresponds to the Gemeinschaft where these plays fmd the greatest potential: self-identified communities within the larger site-specific communities of these plays. In Smith's Crown Heights, we might locate the Lubavitcher and African-American communities as distinct parties within the larger debate. In Maim's play, the communities break down along political lines, and in Laramie, a, local detective. Sergeant Hing, breaks the town into three groups: "What you have is, you have your old-time traditional-type ranchers, they've been here forever— Laramie's been the hub of where they come for their supplies and stuff like that And then you got, uh, the university population And then you have the people who live in Laramie, basically."^^ While The Laramie Project does not define communities as gay/straight, there is some sense that university conununity contains a radical element. And yet Kauffrnan's choice to pose the communities along lines other than ideological ones suggests how much these communities blend and intermingle. To varying degrees, these plays ofi;en try to represent dialogue between these different communities, if not by representing an actual dialogue, then by placing their monologues in close proximity to one another Indeed, this might be the art by which we call these artists playwrights: if their words are not always theirs, the context they give to the words represents their greatest achievement, both aesthetically and politically. Take, for example, the section entitled "Territory" in Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which contains a monologue from community activist Michael Zinzun, who talks of his experiences with and work against police bmtality—a monologue in which he refers to policemen as "pigs."^^ It is immediately preceded by a monologue from former LAPD Police Commisioner Stanley Sheinbaum who, while he maintains, "This city has abused the cops," also wonders, "Why do I have to be on a side? / There's a problem here."^^ The same section also contains a monologue from Comell West (who wrote the Foreword to Fires in the Mirror), in which the Afiican-American scholar places blame on both the police and the oppressed, black male for buying into a machismo cowboy mentality. In short, while various characters place blame on one another, many also often acknowledge the complicity of their own community, and when placed up against one another, they create a dialogue unlike what is typically heard in the streets. This juxtaposition is another marker of the sympathies between feminist politics and the art of playwrights like Mann, since the tactic works against the monologic nature of the interview—in which a single speaker engages in a one-sided discourse with a captive interviewer—and places the monologue of the speaker in dialogue with a range of other conflicting voices. By placing these smaller communities in discursive conflict with one another on the space of the stage, these playwrights not only disrupt the monologic control inherent in the form of the interviews from
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which their text is taken, they also replace that singular, hegemonic voice with a dialogue of voices that presupposes a more democratic conception of power. Since j each interviewee speaks to the playwright as if in a monologue, the playwright radically alters the notion of subjectivity as it is conceived in the initial interviews, not in terms of the words being spoken, but in terms of their context. When Edward Dawson, the complicit KXK informer to the Greensboro police, speaks in his real- life interview with Emily Mann (represented onstage only as "interviewer"), his
subjectivity is hermetic, one-sided, an " I " in contrast to every other "I" in the play, including the police, the Klan, and the Communist Workers' Party (CWP).^^ In the I play itself^ though, his voice is interspersed among all the other voices; it is made a part of the whole dialogue instead of remaining a discrete identity that conceives of the rest of humanity as "outside," as "other." In this sense, these plays are 'I radical realizations of Bakhtinian heteroglossia; the dialogic is a necessary part of communal subjectivity because in order to imagine these personae as part of a whole, none of them may be invested with an authority, as dialogue, above another. 'I However, this disruption of the monologic voice is not without its consequences, since the wresting of authority from the interview subject—be that subject empowered or disempowered in the public sphere—inevitably means the pla3^wright is vested with much of that authority, which plays out in the politically charged processes of editing and ordering in the frnal script, an issue I take up later on. Nonetheless, the close proximity of these voices also suggests how these rigid j cormnunities are more porous than we might imagine. The title character of Twilight, Twilight Bey, says in her monologue, "I can't forever dwell in the idea / of just identifying with people like me and understanding me and mine."^^ And in Fires j in the Mirror, cultural critic Angela Davis notes that, "For many years in African j American history / 'race' was a synonym with community."^^ But she goes on to j note that: '
We have to find new ways of coming together, not the old notion of coalition in which we anchor ourselves very solidly in our ^ specific racialized communities, and simply voice ^ our solidarity with other people. I'm not suggesting that we do not anchor ourselves in our communities; I feel very anchored in my various conununities. But I think that, to use a metaphor, the rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow us to move
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project. One character makes sure to tell a company member, "I love you honey,"^"^ while another seems interested in auditioning for the play. And more than once, company members in the text of the play speak of their emotional responses to the voices around them, which in tum encourages the audience to invest themselves in the dialogue being represented onstage. The final notion of community is the one created anew each time the curtain rises: the ad hoc community established in the theatre itself, one that can encompass difference and similarity in much the same way as the broadest notion of community discussed above. Indeed, Smith's early performances in her On the Road series were site-specific performances, generated for the audiences for whom they were to be performed, so the community represented in the play was ofi:en the community who witnessed the play. In most oral history performance, however, the goal of the playwright is to create in her audience the kind of community that she imagines onstage, so as to create extra-textual dialogue. Anna Deavere Smith notes in her introduction to Fires, for example, that post-play discussions were a crucial element of the performance process, for "When the audience talks, they are talking as much to each other as they are to me."^^ And in her introduction to Twilight, she similarly notes, "I played Twilight in Los Angeles as a call to the community. I perfomied it at a time when the community had not yet resolved the problems. I wanted to be a part of their examination of the problems. I believe that solutions to these problems will callfor the participation of large and eclectic groups ofpeople.""^^ The degree to which Smith wants to involve her audience in these dialogues speaks to her imagining of the audience as its own community. This last category of community, which conforms closely to what Victor Turner calls communitas, seems to be the goal of these oral histories: to create in the audience a sense of community that encourages dialogue, that allows for the peaceful confrontation of individual identities and that incorporates them all into the Utopian space of the theatre. Turner (often quoting his own earlier writings) defines it as "'a direct, immediate and total confrontation of human identities,' a deep rather than intense style of personal interaction. 'It has something "magical" about it. Subjectively there is a feeling of endless power.'"^^ It is important to note that Tumer's definition both incorporates the confrontation of identities—Jew/Black, Communist/Conservative, homosexual/heterosexual, male/female—^that these plays embody, and also accounts for the empowerment of the disempowered that Cornell West identifies in Anna Deavere Smith's performances. West writes, "Fires in the Mirror is a grand example of how art can constitute a public space that is perceived by people as empowering rather than disempowering,"^^ noting the historical disempowerment that African Americans in particular have experienced in the public sphere. In short, this notion of communitas sees the clash of communities and empowers each of them in the space of the theatrical event.
Spring 2003 105 Tliis affective notion of community can be experienced in what Jill Dolan calls the "Utopian performative," for which she locates the potential in all theatre, but which she identifies as exemplary in the feminist/queer performance art of Holly Hughes, Peggy Shaw, and Deb Margolin.^^ This notion is not precisely a model for what should happen on stage, but for how what happens on stage should feel, its experiential element for the audience, one that resists hierarchy, encourages community, and in its very definition, imagines human interaction as it should exist, but not as it does in the world at large or has in the recent past. These plays seem to be creating theatrical Utopias by representing real world dystopias, a commitment to social change that ties these plays to progressive ideology whether, like Anna Deavere Smith, they purport to be impartial chroniclers, or like Mann, are clearly positioning their audience to band against repressive groups like the KKK and the American Nazi Party, in a move that both creates community in the audience and points to a renewed urgency for action. Moreover, the emphasis of these plays on multiple viewpoints and multiple communities enveloped into a broader notion of conununity creates a safe space for dialogue within the audience. These plays specifically encourage the audience to configure themselves not only as a community of spectators, but also as members of the various ideological and identity-based communities represented on the stage. Such boundary-crossing is made possible for the audience in these plays because it begins with the performers onstage, for as Smith imagines it, "The spirit of acting is the travel from the self to the other ""^^ Janelle Reinelt links the performers' boundary crossings explicitly to those of the audience:
The relationship between interviewer and speaker is mobile—it changes— and since the audience is positioned in the direct address sequences to "be" Smith, they are positioned to experience the activity of bridging, working with difference. This effect is the most radical element of Smith's—it engages the spectator in radical political activity to the extent that the spectator grapples with this epistemological process."^^
With this fourth notion of community, then, we can begin to see how each of these configurations of conununity—^the community represented, the ideological sub- communities, the community of performers, and the audience community—^begin to bleed into one another. Since ideological communities make up the Gesellschaft of the play, the audience can place themselves within these smaller ideological communities; the audience and the performers can imagine themselves as a separate community within the theatrical space; and the performers (especially Kaufman's) can begin to imagine themselves as part of the larger community being represented onstage, even as they are doing the representation. Angela Davis's metaphor of the rope and the anchor becomes radically realized in these plays; an audience
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compound the problems and render us more paralyzed. Smith's deepening of this dialogue by de-patriarchalizing our conversation is a major contribution in this regard."^^
Despite indulging in a bit of wishful overstatement/^ the depatriarchalized conversation that West identifies serves as a way to imagine the affinities between the feminist impulses that I identify in these plays and the other oppositional discourses clearly at work, and also seems to me to be a way to imagine this affinity without essentializing based either on the gender of the playwright or on the experience of the playwright among women. And if the conversation is depatriarchalized, its coherence, its univocality, and its status as authoritative are similarly disrupted. While I will suggest some qualifiers to the Utopian image created by Smith's performances, the result is a staged conversation that, to some degree, is similarly depatriarchalized and anti-hegemonic in comparison to the often violent discourse that surrounded the historical events on which these plays focus. Although we imagine the subjects of these plays as the locales in which they take place—Greensboro, Los Angeles, Crown Heights, Laramie—^these are certainly not unified subjects; they are fi-agmented and multivalenced. This fragmentation plays out most clearly in the way that the different communities within a specific site are able to maintain identity, what Ntozake Shange in Fires in the Mirror calls:
a way of knowing that no matter where I put myself that I am not necessarily what's around me. I am part of my surroundings and I become separate from them and it 's being able to make those differentiations clearly that lets us have an identity/^
And yet there is a tension between Shange's notion of identity as the differentiation between self and other and Angela Davis's metaphor of the anchor and the rope that allows for some crossover from community to community. In the four plays examined here, this tension works to mitigate the dilemma that Susan Lanser identifies in the communal voice, when she notes that:
In the wamings of Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Deen (themselves a "we"), 'where no community exists, ' w e ' may seem to presume too much.' If 'we' dissolves the Other/Self dichotomy, its danger lies in its power to reduce each Other to an explicit—or perhaps more troublingly—implicit norm. The Utopian value of the ' w e ' is counterbalanced, then, by the
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equally strong dystopian danger of speaking for women, or a particular group of women, in general."^^
By both highlighting the ideological and identity communities within larger local communities and using the theatrical space itself to encourage the audience to identify with multiple voices in the continuum, each of these plays maintains an Other/Self dichotomy while building bridges that allow for the "confrontation of identities" that Victor Tumer identifies as communitas. The communal subjectivity of these oral histories, then, is marked by a subject that can be configured as a larger community. This community is represented not by one single voice but by a communal voice. Lanser identifies this type of narration as that which "allows each narrator a separateness and indeed a separate authority, yet each also helps create the portrait of an identifiable group.""*^ She continues by discussing a novel narrated in the sequential communal voice, noting that each speaker "has her own narrative style and preferences, and through the metanarrative act of creating characters not simply as voices, but as storytellers, the novel legitimates every woman's diegetic and mimetic authority."^^ Similarly, these plays invest many of their characters with a diegetic authority that is always counterbalanced by the other voices in the conversation. And it is this distribution of "diegetic and mimetic authority" that Smith responds to when asked, "Did you find any one voice that could speak for the entire city?" To this question, she answers that "in order to have real unity, all voices would first have to be heard or at least represented."^' This rhetoric is perhaps undermined by the very real power that Smith has over the conversation that she mediates, since the excerpts she chooses to dramatize invest some characters with more nobility than others; to claim that each voice is presented as equally right or ethical or moral would be naïve. Similarly, Mann represents voices of the KKK and the American Nazi Party, despite her obvious bias against them, alongside those of the CWP with whom she more clearly sympathizes. Nonetheless, this side-by-side representation of multiple voices at once stages the idea of democracy at work while subtly taking part in that democracy by shaping the conversation. Indeed, one might be convinced that instead of a collective "we," these plays merely offer a series of " F s " that at best add up to a few smaller "we's." And yet the push to transform the Gesellschaft into the Gemeinschaft, to bring dialogue and democracy to the normally hierarchical space of the city similarly suggests a push to imagine the individual "we's" of smaller communities as a collective, but fragmented community, a communal subject marked both by commonality and difference. In the theatre, this tension can be illustrated by the different approaches to casting these plays, or more specifically, whether they are cast performances or solo performances. For while a complete cast does indeed enable a greater sense of "communitas" on the stage itself, it perhaps dampens the impact of the communal
110 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism presented in these plays stages a communal conversation that makes dialogue more possible for the audiences in attendance.
Oral History as History Given that the label I assign to this genre is "staged oral history," it becomes important to imagine how history plays out in the politics of these performances. While revisionist history is a common element among oppositional texts, these plays do not primarily attempt to re-envision what happened in the past. They are not unearthing information that was not previously made available, nor are they doing revisionist literary history the way retellings are, nor are they even deconstructing an event the way that many performance artists do. Instead, these plays are enacting a formal revision, choosing instead to recapitulate how the past is handled, considered, and presented. More specifically, in choosing to create a dialogue of actual voices from the pages of the past, staged oral histories do not attempt to change the substance of what we know about, say, the Los Angeles riots. But they do change how we look at them. By reframing the past not as a series of individually held views, but rather as the kind of dialogue that can prevent friture misunderstanding, these plays are revising the discourse around the past. They are creating dialogue around violent events where none existed, and the dialogue is being presented as a remedy for the moment of violence itself And of course, this is how they are doing their political work: instead of revising the events that happened, they are (re)constructing a dialogue that never existed in the hopes of inciting new dialogue. ^ This is an explicitly stated goal of The Laramie Project. University of Wyoming Theatre Professor Rebecca Hilliker says of her initial reaction to the proposal to create the play:
When you first called me, I wanted to say, You've just kicked me in the stomach. Why are you doing this to me? But then I thought. That's stupid, you're not doing this to me. And, more important, I thought about it and decided that we've had so much negative closure on this whole thing. And the students really need to talk. When this happened they started talking about it, and then the media descended and all dialogue stopped.^''
Don Shewey, in his article m American Theatre, links this phenomenon specifically "to Greek Tragedy, in which the outcome is known from the beginning and the play provides an opportunity for the community to talk about the things that are on its mind."^^ And Kaufman himself echoes this goal in his article in the same issue, noting, "Many questions have been answered and many more will be posed. And that is a good thing."^^ Nor does this dialogue extend merely to the members of the
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Laramie community who went to Denver to see the premiere, for the play not only grapples with how the town itself handled the event, but poses larger questions about hate crimes, about how much homosexuality is or is not accepted in the range of American moralities, about the role of the media in creating a martyr, and even broader questions like the ones posed by New York Daily News writer Albor Ruiz: "What makes a community, what can tear it apart and what needs to be done to hold it together?"^^ The (re)construction of dialogue is perhaps a less explicit but even more crucial goal of Mann's Greensboro, since the event in question was not being talked about at all, nor had it ever really been. Early on in the play, the interviewer, whom we take to be the playwright herself, asks one of the original protesters why the American public had not heard more about the massacre, and he notes that the hostages in Iran were taken the next day. And so the massacre "got pretty much pushed off the front page."^^ In a sense, this concern with recovery places the rhetorical situation of Greensboro as much in line with feminist biography plays, which are working to resurrect a lost history, as with oral histories; but the goal seems to be different, for as Athol Fugard notes in his introduction to Mann's plays, "There was an even deeper process at work. The word that immediately came to mind was 'healing.'"^^ This is what we hear from the characters in the other plays of this genre: that these plays are not trying to revise what happened, but rather to come to some kind of healing through giving testimony, through memorializing the event, through replacing the violence with words. Indeed, in an interview with Melissa Salz, Mann pointedly notes, "I think what I rather do is provoke discussion... Now there are multiple points of view given in the Greensboro piece, multiple, but I'm not validating them. I want people to hear them."^° One of the Greensboro widows notes specifically that "we were fighting armed men with ideas, with words,'"^^ and this commitment to words as political action resonates throughout the play.
Caveats: the Hegemony of " W e " The notion of Mann's play as rhetoric and political action marks a significant difference between her work and that of Smith, since Mann is willing to choose sides. Speaking with Salz, Mann admits that despite her refusal to specifically validate one position or another in Greensboro, she is steering the audience toward a conclusion. She explains, "Well 1 guess I'm hoping that the decision is so o b v i o u s , b u t I s u p p o s e I c o m e d o w n on the s i d e of the g o o d guys There are bad guys and good guys in this. The bad guys aren't all bad, and the good guys aren't all good, but still you can make value judgments and 1 have made value judgments. So yes, 1 suppose I am leading people."*^^ This willingness to lead the audience immediately calls attention to the tension in these plays between form and substance. That is, if the playwright chooses to privilege
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Here indeed, is the insidious underside of the single author's power to masquerade as a self-reinforcing community.
In the case of Smith, then, "the voices who tell it" are both multiple, dialogic, and open on the one hand, and authoritative, singular, and univocal on the other hand, for the voice is always hers, even if the words are not. And while the actors of The Laramie Project are themselves polyvocal, they share values that the subjects whom they interview do not necessarily share—in this case, a smaller "we" co-opts the voices of a larger and very different community. And while Emily Mann makes the "I" behind the "we" somewhat explicit in the onstage form of the interviewer, the assumptions and rhetorical bent of that interviewer are that much more prominent. Curiously enough, one play that falls into this trap most egregiously is perhaps the most famous avowedly feminist staged oral history. Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. Ensler is clearly embarked on what she believes is a progressive project: she is working to destabilize objectifying notions of women's bodies in order to give voice to what she imagines as "a community, a culture of vaginas."^^ Yet in her attempt to raise a strong voice against sexual violence and to leverage the power of the choral voice, she imagines a community that elides the differences in those voices. The end result, through her own editing of the text, and through the presentation of her own body as a cipher for her audience, is a community that can only be read through Ensler's positionality as a white, middle-class woman. In short, by subsuming the "we" of all women into her own very distinctive voice, she writes out the diversity that supplies the form of staged oral history with its most radical potential. Yet the greatest conundrum of this form is that these two caveats—the hegemonic dangers native to both life-writing and the communal voice—seem to either compound one another or guard against one another. That is, one might make an argument that the truth-value of these many voices—^that these words were all spoken by real people—guards against the hegemony of the playwright; Emily Mann is bound by what her subjects actually say. And the contextual dangers of life-writing seem to be ameliorated by the sheer plurality of the project; Laramie quotes at least four clergy, two law enforcement officers, several GLBT residents of Laramie, etc. Many voices from the larger communities corroborate these individual voices, which reinforces the idea that no one voice was taken drastically out of context, and the accumulation of voices seems to refute and guard against any impulse of the playwright to severely manipulate one or a few voices. This apologist position, however, seems to ignore the control that the playwright has, not only in collecting the interviews, or in speaking them, but most powerfully in choosing what gets spoken. We might therefore see these illusions of objectivity and plurality as upholding one another While the playwright's ability to construct
114 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism the context of these voices is powerful, the impulse to protest, "But these voices are real, and there are so many of them!" is almost irresistible. And yet these plays clearly have a set of values that go virtually unquestioned—not the least of which is the privileging of dialogue over either silence or unquestioning submission to authority—all of which by extension inherently question existing power structures. There is a temptation for progressive activists to take this as a sign that we can trust the geiure; if the assumptions of the formal structm-es are anti-hegemonic, then the subjectivity behind them should be similarly so. But there is no guarantee in this correlation; to assume so grants even greater power to the playwright. As Lanser reminds us, "form is only possibility, the necessary but never sufficient means for transforming both fiction and consciousness."^^ Therefore, analysis of staged oral history must be constantly aware of the values that underpin the dialogue being crafted before us. So how is the playwright to proceed? Where does one cross the line from challenging hegemony with an open form and constituting hegemony by hiding behind the guise of an open form? Emily Mann's solution in Greensboro seems to be to overtly contextualize the subjectivity of the interviewer onstage.^' She essentially becomes Behar's vulnerable observer when we see her outrage on behalf of CWP organizer Nelson Johnson, and we witness her discomfort with Eddie Dawson's racism. But she also exposes her own rhetoric by showing us her handling of Dawson in interviews. For example, when Dawson inquires about the purpose of the interviews, the interviewer vaguely replies: " I ' m writing about the Greensboro e v e n t... maybe a play... ""^^ When he replies "Yeah? I like plays," her only response is "Good"^^ which does not even remotely point to the fact that he certainly will not like this one. And yet, while she does lay bare her own subjectivity, there are certainly elements that are left unquestioned: a privileging! of education and articulate speech, for example. Dawson is revealed to be not only racist, but stupid, misspelling "Titan," T-I-T-I-A-N.^^ Mann foregrounds this stupidity in the titles to her scenes, an element to the play that remains uncontextualized, left intact in its documentary codes. The first interview with Dawson is labeled "An Escape Goat,"^^ after his own malapropism.^^ This is contrasted with the previous interview, entitled "Extremist Informant," with the very intelligent and articulate Nelson, who uses this phrase to characterize Dawson's relationship with both the Klan and the EBI.*^^ When confronted with this same moniker, Dawson interprets it as applying to his feariessness: "We had a reputation. They needed anything done—cross-burning, intimidation—^they called James Buck and Eddie Dawson... If anything had to be done, they'd call the extremist. You didn't scare me. I put up a good front.""^^ By relentlessly exposing and highlighting Dawson's low level of education, Mann positions the audience to look down upon him, and to identify more clearly with Nelson and the CWP. Whether or not contextualizing her own position mitigates the textual hegemony of her rhetoric in
