Documentary Theatre Research Paper

Theater can be many things. It can be seen as entertainment (this is how it is first perceived). It can be seen as a piece of real life on stage. It can be seen as a political message. Theater can take on many faces and all those faces constitute what theater is. There is a genre of theater for everyone; there are naturalistic plays, avant-garde plays, plays that are solely movement based, etc. There are thousands upon thousands of plays in the world just waiting to be put on stage. There are also new works constantly being created and produced for the next wave of theater-goers to go attend. But, how are theater and politics related? Some shows have a message to them, not always political. What makes a piece of theater political? What is the

It can be hard to define these two forms of theater because some plays take the process of these forms and use it as a jumping point. For example, it can be argued that Hamilton started as documentary theater because it was based off a book that Lin-Manuel Miranda read and used as a jumping point. However, no one would call Hamilton documentary theater. That is because documentary theater is “performance typically built by an individual or collective of artists from historical and/or archival materials such as trial transcripts, written or recorded interviews, newspaper reporting, personal or iconic visual images or video footage, government documents, biographies and autobiographies, even academic papers and scientific research” (citation). In other words, documentary theater takes an event and puts it on stage verbatim. Documentary theater is also known as theater of fact and this is important to note because the people collecting the information should not be changing anything. What is on stage is what was collected through newspapers articles or interviews or government

The first wave of documentary theater in the United States came from The Federal Theater in the 1930’s. The Federal Theater produced work called the living newspapers. The living newspapers were performances that took actual newspaper reports about the experiences of first and second generation immigrants in the United States. This form itself was taken from Western Europe and Russia so documentary theater was a thing before the 1930’s (citation). The second wave of documentary theater came in the 1960’s when many social movements were taking place in the United States like the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s movement, and the LGBTQ movement. “Companies such as the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Teatro Campesino, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe questioned dominant media and state narratives around economic and social oppression, democracy, equality, and the rule of law” (citation). Lastly, the last wave of documentary theater, which still affects theater today, come from artist like Anna Deavere Smith and Holly Hughes, whom “tell more singularly personal stories of identity formation, the struggle against oppressive religious ideologies, discriminatory social hierarchies, and inequitable political systems”