The Laramie Project and The Vagina Monologues are the best weaved pieces of verbatim theater I have encountered. Having seen both plays and acted in Laramie, it is clear that they are thoughtfully manufactured by people that are not only good writers, but expert interviewers and talented actors as well. Both are carefully dramaturged to enhance the missions they put forth, but that cobbling makes the overall message of each stronger.
In Laramie, the interviewers and authors were able to capture the entire story, and conveyed a meaningful passage of time while using interviews taken after-the-fact. They were fairly quick on the draw, arriving in Laramie shortly after Thanksgiving in 1998, not two months after the incident occurred. One important note is that the interviewers/actors were conscious of their presence and the presence of the media, who ballooned the story to international levels. It is good that they incorporated their own voices to the story, because just by asking questions about it, they influenced the outcome. However, like any discussion about the repercussions of a major news event turned artistic enterprise, they managed to gloss over a lot of the details—it was a surface read of the event. For instance, most don’t know that Shepard’s murder, although completely related to the homophobic tendencies of some of those who reside in Middle America, was really mostly a drug deal that went horribly wrong—McKinney, Henderson, and Shepherd were on meth at the time of the murder.
Although many characters in the play are true to life, as you would expect in verbatim theater, many of them are not—including some of the men and women we were fortunate enough to meet in 2007. Having performed this play in Wyoming as only the fifth production in state history, we were very guarded about what we said about the play, the story, and the ideals it confronts. Some of the characters in the script are completely misrepresented, such as Doc O’Connor. From the play, you get the sense that he is a genial old man who is sort of a godfather or seer in Laramie, which is simply not the case. He is a raging alcoholic who people generally regard with disdain for trying to be such a surface media darling but really looking for national attention. Over the course of our three hours at Doc’s house, he had 6 half-and-half Bacardi-cokes (after a day of drinking at the bar) and proceeded to tell us how he himself was bisexual and a whole host of stories that we questioned the verity of. It’s easy to see how the Tectonic theater company was mesmerized by Doc, but were fooled by his sweet talking. The true story is a much grittier and sadder tale about how a town has been defined by a single event, and disregarded as anything else.
What Laramie teaches me about writing plays is a tough question because they didn’t actually write anything except their own voices. They composed a series of interviews, public statements, and court documents to make a living, breathing play, but it was all event centric. The story already existed, the characters already had their voices, and the interviewers transcribed it. Not that it isn’t a well-made piece of theater—it is, as I mentioned above—but the Tectonic Theater company already had their work cut out for them, instead of making something from scratch. If UPS had a billion dollar endowment, sure we could create a monologue piece by going to the Sudan or Haiti or the southern community where the Jena Six were a few years ago, or go ask men in New York what they think of their penises, but we don’t and we can’t do that—we have to make things up as we go along. Perhaps a better choice would have been reading a fictional series of equally touching monologues like Road Movie by Godfrey Hamilton and Mark Pinkosh, two men who are friends of UPS and are familiar with writing fact based fictional theater works.
I feel similarly about The Vagina Monologues, but less so than Laramie, since Laramie concerned a bleak and tragic sociopoliticallyreligious event as opposed to the more personal celebration of the female body and mind. Still, though, it is verbatim theater composed from actual interviews that was cobbled together for an emotional and entertaining purpose.
Maybe I’m being too pessimistic because of my own difficulties in writing characters and making them watchable and believable. But I do think that these extremely well known and well reviewed plays teach me little about how to write; rather, I think it teaches me how to dramaturg and edit better—both useful skills. Both The Laramie Project and The Vagina Monologues are, again, expertly crafted pieces, I would argue though that they are just that—crafted, instead of wholly created and written independently.
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What about Sonnets? Did that one not speak to all of your concerns here?
ReplyDeleteThat said, these two are both fictional too. Were they researched via the conducting of interviews? Sure. But then they were entirely made up. They aren't anything like verbatim. As you point out, Tectonic cut MUCH, rearranged much, recharacterized, rewrote. Ditto Ensler -- in fact, she says as much. These are no more verbatim than Sonnets. The interviews are just research -- often a good first step of the writing process for all sorts of plays.
So part of your question is what does the ambiguous fiction here buy you vs. what does it cost you? Do you feel lied to? Tricked? Or does it thus feel more real and true? Do you need the frame for monologue plays, or do you prefer to do without it, or do you want a different kind of frame? Do you prefer plays/characters avowedly made up vs. ones based on history/actual people? And why? Are your answers here true for all plays or just monologues? What other means, aside from interviewing and then writing about actual people, are at your disposal for writing plays and characters that feel real? These aren't documentaries, and documentaries aren't plays.