Seeking Truth

When I was a sophomore at LSU I was apart of the production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. This was an experience that I thoroughly enjoyed as I was able to play a goofy villain character who also happened to be a child (Barfee). This show was so much fun to do every night and always got a big response from the audience. Despite all the fun times I had working on that show, of which there were many, I would not say that my involvement in the production changed anything about the way I viewed the world. While there were certainly things that I learned from my experience doing the show, there was in no way anything intellectually profound that sticks out in my memory as being a takeaway. 

On the other hand when I was in high school I saw a production of The Laramie Project that did stick with me for a long time. I was pretty new to theatre at this point and had not ever heard of the play before. Although it sounds naive now, I didn’t know that there was theatre like that. The idea of documentary theatre was not something that I had ever thought about. After seeing this production I felt this powerful sense that I needed to do something. Not that I actually went out and did anything, but there was this weird energy that I got that made me feel like “Yea! There’s some messed up things in this world and we need to fix them!” 

Personally I feel like documentary or “verbatim” theatre offers a newly clarified truth as a byproduct of the production - that should be the goal at least. When a piece of theatre uses interviews and personal statements as the dialogue there is this illusion that is created by the actors on stage that they are recreating this actual event that happened in real life. Although there are times the actors make purposeful choices to distinguish themselves as separate from the actual people they are portraying. In these cases I would argue that there is a stronger element of “truth” present. By acknowledging that they are not in fact these people but actors reading their words, the audience is able to accept that and focus on the actual events of the story that are being told. The audience is able to bypass the process of accepting the convention that the actors “are” these people and in doing so they become less of “characters” and more real in a way.