No White Picket Fence. Robin C. Whittaker

FOREWORD: FASHIONING TRUTH TO THINK OTHERWISE

      by Kathleen Gallagher

ATTICUS (male, Native and Nigerian, middle class, straight, believes in God, first language English, other language Ojibway)¹: Um, verbatim is unlike other ones, it’s more natural, more organic, more personal. And it’s more different than other plays that are out there, and it’s just more organic.

      SCOTT (male, white, research assistant): Organic. What do you mean by that?

      ATTICUS: Like it’s, I don’t know, it hasn’t been tweaked, it hasn’t been, like, touched, like it’s untouched, it’s natural. It’s more from the heart than it is from, like, the mind.

      Atticus is a young person in my current ethnographic research project, which uses verbatim theatre as a creative and research methodology. In this exchange, he is being invited to reflect on his experience of making a verbatim play with his drama classmates. His answer points both to the presumed techniques of the form (“it hasn’t been tweaked”) and the kind of communication it initiates (“It’s more from the heart than it is from, like, the mind”). For this young theatre-maker, it is a value to keep things in their original form, untouched. He further characterizes verbatim theatre as a communication from the heart, as a feeling project rather than an analytical one.

      Playwright Andrew Kushnir defines verbatim theatre modestly:

Documentary or verbatim theatre involves dramatizing text that has been crafted from interview transcripts or the carefully tran scribed footage of real-life encounters and events. It produces a fictional non-fiction experience in the theatre wherein the actual words of often-underrepresented voices (or historically misrepresented voices) take the stage.²

      A “fictional non-fiction experience” is a novel way to think about live theatre. Verbatim is indeed a fictional experience of a real or non-fiction world. Yet my research tells me, interestingly, that at its point of reception, audience members often feel that this “fiction” is more real than reality. Mya Ibrahim (female, Somali, heterosexual, middle class, Muslim, first language English, other languages Somali and Arabic), a classmate of Atticus’s, says assuredly: “It’s more real, but it’s not real.”

      How can something be more real but not real? What work is verbatim theatre doing when its created world evokes a communication more real than real life? David Hare, one of verbatim’s fiercest proponents in its early days, believed it was communicating real life to us better than those appointed to do so, journalists and news reporters. He believed that journalism produced life with the mystery taken out whereas art created life with the mystery restored. He argued further that there was a hunger for the fullness and complexity of “reality” that journalists themselves were failing to deliver on. That very idea, though, also made verbatim theatre suspect in its early days; had it sacrificed aesthetic expression and found itself caged by reality? Hare disagreed:

Particular objection is made to the use of other people’s dialogue. No sooner had a genre called verbatim drama been identified than sceptics appeared arguing that it was somehow unacceptable to copy dialogue down, rather than to make it up. People who did this, it was said, are called journalists, not artists. But anyone who gives verbatim theatre a moment’s thought – or rather, a dog’s chance – will conclude that the matter is not as simple as it first looks.³

      Today, one might find verbatim theatre tethered to various forms of research across a range of disciplines, where researchers aspire for their work to reach a wider audience or to communicate in voices beyond scholarly ones. No White Picket Fence speaks to such a collaboration between its creators.

      Whether verbatim theatre is built from scholarly research, a playwright’s own observations and interactions, popular culture, or the news cycle, complex ethical, social, and artistic questions converge at the nucleus of its practice. Consequently, verbatim plays always invite critical discussion about its social and aesthetic value, as well as its dangers. As with research, the relationships at the core of verbatim theatre practice are what matter most: Have the subjects been served by the play? Does the play amplify their voices and questions? Does the aesthetic representation provide an ethical and compelling frame for their worlds? Andrew Kushnir understands his verbatim work as an act of transference rather than translation. When audiences have suggested that his plays have “given voice” to their subjects, he balks:

In fact, I think verbatim theatre, which employs interview transcripts to fashion dialogue and dialectics, does something wholly different than giving voice; it transfers voice – from an originator, through an interpreter, to an audience.⁴

If you are an actor taking up the voices in No White Picket Fence, will you have your pre-conceptions overturned as you play the precise words spoken, the pauses, hesitations, and false starts? Will the particular rhythms of the “real-life” character leak through into your interpretation, their internal rhythms present in your communication? Will your care for their words be evident in your performance? As the audience to No White Picket Fence, how will you hear it? Will you be awakened by its voices? Will you turn towards the issues and people it conveys? Will something be activated in you? Verbatim theatre gives us, as audience, the chance to reconsider our own impulses and challenge our assumptions. Verbatim theatre asks us to dare to think otherwise.

¹ In my own research practice, I ask the young people with whom I work to choose pseudonyms and to describe themselves as they would like me to describe them if I write about them.

² Andrew Kushnir, “A New Hearing: Representation and Relationship in the Making of Towards Youth: A Play on Radical Hope,” in A Global Youth Citizenry: Theorizing Community-Engaged Research Methodology, eds. K. Gallagher, D.J. Rodricks, and K. Jacobson (New York: Springer, forthcoming).

³ David Hare, “David Hare: mere fact, mere fiction,” The Guardian, April 17, 2010.

⁴ Andrew Kushnir, “If You Mingle: Thoughts on How Theatre Humanizes the Audience,” in In Defence of Theatre: Aesthetic Practices and Social Interventions, eds. Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 83–98.