Reality Bites

Real people. Real words. Real life.

It might sound like a talk show promo, but it could just as easily be the ad for a new play--yes, play--coming soon to a theater near you.

A craze for nonfiction drama is sweeping the American stage, turning the raw materials of interviews, trial transcripts, political speeches and other documentary texts into dramatic theater. What was once reserved for libraries, oral history archives and the like is now often winning raves from audiences and critics alike. Forget Shakespeare--get out your tape recorder.

From Broadway to Boise, in theaters ranging from large to teeny-tiny, actors and others are spouting the words of the man--and woman--on the street. And it’s selling tickets.

The examples are numerous and wide-ranging in subject. Emily Mann’s “Having Our Say”--a play based on a memoir by two sisters who lived to be more than 100--ran on Broadway last year and will open the Mark Taper Forum season in September. Currently it is running in Chicago, with an additional touring version set to hit the road in September and no fewer than 20 regional stagings also set for this year.

On a smaller scale but also with wide-ranging appeal, Culture Clash’s “Radio Mambo,” a montage of the disparate voices of Miami, opened there early last year and has been touring the United States ever since. After runs at the Tamarind Theatre in Los Angeles and New York’s INTAR, as well as a quick stop at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa last weekend, the L.A.-based trio will take “Radio Mambo” to the York Theatre in San Francisco in September, the San Diego Repertory Theatre in October and the Dallas Theatre Center in January.

Meanwhile, perhaps the most famous perpetrator of the genre is Anna Deavere Smith, last seen here at the Taper in her “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” about the L.A. riots and the aftermath of the first trial of officers involved in the Rodney G. King beating. Smith is now working the presidential campaign trail, gathering material for a play to be presented at the Taper and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago after its scheduled premiere at the Arena Stage in Washington in 1997.

These few examples represent only a hint of what has become one of the hottest trends in theater.

“The use of verbatim texts is extremely widespread right now, and it’s growing,” says Susan Mason, acting chair of the theater arts and dance department at Cal State L.A. “It makes theater that’s interesting to a lot more groups of people than the traditional theatergoing audience.”

“I don’t think it’s just a trend for the moment, either. It’s redefining theater.”

The rage for documentary theater isn’t limited to the professional houses.

“It’s the happening thing in academic theater right now,” Mason says. “Students go out into the community and interview people and come up with a compilation of voices.”

Similarly, artists are getting grants to use the information-gathering techniques for work in the community, using them as learning tools or even community-healing therapy. Often these projects take the notion of documentary one step further than the traditional theatrical form--with the subjects whose words form the text playing themselves onstage.

In Los Angeles, for instance, performer Brian Brophy of the Actors’ Gang has been working with inner-city teens, helping them shape their experiences into theater. And theater artist Sally Gordon has done likewise with Latina street vendors.

The “AIDS/US” series launched in the late 1980s by Artists Confronting AIDS--the organization co-founded by Michael Kearns and the late James Carroll Pickett--consists of series of topically related first-person monologues performed not by actors but by the authors.

Why the fascination with the words of “real” people? Always looking for fresh material, documentary theater is one way of making drama more relevant to the lives of people who have been raised on barrages of news from every other thinkable medium.

“We’re in one of those times when the theater is very much in need of a raison d’e^tre,” says Oskar Eustis, artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence, R.I., who commissioned Mann’s 1983 play “Execution of Justice” for the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco.

“What this art form is longing for is a claim to authenticity.”

The goal, presumably, is to bring immediacy back to an arena that is often perceived as being out of touch. Documentary plays and solo performances also enable the theater to make underrepresented populations appear more visible.

“It has to do with the sense of many voices, which is both postmodern and multicultural,” Mason says. “Rather than [a play] being filtered through one consciousness, it’s left as a multiple perspective.”

Plus, it is basically a user-friendly form.

“The documentary form gives you a base upon which to build or retell a dramatic story,” says Taper Artistic Director Gordon Davidson, the man with the longest track record of producing this kind of work in the American professional theater. “It can be a wonderful foundation for some solid drama.

“The tension in documentary plays is how much is poetic license of the author or director and how much is agitprop,” he says. “It’s documentary, and it’s also [seen] through a filter. You can level that as criticism, but it’s also part of the power of the form.”

But perhaps most of all, documentary drama is now--as it has been at previous times in American history--part of the culture’s attempt to explain itself to itself.

“We’re really confused about what makes us one country, about identity politics,” Eustis says. Documentary theater “reaffirms the idea that you’re a member of a polis. It’s the oldest function the theater has.”

Then too, it’s a kind of theater that is, or at least seems to be, up close and personal.

“It’s a part of the whole trend of yearning for intimacy that includes the talk shows on TV and radio,” says John Istel, a senior editor at Stage Bill in New York, who is completing his dissertation on the use of verbatim texts in theater. “People want to be addressed.”

If documentary theater has a paterfamilias, it’s German stage director and producer Erwin Piscator. Working in Berlin in the 1920s--with playwright Bertolt Brecht as one of his main collaborators--Piscator sought new ways to engage his audience politically.

He was responsible for innovations in both form and content that still seem novel today. In a striking presentational style, Piscator incorporated nondramatic texts into his scripts and pioneered the use of newsreel footage and visual montage as scenic elements.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger has said that American history tends to run in 30-year cycles, and clearly the theory holds when it comes to documentary theater, which has seen recurrences of popularity in the United States in the 1930s, ‘60s and ‘90s.

About the time Piscator was working, a U.S. documentary theater was also being born. And like Piscator’s, it was politically engaged.

Prompted by the Great Depression, the Federal Theatre Project was launched by Congress in 1935, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. With Hallie Flanagan as its director and branches throughout the country, it came to provide jobs for 10,000 people.

Elmer Rice, head of the New York operation, started the Federal Theatre’s most famous venture, the Living Newspaper, which became known for documentary plays using excerpts from political speeches of the day and other topical documents.

Several notable dramas at the time--including Robert Sherwood’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1939--also incorporated “found” texts, such as excerpts from political tracts and speeches.

Toward the end of the 1930s, with the Depression era ending, such plays began to disappear. The memory of the Depression’s hardships was fading, and people turned from political activism to lighter fare. The final blow, at least in symbolic terms, came in 1939, when Congress bowed to conservative pressure and curtailed the Federal Theatre. American documentary theater--and indeed American political theater in general--then went into a period of comparative dormancy that lasted until the brink of the 1960s.

“By the end of the ‘50s, theater artists were [again] starting to maintain their authenticity, trying to say, ‘This is historically true, not a fictional innovation,’ ” says Istel, who cites Norman Corwin’s “The Rivalry,” a 1959 drama focusing on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, as a turning point.

When “The Rivalry” went to Broadway, its assistant company manager was none other than the Taper’s Davidson. “He’s been a crucial part of the American documentary theater movement,” Istel says.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, documentary plays proliferated. This was true not only in the United States but also in Europe, where such works as Peter Weiss’ “The Investigation” (1966)--based on transcripts from the 1964-65 trials of people accused of taking part in the World War II killings at Auschwitz--attracted a great deal of attention.

Here, in 1968, the brand-new Taper, with Davidson at the helm, presented “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” about the case against the man who helped build the atomic bomb. The play, which used some verbatim text, moved the next year to New York’s Lincoln Center.

Davidson believed that the social climate of the time was right for such works: “In the late ‘60s, the world outside was very turbulent, and there was a hunger to know something more about the facts of a situation. TV reporting only took you so far.”

Says Istel: “Media became suspect, where it had been considered sacrosanct. Theater artists started using documents to question the main line of information and assert their own.”

One of the more interesting aborted efforts of the time (albeit a variation on the usual form) was San Francisco Mime Troupe founder R.G. Davis’ scheme to restage the 1969-70 trial of the so-called Chicago Eight and take it on tour, original Yippies and all. Unfortunately, some key participants--including Judge Julius Hoffman--turned down the gig.

All was not lost, though, since the trial records did provide raw material for several plays and TV scripts. Arguably the most notable of these is Ron Sossi and Frank Condon’s “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” based on the transcripts. The play, first staged in 1979 and later produced by HBO, was performed in a Condon-directed revival at Sossi’s Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in West Los Angeles as recently as 1994.

Trials have proved to be fertile ground: Another play was Vietnam war resister Daniel Berrigan and Saul Leavitt’s “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” which had its premiere at the Taper in 1971. When Davidson first decided to stage the work, Berrigan had not yet gone underground. “No sooner did we say that [we were going to do it] than he disappeared,” Davidson recalls.

One of his motives in presenting the play and others like it was to use the theater as a forum for the discussion of issues that weren’t being aired elsewhere.

“When I did ‘Oppenheimer’ and even ‘Catonsville,’ the chances of getting those kind of pieces on television were very remote,” he says. “A docudrama was not considered interesting to the TV audience. Now, that’s almost all you see.”

Davidson has continued to present nonfiction-based works during the years since “Catonsville,” if only now and then. One production that prefigured both the methods and the subject matter most popular in the current trend was JoAnne Akalaitis’ “Green Card,” seen at the Taper in 1986.

Based on extensive interviews the playwright-director conducted with men and women of a wide range of nationalities and cultural backgrounds, the play explored the immigrant experience in America through a multimedia collage of music, film footage and text.

Today’s surge of documentary theater can be broken down into three distinct but related subgroups, exemplified by the styles of Emily Mann, Culture Clash and Anna Deavere Smith.

Mann writes multi-character plays that are performed by actors other than herself. Culture Clash’s “Radio Mambo”--the trio’s first and only attempt at the genre to date--is also a multi-character work, but it is performed in sketch form by the group, who are the authors and interviewers.

Smith also both creates and performs her own works, but her two documentary shows that have received widespread attention--”Twilight” and “Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities”--so far have been multi-character solos, not traditional plays. Smith’s work on the campaign, however, is to be turned into a play rather than a solo work, her publicist says.

Mann, now artistic director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J., is clearly the pioneer in the field. She first hit upon the concept of what she sometimes calls “theater of testimony” about the same time it was coming to the fore nationwide, in the late 1960s.

Then a student at Harvard College, Mann stumbled upon the idea of using an interview transcript as the raw material for a play during a visit home. Her father, who was head of the American Jewish Committee’s oral history project, had a number of interview transcripts that he allowed her to read.

“There was this incredible transcript of a young women interviewing her mother who I think had been in Treblinka,” Mann says. “I remember rushing to my father and telling him I wanted to make a play [out of it]. He said, ‘You can’t. You have to do your own.’ ”

So she did. Her first documentary play, “Annulla Allen: Autobiography of a Survivor,” premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis in 1977.

Not long after, one of Mann’s friends told her about his experiences during and after his tour of duty in Vietnam. “For three hours he talked nonstop in this incredible monotone,” Mann recalls. “I thought, ‘This man doesn’t need to have a play about him, he needs to get help.’ ”

Then the man, identified as Mark, suggested that Mann meet his wife. “She came up the stairs six months pregnant and sat down in my rocking chair and stayed until 3 in the morning,” Mann says. “She spilled her entire life out to me.”

Next Mann interviewed Mark’s mistress, who became the third corner of the triangle of “Still Life.” The play, a visceral and sometimes violent journey into the emotional fallout of the Vietnam homecoming, was staged first at the Goodman Studio Theater in Chicago in 1980 and later, in 1982, under Taper auspices at the Aquarius Theatre in Hollywood.

Mann’s “Execution of Justice”--based on the trial of Dan White for the murders of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone--premiered at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1983 and went to Broadway in 1986.

It took “Having Our Say,” however, to bring Mann Broadway success. The play was adapted from the book “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years,” by Bessie and Sadie Delany with Amy Hill Hearth--and premiered at the McCarter in 1994 before traveling to Broadway in 1995.

Mann’s most recent drama, “Greensboro: A Requiem,” opened at the McCarter in February and is, in its political nature and difficult subject matter, a return to form for the playwright.

By contrast, Culture Clash’s dive into documentary is definitely not a return to form for the group, which is best known for its original comedy sketches.

To create “Radio Mambo,” Culture Clash members Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza spent three months in 1994 interviewing Miami residents of many races, ages, class backgrounds and occupations. The first version of the play, which was commissioned by the Miami Light Project, premiered in Miami in January 1995.

Upon returning to L.A., however, the group engaged actor-performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith to direct a new version of the piece. Smith was an apt choice in that one of his own solo works--”A Huey P. Newton Story,” staged at the Actors’ Gang in 1995--was documentary, with a text wrought entirely from the late Black Panther’s own words.

“Radio Mambo” is doing particularly good business for Culture Clash. The group has also been approached by several theaters that are interested in having the trio do similar projects in their cities.

The success was unexpected.

“It’s surprising us,” Montoya says. “It’s opening up new things, different things, and getting us into some of these major houses.”

Similarly, Anna Deavere Smith--who first developed her technique of interviewing people and then embodying their words and personas onstage as an acting exercise--shot to sudden national popularity with “Fires in the Mirror,” produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater in 1992.

Her next show, “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” was commissioned by the Taper’s Davidson almost immediately after the opening of “Fires in the Mirror.” “Twilight” premiered at the Taper in 1993 and was directed by Mann.

Smith’s multi-persona performances may bear some formal resemblance to the work of other solo artists such as Eric Bogosian, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin and Michael Kearns, but those artists’ characters are fictional while Smith’s goal is to replicate the speech and gestures of the people--both famous and unknown--she has interviewed.

Smith develops her shows with a team of researchers and dramaturges, although the process is unlike that of most plays. (She is on the road and was not available to be interviewed for this story.)

“It’s much more objective,” says Eustis, who was one of half a dozen dramaturges who worked on “Twilight” at the Taper. He points to the fact that issues, not just plot, are the takeoff point: “It’s much less about [having] to sign on to their artistic vision. We were talking about the Los Angeles uprising, really talking politics. We weren’t even civil, let alone friendly.”

The very relevance that makes documentary theater compelling can also make the highest level of commercial success elusive. For example, Smith’s “Twilight” won raves, but when it moved from the nonprofit Public Theater to Broadway it lasted only six weeks.

“On Broadway, a play has to be much more digestible and general,” Istel says.

“Both ‘Twilight’ and ‘Execution’ were conceived of specifically as local events,” Eustis says, “and the importance of them was as local events.” Nevertheless, both productions have had success touring and in regional productions.

Most documentary plays seldom are revived, although Mann’s works have been the exception. “So far, they’ve stayed topical,” she says. “As long as people are killing each other, as long as there’s the question of race in America.”

The gravest charge leveled at work of this kind, however, is that because of its journalistic nature, critics claim that its creation is less original and artistic than other types of theater. Smith’s “Twilight,” for example, was disqualified as a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize in drama on the grounds that it was derived from interview transcripts.

Yet despite the critics, the form appears to have a life of its own.

“Since history is just a narrative anyway, a story based on facts, whoever tells it is telling the history,” Istel says. “So you can take it and rewrite it as an artist, but you’re still writing history. It’s not any less or more artful than a good historian’s biography.”