Documentary theatre

Last updated

Documentary theatre is theatre that uses pre-existing documentary material (such as newspapers, government reports, interviews, journals, and correspondences) as source material for stories about real events and people, frequently without altering the text in performance. The genre typically includes or is referred to as verbatim theatre, investigative theatre, theatre of fact, theatre of witness, autobiographical theatre, and ethnodrama. [1]

Contents

History

Zhivaya Gazeta and Piscator

While fact-based drama has been traced back to ancient Greece and Phrynichus' production of The Capture of Miletus in 492 BC, [2] contemporary documentary theatre is rooted in theatrical practices developed in Eastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. In the years after the Russian Revolution, the USSR's Department of Agitation and Propaganda employed theatre troupes known as the Blue Blouses [3] (so called because they wore factory workers' overalls) to stage current events for the largely illiterate population. [4] The Blue Blouses dramatized news items and current events through song, dance, and staging. By 1924 these performances were standardized into the form of the zhivaya gazeta, or living newspaper. [5]

Meanwhile, in Germany, Erwin Piscator was experimenting with incorporating documentary film footage and other primary source material into his "mass spectacles" [6] In 1925 he wrote In Spite of Everything , a piece derived entirely from contemporary political documents and often cited as the beginning of the first period of modern documentary drama. [7] In this and other early works, Piscator sought to depict the "absolute truth". [8] He focused on the presentation of factual material in montage and collage form rather than trying to express the internal lives of the characters. [9]

Depression-era America

AAA Plowed Under, Federal Theater Project WPA Federal Theater Project in New York-Living Newspaper-"AAA Plowed Under" - NARA - 195707.tif
AAA Plowed Under, Federal Theater Project

Documentary theatre spread west during the 1930s. In England, the form was employed by left-leaning political theatre groups like the Unity Theatre, which presented both documentary and historical dramas in order to expose the truths of the common man, frequently combining fiction and reality to achieve truth. Unity Theatre's documentary shows focused on the "living newspaper" aesthetic of Eastern Europe. Their first piece, Busmen (1938), combined naturalistic dialogue with abstract and stylized design aesthetics culled from expressionist and constructivist genres. [10]

In the United States, the form was adapted by Hallie Flanagan Davis and Morris Watson into the large-scale Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. [11] Initially conceived as an "animated newsreel," the form evolved into a distinct theatrical genre; practitioners used spectacle and vaudeville techniques in addition to agitprop and Piscatorian conventions to tackle issues such as labor, housing, and agriculture during the Great Depression. [12] Often, they included characters such as Little Man and Loudspeaker to stand in and speak for and to the audience during the action, fusing fact with dramatic symbol and clarifying the narrative arc. These plays, like later iterations of documentary theatre, were frequently communally created, often by groups of newspaper writers and theatre artists. [13] The end of the Federal Theatre Project in 1939 brought documentary theatre in the United States to a halt until the early 1960s. [9]

Post-war era and the 1970s

While the documentary theatre of the 1930s stressed the involvement of the audience, much of the work of the 1960s into the 1970s was influenced by Bertolt Brecht's distancing of the audience, through aesthetic practices, in order to question dominant ideologies. [14] The work of this era focused more intensely on new or alternative perspectives of historical events by restructuring the documents to raise questions about perceived reality. In Germany, these documentary plays focused mainly on the aftermath of Nazism and the genocide of the Holocaust. [6] Many works drew from transcripts from tribunals, such as Heinar Kipphardt's In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Peter Weiss's The Investigation. [9]

In his essay "Notes on the Contemporary Theatre", Weiss details 14 elements of documentary theatre, stating that "the strength of the documentary theatre resides in its ability to arrange fragments of reality into a usable model," and that the artistic power of the genre comes from a partisan interpretation and presentation of factual material. He also identified many potential sources for documentary theatre, including

minutes of proceeding, files, letters, statistical tables, stock-exchange communiques, presentations of balance-sheets of banks and industrial undertakings, official commentaries, speeches, interviews, statements by well-known personalities, press, radio, photo, or film reporting of events and all the other media bearing witness to the present. [15]

This type of documentary drama was exported to Israel and the Middle East by Nola Chilton, whose theatre of testimony focused on marginalized groups in the area and later influenced the work of American practitioners. [16] During this period of time, however, the American genre became more overtly political with plays such as Martin Duberman's In White America, a piece based in Living Newspaper techniques of narration and song, presented by the Free Southern Theatre, a company that sought to make theatre for black audiences in the south. [17] Plays also became more experimental, leading to documentary-style performances, as artists such as Joseph Chaikin and The Open theatre used historical documents as source material for improvisations ( Viet Rock ) [18] or Luis Valdez combined verbatim text from newspapers, transcripts, and correspondence with a fictionalized story and characters in Zoot Suit . [19]

In England, meanwhile, the use of tape-recorded testimony to generate script became a hallmark of the Stoke Local Documentary Method, developed by Peter Cheeseman. [20] In his many plays, including Fight for Shelton Bar (1977), Hands Up, For You the War Is Ended! (1971), Cheeseman focused on the exact transcription of recorded interviews, and is one of the earliest pioneers of the sub-genre "verbatim theatre." The theories of Cheeseman and other British practitioners of verbatim theatre informed the development much of American documentary theatre of the late 20th-century. [7]

Late 20th-century and early 21st-century

The Laramie Project Laramie Project (15611763903).jpg
The Laramie Project

The focus on individuals within the context of historical events that permeated the documentary theatre of the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for artist- and individual-centric documentary theatre in the 1980s and 1990s. During this period of time, the focus shifted even further away from broad historical presentations to focus more specifically on how identity shaped personal relationships with major events. The seminal works of this period, which highlight the work of the artist as interpreter of the factual material, include one-person shows such as Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror (1992), collectively created shows like Tectonic Theatre Project's The Laramie Project (2000), [21] and playwright-driven work like Anne Nelson's The Guys (2001) and Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen's The Exonerated (2002). [22] In Eastern Europe, new German documentary theatre also focused on the importance of the artist as interpreter through the development of media-driven non-narrative creations of auteur directors like Hans-Werner Kroesinger. [6]

Contemporary practice

Contemporary documentary theatre is defined by its privileging of subjectivity over universality and questioning of the definition of truth in an age where digital and physical realities collide. [23] Many contemporary practitioners reject the term "documentary theatre" in favor of more equivocal labels like "investigative theatre" that allow for more leeway in the artistic interpretation of reality and moves away from the original concept of the artist as moral arbiter of the truth. [24] Just as Piscator utilized the new media of film and projection to enhance his productions, so contemporary documentary theatre continues to rely on new media to explore the increasingly fuzzy line between reality and representation of reality. Similarly, documentary theatre continues to rely on a democratic process of interview gathering and multiple artistic perspectives to create new narratives. [21] This has led to a proliferation of plays, both verbatim and fictionalized, that focus on the stories of refugees and migrants that use interviews and workshops as the starting point for narrative plays. [25] A very recent iteration of documentary theatre has been undertaken by Anuja Ghosalkar and Kai Tuchmann`s Festival "Connecting Realities", which has attempted "to [...] contribute to an examination of Indian and Asian performance practices, both traditional and contemporary, that relate to performing reality." [26]

Verbatim theatre

Verbatim theatre is a form of documented theatre in which plays are constructed from the precise words spoken by people interviewed about a particular event or topic.

Definition

The playwright interviews people who are connected to the topic that is the play's focus and then uses their testimony to construct the play. In this way, the playwright seeks to present a multi-voiced approach to events. Such plays may be focused on politics, disasters, sporting and other social events.[ citation needed ]

A verbatim (word-for-word) style of theatre uses documented words from interviewees or records, such as court transcripts, to construct the play. Campion Decent, Australian playwright and author of the verbatim theatre play Embers, said it is “not written in a traditional sense… but is... conceived, collected and collated”. [27] It is a creative type of drama to help tell the story of what happened in events. Verbatim theatre exists as conceived in the United Kingdom. But in the United States, verbatim theatre is not always distinguished from the broader genre of documentary theatre. Therefore, the plays, movies and TV listed below – as verbatim theatre, written by playwrights living and writing in the United States, should be considered as documentary theatre.

History

British-American playwright and critic Eric Bentley's 1974 play Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been: The Investigations of Show-Business by the Un-American Activities Committee was built on testimonies delivered before the US House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. [28]

American actress/playwright Anna Deavere Smith has been described as a pioneer of verbatim theatre due to two of her one-woman plays in the early 1990s: Fires in the Mirror (1992), about the 1991 Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn, New York, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994), about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. For both plays, she conducted interviews with numerous people connected to the events, then fashioned the plays by selecting from her interview transcripts.

New York-based theater company The Civilians, known for its "investigative theater" method, also contributes to the genre with its creative approach that blends in-depth research with theatrical performance. [29] [30] Their work includes landmark productions like Gone Missing [31] , Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play [32] , and The Great Immensity. [33]

High-profile pieces of verbatim theatre include The Laramie Project (2000) by Moises Kaufman & members of the Tectonic Theater Project and its sequel, The Laramie Project-Ten Years Later , both about the murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming in 1998; Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans, My Name is Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner, Deep Cut by Philip Ralph and Katharine Viner, The Permanent Way by David Hare and Counted (2010) by LookLeftLookRight. [34] Unusually, London Road (2011) by Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork, is a verbatim musical, in which the verbatim spoken text is coupled with music composed and sung to resemble the source interviews as closely as possible. In 2017, the Russian production "In Touch" [35] (director - Ruslan Malikov) premiered its international version at London's National Theater (the Russian premiere was held in Moscow in 2015). It is the first documentary theater production in the world that features an ensemble cast of deafblind actors and seeing/hearing ones performing together - and performing verbatim about their own lives.

More recent examples of political verbatim theatre are Tess Berry-Hart's plays Someone To Blame (2012) and Sochi 2014 (2014). In Someone To Blame (about the miscarriage of justice related to teenager Sam Hallam [36] ) the words were taken solely from witness statements, court transcripts, media headlines, and interviews with those involved. [37] Sochi 2014 was created from interviews with various LGBT citizens in Russia after Vladimir Putin's anti-gay laws were passed (see LGBT rights in Russia) in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics. [38] On The Record (2011) [39] by Christine Bacon and Noah Birksted-Breen, produced by iceandfire theatre company [40] at the Arcola Theatre, directed by Michael Longhurst, [41] followed the lives of six real journalists around the globe, showing the professional and personal risks taken in the name of investigative journalism.

Black Watch (2006) integrates interviews taken with members of the Black Watch with dramatized versions of their stories and dance pieces. The piece originated in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and was created by the National Theatre of Scotland and Gregory Burke. 8 , a play by Dustin Lance Black, is an example that uses interviews and courtroom transcripts in order to reenact the legal argument and witness testimony of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case.

Major examples of documentary theatre

Early 20th-century

Mid 20th-century

Late 20th- and early 21st-century

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clifford Odets</span> American writer and actor (1906–1963)

Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. In the mid-1930s, he was widely seen as the potential successor to Nobel Prize–winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, as O'Neill began to withdraw from Broadway's commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash. From January 1935, Odets's socially relevant dramas were extremely influential, particularly for the remainder of the Great Depression. His works inspired the next several generations of playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and David Mamet. After the production of his play Clash by Night in the 1941–42 season, Odets focused his energies primarily on film projects, remaining in Hollywood until mid-1948. He returned to New York for five and a half years, during which time he produced three more Broadway plays, only one of which was a success. His prominence was eventually eclipsed by Miller, Tennessee Williams, and, in the early- to mid-1950s, William Inge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Federal Theatre Project</span> USA theatre company 1935–1939

The Federal Theatre Project was a theatre program established during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal to fund live artistic performances and entertainment programs in the United States. It was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, created not as a cultural activity but as a relief measure to employ artists, writers, directors, and theater workers. National director Hallie Flanagan shaped the FTP into a federation of regional theaters that created relevant art, encouraged experimentation in new forms and techniques, and made it possible for millions of Americans to see live theatre for the first time. Although The Federal Theatre project consumed only 0.5% of the allocated budget from the WPA and was widely considered a commercial and critical success, the project became a source of heated political contention. Congress responded to the project's racial integration and accusations of Communist infiltration and cancelled its funding effective June 30, 1939. One month before the project's end, drama critic Brooks Atkinson summarized: "Although the Federal Theatre is far from perfect, it has kept an average of ten thousand people employed on work that has helped to lift the dead weight from the lives of millions of Americans. It has been the best friend the theatre as an institution has ever had in this country."

<i>The Laramie Project</i> 2000 play by Moisés Kaufman and others

The Laramie Project is a 2000 American play by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project about the reaction to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The murder was denounced as a hate crime and brought attention to the lack of hate crime laws in various states, including Wyoming.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Epic theatre</span> Theatrical genre

Epic theatre is a theatrical movement that arose in the early to mid-20th century from the theories and practice of a number of theatre practitioners who responded to the political climate of the time through the creation of new political dramas. Epic theatre is not meant to refer to the scale or the scope of the work, but rather to the form that it takes. Epic theatre emphasizes the audience's perspective and reaction to the piece through a variety of techniques that deliberately cause them to individually engage in a different way. The purpose of epic theatre is not to encourage an audience to suspend their disbelief, but rather to force them to see their world as it is.

A political drama can describe a play, film or TV program that has a political component, whether reflecting the author's political opinion, or describing a politician or series of political events.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theater in the United States</span> Theatrical performance and history in the United States

Theater in the United States is part of the old European theatrical tradition and has been heavily influenced by the British theater. The central hub of the American theater scene is Manhattan, with its divisions of Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway. Many movie and television stars have gotten their big break working in New York productions. Outside New York, many cities have professional regional or resident theater companies that produce their own seasons, with some works being produced regionally with hopes of eventually moving to New York. U.S. theater also has an active community theater culture, which relies mainly on local volunteers who may not be actively pursuing a theatrical career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hallie Flanagan</span> American dramatist

Hallie Flanagan Davis was an American theatrical producer and director, playwright, and author, best known as director of the Federal Theatre Project, a part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Moisés Kaufman is a Venezuelan American theater director, filmmaker, playwright, founder of Tectonic Theater Project based in New York City, and co-founder of Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre. He was awarded the 2016 National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He is best known for creating The Laramie Project (2000) with other members of Tectonic Theater Project. He has directed extensively on Broadway and Internationally, and is the author of numerous plays, including Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and 33 Variations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Green (playwright)</span> American playwright (1894–1981)

Paul Eliot Green was an American playwright whose work includes historical dramas of life in North Carolina during the first decades of the twentieth century. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1927 play, In Abraham's Bosom, which was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1926-1927.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theatre of Japan</span>

Traditional Japanese theatre is among the oldest theatre traditions in the world. Traditional theatre includes Noh, a spiritual drama, and its comic accompaniment kyōgen; kabuki, a dance and music theatrical tradition; bunraku, puppetry; and yose, a spoken drama.

Tectonic Theater Project is a stage and theatre group whose plays have been performed around the world. The company is dedicated to developing works that explore theatrical language and form, fostering dialogue with audiences on the social, political, and human issues that affect society. In service to this goal, Tectonic supports readings, workshops, and full theatrical productions, as well as training for students around the United States in their play-making techniques. The company has won a GLAAD Media Award.

Theatre for development (TfD) is a type of community-based or interactive theatre practice that aims to promote civic dialogue and engagement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas P. Riccio</span> American multimedia artist and academic (born 1955)

Thomas P. Riccio is an American multimedia artist and academic. He received his BA from Cleveland State University in English Literature in 1978, his MFA from Boston University in 1982, and studied in the PhD program in Performance Studies at New York University from 1983 to 1984. Riccio has directed over one hundred plays at American regional theatres, off-off and off Broadway and has worked extensively in the area of indigenous and ritual performance conducting research and/or creating performances in: South Africa, Zambia, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Europe, Russia, Siberia, Korea, India, Nepal, China, and Alaska. In 1993 the People's Republic of Sakha declared him a “Cultural Hero”.

Devised theatre – frequently called collective creation – is a method of theatre-making in which the script or performance score originates from collaborative, often improvisatory work by a performing ensemble. The ensemble is typically made up of actors, but other categories of theatre practitioners may also be central to this process of generative collaboration, such as visual artists, composers, and choreographers; indeed, in many instances, the contributions of collaborating artists may transcend professional specialization. This process is similar to that of commedia dell'arte and street theatre. It also shares some common principles with improvisational theatre; however, in devising, improvisation is typically confined to the creation process: by the time a devised piece is presented to the public, it usually has a fixed, or partly fixed form. Historically, devised theatre is also strongly aligned with physical theatre, due at least in part to the fact that training in such physical performance forms as commedia, mime, and clown tends to produce an actor-creator with much to contribute to the creation of original work.

Tess Berry-Hart is a British playwright and novelist writing for adults, young adults and children. Novels and theatre plays deal with themes such as the European migrant crisis, LGBT rights, mental illness, genetic engineering, and the sex-positive movement. Berry-Hart has also written fiction and verbatim theatre pieces for stage to support human rights campaigns and to raise funds for the refugee crisis.

The Civilians is an investigative theatre company in New York City founded in 2002 by Artistic Director, Steve Cosson. The plays and musicals they produce aim to "blend the real and the theatrical" by utilizing interviews, research, residencies, and community collaborations to dive into specific real-world topics.

<i>Gone Missing</i> (musical) Musical by Michael Friedman

Gone Missing is a 2003 musical by The Civilians, an investigative theater company in New York City. This piece of musical theatre is composed of interviews conducted by the company on the subject of loss. The play engages with individuals who have lost everything from jewelry to technology to a black Gucci pump, investigating both how things get lost, and how the impact of that loss can extend far beyond the meaning of the object itself. Gone Missing was written and directed by Steve Cosson from interviews by the company, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman, with additional text for “Interview with Dr. Palinurus” by Peter Morris. Gone Missing made its Canadian premiere on May 12, 2011 by Southpointe Academy in British Columbia.

Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is a one-woman play written and originally performed by Anna Deavere Smith, an American actress, playwright and professor. It is about the infamous 1992 Los Angeles riots.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tina Satter</span> American dramatist

Kristina "Tina" Satter is an American filmmaker, playwright, and director based in New York City. She is the founder and artistic director of the theater company Half Straddle, which formed in 2008 and received an Obie Award grant in 2013. Satter won a Guggenheim in 2020. Satter was described by Ben Brantley of the New York Times as "a genre-and-gender-bending, visually exacting stage artist who has developed an ardent following among downtown aesthetes with a taste for acidic eye candy and erotic enigmas." Her work often deals with subjects of gender, sexual identity, adolescence, and sports.

Early Native American culture was rich with ceremonies, rituals and storytelling. The stories that inspire Native American theatre have been around for hundreds of years, but did not gain formal recognition by colonial America. This lack of recognition lasted until the 1930s when Lynn Riggs, a playwright of Cherokee descent, brought Native Theatre into the spotlight through the Six Nations Reserve Forest Theatre in Ontario. Through these events, Native Theatre has been introduced to mainstream society and contemporary Native American Theater was born. Indigenous American cultures have been a major aspect of Chicano drama.

References

  1. Martin, Carol. Theatre of the Real. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 5.
  2. Favorini, Attilio (1995). Voicings: Ten Plays from the Documentary Theatre. Ecco Press. ISBN   9780880013970.
  3. "Documentary drama and theatre." The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance. 2010, p. 173.
  4. Senelick, Laurence, and Ostrovsky, Sergei. The Soviet Theater: A Documentary History. Yale University Press, 2014. 3 April 2018 http://www.myilibrary.com?ID=614054
  5. Innes, C.D. Erwin Piscator's Political Theatre: The Development of Modern German Drama. CUP Archive, 1972, pp. 24
  6. 1 2 3 Irmer, Thomas. "A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany." TDR The Drama Review, vol. 50, no. 3, 2006, pp. 16–28. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4492692.
  7. 1 2 Dawson, Gary Fisher. Documentary Theatre in the United States: An Historical Survey and Analysis of Its Content, Form, and Stagecraft. Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 14, 16, 21.
  8. Piscator, Erwin. The Political Theatre. Berlin, 1929, p. 65.
  9. 1 2 3 Mason, Gregory (1977). "Documentary Drama from the Revue to the Tribunal". Modern Drama. 20 (3): 263–278. doi:10.3138/md.20.3.263. S2CID   192057269.
  10. Chambers, Colin. "Unity Theatre and the Embrace of the Real." Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011, pp. 38-52.
  11. "Living newspaper", The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance. 2010. ISBN   9780191727917.
  12. Nadler, Paul (1995). "Liberty Censored: Black Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project". African American Review. 29 (4): 615–622. doi:10.2307/3042154. JSTOR   3042154.
  13. O'Connor, John, and Brown, Lorraine. Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Federal Theatre Project. Eyre Methuen, 1980, pp. 10-11.
  14. "Documentary Theatre," The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, 2002.
  15. Weiss, Peter. "Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater," Rapporte 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971.
  16. Ben-Zvi, Linda (2006). "Staging the Other Israel: The Documentary Theatre of Nola Chilton". TDR. 50 (3): 42–55. doi:10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.42. S2CID   57572595.
  17. Bean, Annemarie. "The Free Southern Theater: Mythology and the Moving Between Movements." Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theatres and Their Legacies, edited by James M. Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, University of Michigan, 2006, pp. 269-285.
  18. Shank, Theodore. American Alternative Theater. Grove Press Inc., 1982, p. 38.
  19. O'Connor, Jacqueline. "Documentary Theatre and Zoot Suit." Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
  20. Paget, Derek. "The 'Broken Tradition' of Documentary Theatre and Its Continued Powers of Endurance," Get Real: Documentary Theatre Past and Present, edited by Alison Forsyth and Chris Megson, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011, pp. 224-236.
  21. 1 2 Odendahl-James, Jules. "A History of U.S. Documentary Theatre in Three Stages." American Theatre Magazine, August 22, 2017. https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/08/22/a-history-of-u-s-documentary-theatre-in-three-stages/
  22. Collins-Hughes, Laura. "The play's the thing: the dramatic and narrative appeal of documentary theater." Nieman Reports, Summer 2015, p. 8. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com.ez-proxy.brooklyn.cuny.edu:2048/apps/doc/A431081527/AONE?u=cuny_broo39667&sid=AONE&xid=89597130 . Accessed 30 Apr. 2018.
  23. Martin, Carol. "Our Reflection Talks Back." American Theatre Magazine, August 22, 2017, https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/08/22/our-reflection-talks-back/
  24. Parenteau, Amelia. "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Documentary Theatre?" American Theatre Magazine, August 22, 2017, https://www.americantheatre.org/2017/08/22/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-documentary-theatre/
  25. Jeffers, Alison. Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities. Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, p. 56.
  26. https://connectingrealities.org/
  27. Whitton, Rebecca (August 10, 2006). "Embers". Sydney Stage Online. Archived from the original on August 19, 2006. Retrieved September 27, 2018.
  28. Bentley, E. (1974). Are You Or Have You Ever Been. NY: Harper & Row
  29. "Latest News on The Civilians". Broadwayworld.com. Broadway World. Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  30. "About The Civilians". TheCivilians.org. The Civilians. Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  31. "Gone Missing Licensing". Broadwaylicensing.com. Broadway Licensing. Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  32. Higgins, Molly. "The Civilians Will Honor Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Anne Washburn at 2024 Gala". Playbill.com. Playbill. Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  33. Tran, Diep (5 June 2017). "How a 'Climate Change Musical' Became a Right-Wing Punching Bag". Americantheater.org. American Theater Magazine. Retrieved 16 August 2024.
  34. Jupp, Emily (April 13, 2010). "The rise of democratic theatre". The Independent.
  35. "National Theatre hosts in Touch".
  36. "Sam Hallam Released after Seven Years", The Guardian, 16 May 2012
  37. "Sam Hallam campaigners make drama of Hoxton murder case". 16 March 2011.
  38. "Gay Russia Finds a Voice in London Play", The Independent
  39. Bacon, Christine; Birksted-Breen, Noah (2014). Forsyth, Alison (ed.). The Methuen Drama Anthology of Testimonial Plays. Bloomsbury. pp. 215–264. ISBN   9781408176528.
  40. "iceandfire website".
  41. "Arcola Theatre production page". 15 May 2019.