Reality Bites

From left to right: Alison Lawrence, Lesley Dowey, Deborah Drakeford, Mark McGrinder, Kimwun Perehinec and Dylan Roberts in The Laramie Project. Photo John Karastamatis. Courtesy Studio 180.

The theatre has always gloried in its falsehood, aristocratically disdaining common truths (leave that to the journalists) while seeking out uncommon ones (known off-stage as lies). The vivid costumes, the highly coloured cheeks, the grand emotions: drama has always aimed to be larger, more colourful, than our actual lives. But now, trendy documentary plays challenge theatre’s paradoxical assumption that fiction can ring truer than facts.

Usually, proponents of doc theatre loathe the traditional drama’s upper-crust orientation — “let’s put ordinary people on the stage,” they say, “not just kings and queens.” They also despise socially detached theatricals, using techniques borrowed from documentary filmmakers to wade into politically and socially charged issues.

Based on interviews with 200 women, Eve Ensler’s 1996 The Vagina Monologues featured often high-profile actresses delivering real women’s ruminations on their bodies and sexualities. Anna Deveare Smith has also been a frequent practitioner of this comparatively young hybrid art form, with shows based on interviews conducted in the aftermath of race riots in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.

The 2000 sensation The Laramie Project, created by a New York theatre company, used interview snippets from inhabitants of the titular Wyoming town to attempt to understand the murder of gay university student Matthew Shepard. The play covered the gamut in the community, from god-hates-fags fundamentalists to the young man’s best friends. (Since its debut off Broadway, the play has toured extensively, with runs in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.) American dramatist Douglas Wright cobbled together his Tony-winning I Am My Own Wife (currently playing in Vancouver, having just finished runs in Toronto and Ottawa) from transcripts of interviews with a German transvestite who somehow managed to survive both the Nazi and communist regimes.

U.K. playwright Robin Soans produced last year’s Talking with Terrorists (which opened mere days after the London bombings) and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook (2004) using similar techniques. The first revisits charged real-life meetings between Soans and fanatical would-be bombers in the Middle East. In the second, the dramatist aimed to get beyond the rhetoric spouted by political leaders by listening to (and recreating) what average Arabs and Israelis have to say about the too-interesting times in present-day Israel and Palestine.

Although much of the recent wave originated abroad, Canadians actually pioneered the documentary theatre form in the early 1970s. A group of young actors associated with the hippie collective theatre company Passe Muraille — literally, “beyond walls” (can you dig it?) — went out to the countryside near Clinton, Ont., one summer to talk to local farmers about their lives. Out of their taped interviews, they created one of the biggest indigenous theatre hits in Canadian history, The Farm Show.

Paul Thompson, one of the Canadian theatrical community’s eminences grises, who sports a beard to rival Robertson Davies’s, directed that legendary production. “I was doing auditions in Toronto — then as now, the centre of the universe,” he recalls. “One day, I asked actors to give me some Canadian accents, but none of them could do any but the most basic ones: Newfie, French Canadian and Charlie Farquharson. We’d lost touch with our country, just becoming self-obsessed artists living on top of each other in the city. We needed to get out.”

In pairs, the actors knocked on every farm door in the Clinton district. In order to get the desired interviews, they often ended up helping with farm chores and paging through wedding albums over tea. They transformed their interviews into a series of set pieces, from a monologue about the pains of stacking hay bales to a song about a farming dynasty. “There was no plot as such,” Thompson says. “The form of the play was more like a Canadian Sunday school or Christmas concert, where one person does a recitation, another sings a song, a third acts out a skit.”

The product was first presented to locals in a cattle-auctioning barn, before it was taken to Canada’s cities and on a U.K. tour. “So far as I know, there was no precedent for this type of work then,” says Layne Coleman, Passe Muraille’s current artistic director. “The truths that are rooted in people, in the actual details of their lives, are never clichés. The play made people feel bigger, not smaller, as so much theatre does.” Indeed. The Clinton Special, a documentary produced by author Michael Ondaatje about The Farm Show, records locals watching a play about themselves. Their rapt faces telegraph a slew of emotions, and when interviewed years later, many of them cite watching the play as one of their life’s high points.

The Farm Show had many ripples. Passe Muraille produced many similar plays in its wake; in 1999, Michael Healey wrote The Drawer Boy, another hit which told (fictionally) how the summer affected one actor and the two farmers whose stories he tells on stage. Paul Thompson employed many of the same techniques in a well-regarded regional theatre he managed in Yorkshire, England, for some years.

In short, we sent the documentary play format out into the world and now it’s come back. To haunt us. Contemporaries loved The Farm Show — it explored virgin theatrical territory and brought new types of people to the stage. This remains the form’s prime virtue. However, documentary plays tend to ignore drama’s ABCs — the building of tension through character development and events to some resolution, not necessarily a tidy one. Too often, the playwright shrugs off responsibility for developing an overarching perspective, content merely to rest on he said x, then she said y.

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook (now on stage at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre) jumbles together the experiences of an international Jewish jetsetter who chooses to settle in Israel (Maria Ricossa), a Palestinian whiz kid studying both medicine and law (Mark McGrinder), a gay Israeli who sings in a mixed Arab-Israeli choir (Jeff Miller) and an aged Palestinian couple (David Fox — ex of The Farm Show — and Barbara Gordon) who can’t visit their relatives because of the wall. And so on.

The hordes of characters are unified by a love of falafels (cooked on stage) and by narrow escapes from terrorist attacks. Perhaps only moderates would speak with Soans or maybe he edited out the extremists, but all of his characters earnestly wish everyone would just get along. The play feels curiously bloodless despite being set in a de facto war zone; how exactly do you produce a namby-pamby piece about the Middle East?

The Laramie Project worked marginally better, mainly because the story is a narrow one, focused on the effect of one individual’s murder. But again, the story’s thrust is dispersed, with too many Laramie locals serving up their idiosyncratic views.

Hippie hooray: Jamie Robinson in The Rochdale Project. Photo John Lauener. Courtesy Theatre Passe Muraille.

The Rochdale Project (now on at Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille) is probably the best of this lot, because it departs from the literal truth in search of the dramatic one. Four years ago, a group of young actors began talking to former inhabitants of the hippie-run Toronto skyscraper that styled itself as Rochdale College in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. At one recent performance, an audience member squealed at a character, “But that’s me!” while a joint circulated through the crowd, lending the piece a further sense of authenticity.

This production of the play has a sprawling, sometimes undisciplined script and performances that range from good to adequate. But it has that indefinable quality: heart. You care about these characters. There are fewer of them, and they are more fully rounded than anything in The Arab-Israeli Cookbookor Laramie. They are also fictional, sometimes amalgams of several real people (including, no doubt, the aforementioned enthusiastic audience member), other times, products of imagination. The period-specific details come from the interviews; the rest comes from the imagination.

While Thompson insisted the actors in The Farm Show learn to mimic the farmers’ accents, not all was theatre vérité. In the play’s climactic scene, a farm machinery accident sends a man into a coma, leaving his wife (played by Amos) to soldier on bravely. “I just made that up,” Amos explains in an interview on the DVD of The Clinton Special. “I met someone whose husband had been killed that summer. She answered the door and she was like a ghost person. I took her image and I tried to internalize it and build on it.”

Amos says she made an effort to imagine what was going on behind the woman’s pale mask, to articulate the woman’s feelings in a way the woman herself likely could never have done. This scene gave a cathartic moment to the play; probably, alas, the bereaved woman at the door never got such a moment in her real life. Few of us do. We need fiction to give us what fact often callously fails to provide. A good writer can give our lives meaning, making us gape at the finished product. It is the poor journalist who simply repeats, without commentary, the truths, half-truths and lies we happen to speak aloud.

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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