The Methuen Drama Anthology of Testimonial Plays: Bystander 9/11; Big Head; The Fence; Come Out Eli; The Travels; On the Record; Seven; Pajarito Nuevo

345 Pages·2014·7.653 MB·English

by  Tim Etchells, Alecky Blythe, Meron Langsner

The Methuen Drama Anthology of

Testimonial Plays
Also available from Bloomsbury Methuen Drama:
The Methuen Drama Anthology of Irish Plays
The Methuen Drama Book of Naturalist Plays
The Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays
The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers
The Methuen Drama Book of Plays from the Sixties
The Methuen Drama Book of Post-Black Plays
The Methuen Drama Book of Royal Court Plays 2000–2010
The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays
The Methuen Drama Book of Twenty-First Century British Plays
Modern Drama: Plays of the ’80s and ’90s
Not Black and White
Producers’ Choice: Six Plays for Young Performers
Six Ensemble Plays for Young Actors
Theatre in Pieces: Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration
The Methuen Drama Anthology of

Testimonial Plays
Bystander 9/11
Big Head
The Fence
Come Out Eli
The Travels
On the Record
Seven
Pajarito Nuevo la Lleva: The Sounds of the Coup
Edited and with an introduction by
ALISON FORSYTH
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
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Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Testimony in Performance: Memory in Action 1
Meron Langsner Interviewed by Alison Forsyth 15
Bystander 9/11: A Theatre Piece Concerning the Events of
September 11, 2001 by Meron Langsner 23
An Essay by Denise Uyehara 47
Big Head by Denise Uyehara 55
Story, Silence, Song and Site: The Multiplicity of Testimony in
The Fence: Alicia Talbot Interviewed by Caroline Wake 75
The Fence by Urban Theatre Projects 83
Alecky Blythe Interviewed by Alison Forsyth 117
Introduction 125
Come Out Eli by Alecky Blythe 127
A Principle Rather Than an Accident: Some Notes
on Forced Entertainment’s The Travels
by Tim Etchells 173
The Travels by Forced Entertainment 183
An Essay by Christine Bacon and Noah Birksted-Breen 215
On the Record by Christine Bacon and Noah Birksted-Breen 221
Introduction to Seven 265
Seven by Paula Cizmar, Catherine Filloux, Gail Kriegel,
Carol K. Mack, Ruth Margraff, Anna Deavere Smith,
Susan Yankowitz 267
An Essay by María José Contreras Lorenzini 297
Pajarito Nuevo la Lleva: The Sounds of the Coup by María José
Contreras Lorenzini 305
Permissions 331
Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to all the contributors of this volume.
These include Meron Langsner, and JAC Publishing/JulieAnn Govang
who should be contacted if somebody intends to produce Bystander 9/11;
Denise Uyehara and Kaya Press who first published Big Head in Maps of
City & Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara in
2003; Alecky Blythe, the Recorded Delivery Theatre Company and Camilla
Young for helping to arrange the interview with Alecky and for introducing
me to the text of the hitherto unpublished Come Out Eli; Christine Bacon
and Noah Birksted-Breen of ice&fire theatre company; Tim Etchells and
Forced Entertainment; María José Contreras Lorenzini and her colleagues,
Ornella de la Vega, Milena Grass and Nancy Nicholls at the Universidad
Catolica de Chile, as well as Camila Le-Bert for agreeing to translate
the commissioned transcription of the performance text, Pajarito Nuevo
la Lleva, for this volume; Dr Caroline Wake, postdoctoral fellow at the
Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia at the University of New South
Wales for conducting such an insightful interview with Alicia Talbot of
Urban Theatre Projects. In addition, thanks go to Alicia Talbot, Raimondo
Cortese and Lina Kastoumis for transcribing the performance text of The
Fence for this anthology – a work which was originally devised by Alicia
Talbot with Helen Dallas, Richard Green, Vicki van Hout, Kelton Pell and
Skye Wansey; Michael Callahan of Josef Weinberger Ltd for allowing me
to discover the play, Seven.
Furthermore I would like to extend a special note of gratitude to my
commissioning editor, Mark Dudgeon, who has been most supportive and
incredibly patient during the various peaks and troughs that have occurred
during the preparation of this volume.
Alison Forsyth
Aberystwyth, 2013
Introduction:

Testimony in Performance: Memory in Action
Alison Forsyth
Testimony is usually taken to mean the intentional expression of an
individual’s memories and recollections about a given event in the past,
and it has been traditionally associated with a mode of speech used within
the context of the courtroom – that is, words uttered in the witness box
and under oath. However, as noted by Robert Audi, over recent years,
testimony has acquired a wider, more general definition and application
beyond its usual legal connotations, whereby ‘formal testimony differs
from the informal kind in the conditions of its expression . . . [it does] not
necessarily in credibility.’1 Theatre provides a platform from which one
such ‘informal’ kind of testimonial expression can be aired, and it is the
purpose of this volume to illustratively explore the various ways in which
testimony is utilized in the making and execution of a range of plays and
performances since 2001.
During the last two decades there has been a marked multiplication of
dramatic works which utilize testimony (verbatim theatre, Tribunal plays,
documentary theatre) leading one critic to note that ‘mere dramatic fiction
has apparently been seen as an inadequate response to the current global
situation.’2 This pronounced focus on testimony in drama over recent years
is perhaps reflective of an increasing appetite to gain a deeper personal,
even more intimate, insight into the world we inhabit over and above the
seemingly ceaseless yet perhaps superficially depthless access we have to
rapid-fire, mass-circulated news’ stories and journalistic reports via 24-
hour television and radio, the internet and social media.
The potential to gain a more profound insight into recent or more
distant historical events and experiences of which we may or may not
be already familiar is made available in testimonial theatre by dint of
the form’s capacity to present information about such events differently.
Instead of placing an emphasis on testimony as a means of accessing data
on a purely cognitive level (as is arguably its purpose in a court of law
or news stories) theatre consciously engages its many performative and
creative tools when utilizing testimony, in order to move us beyond a
2 The Methuen Drama Anthology of Testimonial Plays
merely fact-bearing exercise. Thus, rather than merely relaying the bare
facts of an historical event in an almost evidentiary manner, testimonial
theatre strives to engage the spectator on an emotional and affective level
so that the particular circumstances of the past may be illuminated by, for
example, more intimate, personal and even conflicting perspectives which,
in turn, highlight the complexities of any one given historical event as well
as sometimes exposing the fallible mnemonic foundations of testimony. In
a way, one could say that the most challenging testimonial theatre takes
us further away from easily digestible and discrete factual narratives, and
instead brings us closer to an understanding of the complicated and even
irreconcilable truths of a past event, and indeed it could even be a form
which makes us interrogate the way we consign, oftentimes prematurely,
historical events to ‘the past’ when in fact that past may be still shaping
our present, and potentially our future. Testimonial theatre’s potential to
let us know about historical and/or past personal events differently does
not, therefore, necessarily equate with knowing about historical and/or
past personal events definitively; on the contrary, this form of theatre can
prompt an interrogation of our often all too easy acceptance of the supposed
inviolable relationship between fact and truth. Indeed, Alessandro Portelli’s
excellent summation that ‘the credibility of testimony does not rely on its
slavish adherence to facts, but rather in its departure from it’ highlights the
way testimony, and by extension, testimony in performance, can create the
potential for us to know differently.
When quizzed by Robert Martin about the historical accuracy of his
work, Arthur Miller retorted that ‘. . . well a worship of fact – by fact, I mean
in the crudest sense – is always an obstruction if one is looking for the truth.
There is a difference between facts and the truth; the truth is a synthesis of
the facts.’3 Here, with reference to his own stagecraft, Miller encapsulates
the way performance can creatively mediate and thus expand upon and even
interrogate received fact. As distinct from the courts’ or journalists’ evaluation
of testimony, often gauged against a rigid benchmark of proof or evidence,
testimony is valued in theatrical practice for its potentially complicating
insights into how individual people involved in past events interpret these
events and their implications. Although mindful of Rinaldo Walcott’s
perceptive caveat that ‘[I]n many quarters, personal testimony has taken on
the spectre of transparent truth-claims whereby questioning them suggests a
kind of vulgarity on the part of the questioner’4 it is crucial to acknowledge
that once testimony is consciously demarcated in dramatic practice from
either the notion of being little more than a dry and incontestable record
of fact, or a rather crass method of eliciting spectator sympathy towards
a given perspective, it can actually provide the very means to expose, to
subvert, to complicate, to emphasize and to question a past that has not
Introduction 3
yet been mastered, and to use Max Stafford-Clark’s description of his own
project when using testimony, to delve deeper and ‘find the story within the
story’.5 (Hammond, 2008, 58) With this in mind, testimonial theatre need not
imply work that is little more than a testimony-filled superimposition onto
a narrative arc which, to use David Mamet’s phrase, follows a ‘dramatic
urge’6 – a reductive device which flattens out complexity, nuance, subtlety
and indeed contradiction to allow us to stage life as a series of simplistic and
easily digestible exempla which in turn serve to allay our anxieties about the
real world. Indeed, recent examples of testimonial theatre do successfully
counter Mamet’s concerns, often reflecting an increasingly more self-
reflexive approach about, for example, the relationship between witness and
listener/spectator, far removed from the presentation of sense-dulling and
descriptive monologues in the service of reductive and possibly tendentious
authorial viewpoints. With this in mind, this selection of plays endeavours
to provide an insight into how much recent testimonial theatre utilizes
and incorporates other people’s words in order to be affectively engaging,
provocatively critical and even transformative.
Bystander 9/11 (2001) is based on Meron Langsner’s own experiences
of being physically caught up in the horrifying events of the attacks upon
the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. Interestingly, throughout
this autobiographical work, Langsner does not identify himself as
‘Narrator’ – suggestive perhaps of his desire to convey how the scale of
the event overwhelmed his sense of identity, as well as placing the event,
as opposed to character, centre-stage. From within the play itself, we learn
that Langsner started to record his thoughts and fears almost immediately,
as and when the catastrophe was unfolding. The overlay of immediate
testimony (from e-mails and messages sent contemporaneous with the
events of that fateful day) with the Narrator’s subsequent memories some
weeks later, dramatically illustrate how witnesses to traumatic events do
not fully realize the significance of various sights and sounds until later,
in keeping with Cathy Caruth’s observations that ‘[T]he impact of the
traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply
located.’7 The timeframe of the play and its expression of testimony at
different intervals from the events of 9/11 (some being recollections of
secondary ‘choric’ type voices) thus provide a fascinating glimpse into the
way memory can become the subject as well as the source of testimony,
particularly in relation to trauma. One particularly harrowing insight into
the way Bystander 9/11 captures the sense of trauma as existing beyond
the event and more from within the ‘structure of its experience’ after the
event (p. 4, Caruth) is when the ‘Narrator’ recounts seeing
. . . things falling from the towers. I didn’t know what they were. I
thought it was some kind of debris. I heard later about the people