Theatre History Studies

Advocates of verbatim theatre have long held that listening to diverse, firsthand accounts of a crisis can heal social rifts. For nearly twenty years, feminist theatre scholar Ryan Claycomb has tended to agree. In his latest book, however, Claycomb offers a compelling reassessment. In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation interrogates the visions of empathetic and transformative dialogue that have popularized verbatim theatre in the United States and beyond.

The book's contribution to documentary studies begins with its premise: that prominent verbatim plays are distinguished not only in their epistemological claims to know and tell what is real but also in their political and affective claims about how democracies should function and feel. As verbatim theatre rose to prominence in the 1960s–1990s, so too did the theory of deliberative democracy. Political philosophers like Jurgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and Iris Marion Young proposed that democracy depends on substantive conversations between citizens. Fellow academics were taken with the idea, but so were many outside the academy. "Democratic dialogue" became ubiquitous shorthand for deliberative-democratic tenets and an antidote prescribed for all manner of social ills. Much has changed, however, since the inceptions of verbatim theatre and democratic dialogue. Claycomb characterizes the past seven years, in particular, as a "'rightward lurch' of western democracies" (3). Amid misinformation, violence, hate speech, and populism, "democratic dialogue" may no longer offer a tenable model of meaningful political participation.

Chapter 1, "Democratic Deliberation and the Theatricalized Public Sphere," shows how verbatim plays have dramatized normative models of the public sphere. In works like Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and Greensboro: A Requiem, playwrights Anna Deavere Smith and Emily Mann, respectively, weave diverse viewpoints into moving and even-handed narratives. In doing so, they implicitly invite audiences to continue the democratic work of listening to different perspectives and finding points of agreement. However, Claycomb, echoing Jodi Dean, raises an important critique: by centering discussion in democratic participation, these "democratic dramaturgies" deflect attention from pressing and divisive structural issues, such as economic inequality (23).

In chapter 2, "Debating in Utopia," Claycomb turns from discussion to the literal and conceptual uses of space. He observes that verbatim plays often draw [End Page 210] their titles from specific settings (Laramie; Guantánamo; Los Angeles) but call for abstract and conceptual mise-en-scène (41). While staging specific events and locations, verbatim plays tend to "create a spatialized utopia by thinning out the places of violence they are representing" (45). In doing so, they erase important differences between the worlds of characters and their audiences. Such erasures, Claycomb notes, may be necessary to engender audience dialogue, but dialogue itself might be a dead end, or worse—in Lauren Berlant's terminology—a spark for "cruel optimism." Perhaps, Claycomb explains, theatre has so fetishized conversation that it has made space for hate speech and "other matters of anti-sociality to be re-admitted" into public discourse (51).

Chapter 3, "Feeling Together," challenges the pervasive assumption that empathy is a "moral and political imperative" for peaceful coexistence (55). Verbatim plays often compel audiences to "feel with" their subjects, but the meaning and value of this proposition, as Claycomb asserts, needs interrogation and historicization. In the neoliberal United States, for instance, corporations have revalued empathy as a technique for penetrating foreign markets, while Trump and his supporters have conflated it with political weakness. Claycomb, in his reluctance to empathize with Trumpers, reflects on a "political lurch" toward a posture "more cynical and closed off" than the open-mindedness verbatim theatre has so often enlisted.

In chapter 4, "The Opposite of Empathy is Suspicion," Claycomb explores three verbatim plays (My Country; A Work in Progress; The Assembly—Montreal; Notes from the Field) produced in the historic and ideological lurch he has described. None of them, Claycomb observes, espouse the utopian visions of deliberative democracy that were evident in verbatim plays of the 1990s and 2000s. Neither do they offer satisfying alternatives; instead they reiterate polarization and communication breakdown or appeal only to those who are already in agreement. It is no surprise then, as Claycomb observes in his coda, that once-timely verbatim plays still remain popular, but as objects of nostalgia. They beckon liberal theatregoing publics into past models of togetherness.

The remounts, revivals, and retrospectives that Claycomb considers in his coda attest to the wide-ranging implications of his argument. Verbatim theatre remains a mainstay on college campuses and regional theatre stages alike; theatre scholars and artists, even those with no investment in verbatim theatre or deliberative democracy, often invoke dialogue's democratic possibilities on grant applications and at season launches, in teaching philosophies and dramaturgical talk-backs. A reckoning with the liberal-democratic ideas that undergird these trends is overdue, and Claycomb's analysis is reflective and convincing.

To engage with and extend this important work, two avenues of discussion [End Page 211] might be especially generative. First: Claycomb's attention to "political fantasies" offer a crucial corrective to documentary scholars' focus on epistemology. It invites documentary scholars to consider not only "how documentary theaters claim to know and tell something real" but also how they generate political affects and effects (87). Yet it is worth considering how matters of knowing, doing, and feeling might be thought differently. Might political fantasy, when teased apart from Jill Dolan's utopian performative, do something other than engendering attachment to impossible futures? And might theatrical fiction, fabrication, and fabulation offer resources not just for feeling-with but for thinking and arguing about political ideas? Such questions might illuminate alternatives to deliberative democracy in performances that now appear, primarily, as applications of them.

Second: how might the argument change or expand in the context of the relatively continuous, centuries-long project of political liberalism, rather than "in the lurch" of the past seven years? As a historical frame, the lurch foregrounds abruptness and rupture, which Claycomb links to significant developments like the formation of Black Lives Matter, the Trump presidency, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet these events are not unprecedented, nor are they disconnected from the racial and colonial violence at the foundations of political liberalism. How might a more expansive history inflect the workings of empathy, democracy, dialogue, and liberal ideas in verbatim theatre? How does verbatim theatre engage in the fundamentally liberal myth that human-ness is self-evident on some bodies and not on others?

In the Lurch is a compelling prompt for these and other inquiries. It will be an invaluable resource in the classroom and for future research about documentary theatre, feminist scholarship, and democratic theory.