Comparative Drama

Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater constitutes a welcome addition to the growing body of research concerned with forms of documentation in the theater. By investigating what she calls the “documentary trial play,” O’Connor sets out to explore “complicated questions…about law and the execution of justice, about art and the resolution of emotion” (21). Through theatrical reenactment of the procedures of justice, she argues, communities of performers and spectators can symbolically “re-open” the cases, and can debate their cultural and social ramifications in ways legal proceedings cannot. In close readings of nine such documentary trial plays, first produced between 1970 and 2000, O’Connor deliberates and interrogates the boundaries that (often very tentatively) separate fact from fiction, the courtroom from the theater, and the individual from the social. [End Page 98]

The documentary trial play, O’Connor states in an initial definition of the genre, “comes about through the blending of verbatim excerpts from legal transcripts, media coverage of the events, and first-person interviews, the last compiled either at the time of the trial or, in some cases, months or years later” (4). Not all of the trial plays analyzed in the book are concerned with trials in a strictly legal sense; some also deal with judicial hearings such as the infamous congressional investigations conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy era. Moreover, O’Connor’s notion of the “contemporary” in her title is relatively broad and reaches back to the 1970s; while the trials that precede the plays even date back as far as the 1890s, the historical, political, and aesthetic territory covered by the book can be roughly delineated as the post-World War II United States.

In four main chapters, O’Connor discusses nine plays and the courtroom proceedings they are based on. Importantly, she points out, documentary trial plays hardly ever focus on “ordinary” trials, but instead dramatize legal action in which broader cultural, social, and political issues are negotiated. In these cases, the rationality of the law is often doubtful, and reflection on it determined to a large extent by political and ideological considerations. This focus on exemplary cases also explains why at times O’Connor seems to say more about the trials themselves and their historical circumstances than about the aesthetics of the trial plays she purports to analyze. The strong emphasis on the historical bases of her theatrical archive is also evident in the larger structure of Documentary Trial Plays: its four chapters are structured along thematic lines (chapter 1 deals with Vietnam War protests, chapter 2 with the McCarthy era, and so on) rather than in terms of formal, aesthetic, or theatrical considerations. While this is not necessarily a flaw, it points to the complexities of writing about documentary art, which is so explicitly entangled with larger historical realities that it is often difficult to foreground aesthetic and production processes and decisions.

In the first chapter, “Judicial Identification,” O’Connor examines two documentary trial plays related to illegal forms of protest against the Vietnam War: Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1970), about Catholic activists (of whom Berrigan was one) burning draft cards, and Ron Sossi and Frank Condon’s The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1979), about protesters who refused to exit public parks during the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago. In her reading, O’Connor focuses on the relationship between law and morality, and the tricky question of the extent to which laws are reflective of moral considerations at all. How can we assess the role of the legal system, she asks, in matters of political dissent? This question is particularly pronounced in the way the plays position the figure of the judge. An abstracted representative of the law’s rationality, the judge is always also an individual, a human being with his or her own—and often contradictory—moral standards and opinions. [End Page 99] While these complexities are seldom addressed in the trials themselves, O’Connor reasons, documentary trial plays may open up a space for reflection and dialogue, and highlight not only “the imperfections of the legal system,” but also examine the ways in which the theater can “call attention to the imbalance” between legal and moral principles (59).

Chapter 2, “National Investigation,” is concerned with the culture of fear in the United States that resulted from the Communist scare of the 1950s. Analyzing Inquest (1970) by Donald Freed, and Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (1972) by Eric Bentley, O’Connor focuses on the idea of “identity” and posits the historicity of identity as the central problem of this chapter. Both Inquest, which deals with the espionage trials of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, which reenacts several HUAC hearings, revolve around the uncovering of present and/or past identity and affiliation (such as party membership). Whereas the trial itself has only limited and often unreliable means to establish a person’s “true” identity, O’Connor claims, the documentary play can draw from and combine a much wider range of experiences and narratives, both rational and emotional, in order to contemplate the idea of a coherent identity.

The creative use of a variety of different source materials in documentary trial plays is also stressed in chapter 3, “Ideological Confrontation,” which asks hard questions not only about how to deal with ideologically motivated violence, but also about the ways in which collective trauma can be resolved. Analyzing two plays by Emily Mann, Execution of Justice (1984) and Greensboro (A Requiem) (1996)—about the murder of Harvey Milk and a violent clash between the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Workers Party, respectively—O’Connor stresses the role and importance of additional testimonies by people who were not directly involved in the trial but who are still part of the larger community affected by the events. These “uncalled witnesses” often complicate the official record, and highlight the fact that processes of mourning, trauma, and forgiveness are not necessarily resolved once the trial is over. By continuing the conversation about the trials’ underlying social and political problems, O’Connor argues, documentary trial plays can eventually “help the various communities reconcile their feelings about the events” (125).

Chapter 4, “Individual Interrogation, Communal Resolution” is concerned with three trials of the 1990s, all of which deal with the intersection of gender, sexuality, and power: Unquestioned Integrity: The Hill/Thomas Hearings (1993), conceived by Larry Eilenberg and composed by Mamie Hunt, and two plays by Moisés Kaufman, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997) and The Laramie Project (2000). In different ways, each play addresses the harassment dilemma, where “the witness becomes a kind of defendant whose witnessing often comes with the need to defend herself and her position” (136). O’Connor [End Page 100] highlights the ways in which the plays confront these shifting perceptions of guilt and points out, among other things, that these perceptions are almost always influenced by stereotypical and highly emotional preconceptions of gender and sexuality.

Documentary Trial Plays in Contemporary American Theater is full of astute observations and is written in lucid prose devoid of specialized vocabulary. However, although the book’s easy readability is laudable in principle, O’Connor’s analyses remain significantly under-theorized and would have benefitted from a stronger conceptual framing and a more rigorous engagement of scholarly work pertaining to the larger issues she raises. O’Connor’s recurrent complication of both the rationality of law and the emotionality of the theater, for example, could have gained much in precision from a consideration of the abundance of recent theoretical thinking about affect and emotion. Likewise, O’Connor’s insights into the “documentariness” of her trial plays (“Although a new narrative is created from the existing one and staged as a theatrical event, not a legal event, the stage trial reanimates the original proceeding” [7]) could have been rendered much more complexly with recourse to the work of, for example, Rebecca Schneider, who has so comprehensively delved into matters of the archive and the document in performance. Although these conceptual blanks do not necessarily diminish the accomplishment of O’Connor’s readings, Documentary Trial Plays seems somewhat removed from recent productive debates over affect and the archive in the humanities in general and in performance studies in particular. Still, the book’s expansive scope and its careful and detailed readings make it a valuable resource for scholars interested in the relationship of law, theater, and documentary form.