Docudrama & Documentary Plays

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > CONTENT > SUBJECTS > TRUTH > DOCUDRAMA

'I like having to deal with the facts of the case. I couldn't make up who the Klan and the Nazis are. I had to look the real devil in the face and say, 'Who are you?' I felt that if I could make this story powerful on stage -- and that can be very hard because sometimes real life is not as theatrically exciting as what you can write -- if I could distill and juxtapose and theatricalize this story well enough, the impact would in the end be stronger than if I'd made it up.'

-- Emily Mann

There's a rather fine hair being split between Docudrama and the Documentary Play, with the second of these being far more faithful -- some would say slavishly faithful -- to interview or trial transcripts. But even here, you're involved in an act of selection as a playwright, since you can't use everything that's been said from what may be hundreds or even thousands of pages of transcripts.

If there's one key to either variant, it's finding an event or a life that culminates in a natural Climax. The creators of the most successful of these documentary ventures arrange their slices of life to approximate the Shape of a play. What ends up on stage may be an accurate recording of real events, but it has the structure of theatrical fiction.

Turning Life into theatre in ways that work . . .

EXECUTION OF JUSTICE: Emily Mann's play is based on recorded interviews and the transcript of the trial of Dan White, the assassin of the Mayor of San Francisco, whose attorney successfully mounted the infamous "Twinkie" defense.
IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER: Peter Weiss' play is based on the transcripts of the hearings that eventually stripped the famous physicist of his security clearance, because of political suspicions raised by his opposition to development of the H-Bomb.
A FEW GOOD MEN: Adam Sorkin's play is based on transcripts of a near-miscarriage of military justice in a murder trial stemming from events at the U. S. base in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay.
FIRES IN THE MIRROR: CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN, AND OTHER IDENTITIES: Anna Deavere Smith's play is based on recorded interviews with participants and others impacted by an African American fatality caused by a Rabbi's car and the investigation that followed.

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