Transcripted
Originally published at The Off-Center. Please leave any comments there.
I think pretty much everyone knows that war sucks; the extent to which it sucks is sometimes intensely personal, sometimes very public, and sometimes fodder for propaganda! All right, to call Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s play Aftermath propaganda is perhaps unfair - it’s important work. They set out to give voices to the real people behind the phrase “collateral damage”, which is certainly a noble endeavor. But does it work as a piece of theater? No, I don’t think it does.
That isn’t to say that it’s not well-acted, because it is. And that’s not to say that it was boring or sloppy or poorly edited, because it wasn’t. All I mean was that it was missing the most essential element to anything that is to appear on stage: theatricality.
Aftermath is based on first-hand accounts of displaced Iraqis living in Jordan after the fall of Baghdad. Because I was fortunate enough to catch a show with a talk-back, I happen to know that there were originally 37-interviews, lasting anywhere from several minutes to several hours. The interviews were conducted in English and Arabic, with a translator, and recorded. From there, they were translated a second time, in full, and then transcribed by interns at New York Theater Workshop. Finally, they were aurally edited by Jessica Blank as she worked with the actors. What was left was a series of interconnected, incredibly compelling, but ultimately nontheatrical vignettes. They were just talking at us that whole time, sometimes pausing, perhaps to indicate where the true interviewers posed a question. I kept thinking about a play based on the material from the play I was watching.
Why am I writing about this? Well, I had to see the show for a class in adaptation and I am trying to get my thoughts strait on it before I pen a slightly more formal response paper. I also had to read an article on Documentary theater that states pretty clearly why I’ve never really been drawn to it myself: “Governments ’spin’ the facts in order to tell stories,” Carol Martin writes in her article Bodies of Evidence, “Theater spins them right back in order to tell different stories… There is no “really real” anywhere in the world of representation.” And I think why I have never been interested in this type of theater, docu-drama or “verbatim theater”, is because I don’t think anything needs to be “spun” in order for it to be effective. Some things are just universal, some things will break through cultural, racial, class boundaries, and those are the things that make for good theater. I don’t want to be on one side of a table, the actors on the other, reciting someone else’s story.
Mm, I dunno. I might be thinking in circles. Better sit down and try to actually do the homework part of this.