Immigration Experiences Through Verbatim Theatre

Ash Marinaccio: Hey, friends. It’s Ash, your host for the Nonfiction Theatre Forum podcast produced for HowlRound, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. The Nonfiction Theatre Forum brings together artists, documentarians, journalists, scholars, and theatremakers to explore the wide world of nonfiction performance from documentary and autobiographical work to ethnographic, verbatim, and tribunal theatre, and everything in between. Together, we’ll dive into how these forms intersect with community collaboration, ethics, staging, and more.

In this episode, we talk with Scott Illingworth, founder of the Verbatim Salon, a monthly public event in New York City where actors share stories from interviews recorded with people interacting with the US immigration system. These stories are performed using an in-ear verbatim technique. Actors listen in real time to the recordings via headphones as they speak the words aloud in front of an audience. Let’s have a listen.

Actor: [Performing in Verbatim Salon] I didn’t meet my dad until I was six years old. My dad came to the US just after my mom was pregnant. My mom gave birth, and within the first six months, I think, my dad sent from my mom. So he worked for that whole year, seven days a week for an entire year, and sent money back to have my mom brought to the US. And she was able to come with... On a plane so she didn’t have to suffer the way my dad did. So then she came shortly after I was born, and then both of them found work and then they had saved enough money and they found the right people, and then they sent for me when I was six years old.

Ash: That is an excerpt from the Verbatim Salon, and Scott is going to tell us a lot more. Scott Illingworth is the associate chair of the Graduate Acting Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a freelance director, co-founder of Society Theatre Collective, and author of Exercises for Embodied Actors: Tools for Physical Actioning. He’s taught, lectured, and directed at universities and schools across the United States and internationally. Scott, we’re so excited to talk with you today about this amazing project.

Scott Illingworth: Oh, I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for asking me to do it.

Ash: Oh my god, I’m thrilled. So, tell me about the Verbatim Salon. How did it come about? What was the impetus behind the project, and how long have you been doing it?

Scott: Yeah, it’s a relatively new project just as a standalone, but the idea is older. But we’ve been doing it since April of 2025. There are two impulses. One is a kind of bigger impulse for me, which is about what does it mean to use some of these verbatim techniques, which I’ve become interested in recent years, to make work that feels really rapidly responsive to the circumstances, to the times, because I think there’s real potential there.

And two, more directly a response to the kinds of conversations it feels like we’ve been having about immigration in the United States—that those conversations tend to be really binary. They tend to be siloed in certain ways. And I thought this technique might have the potential and some kind of ongoing format to really have a kind of slow down, very deep exploration of this question of immigration in the United States by taking these individual stories, focusing on them together, having a dialogue about the way the room—the Salon—each month is responding, the way the stories are responding to each other, presenting multiple ones per month. And so far, these first four or five months have really proven that to be true, that there’s not a single month where anyone in the room isn’t taken, surprised, a little disoriented, excited, feels familiar about something in these conversations we’re having.

Ash: What’s your process for collecting the stories?

Scott: Yeah, there’s a few different versions of it. So whenever possible, what we try to do is have one-on-one conversations with somebody. So sometimes it’s me doing the interviews, sitting down with somebody and often having a conversation that’s between one and two hours long, certainly about their experience interacting with the US immigration system, but also other things that just come up or stories that they’re reminded of about their life. And when it isn’t me, it’s often a core group of actors who I’ve worked with in this technique before working on this project, and we do a small training about how to do these interviews, both technically and just in terms of having these conversations, and then sometimes the actors who record them are the people who perform, those folks. And sometimes they aren’t. It really just depends on a range of factors, sometimes including how much anonymity we want to try to make sure we provide the person who’s granted the interview.

Ash: And are they signing release forms? Do they know that their story’s going to be used as part of the Salon? Do they come to see their story performed?

Scott: Yeah, everyone knows this is what this interview is, for this specific event and this is how it’s going to be used, that we’re going to audio record this conversation, and then some part of that audio is going to be then performed by an actor, that the audience never hears the audio, but the audio is used by the actor. And so they know the circumstances that we’re using it in. Sometimes we have had people come and they wanted to come and see their own story told. Sometimes not. We’ve had instances where people came to an event because they were interested in having seen somebody else’s story, thought, “I really want my story to be a part of this conversation,” and volunteer themselves to join. So yeah, when somebody’s going to be there who was the interview subject, I tend not to tell the actor that person’s going to be there just so they don’t feel some sort of way about doing it in front of them. But it’s not uncommon that then after the event, that person really wants to meet the person who told their story.

Ash: I just did a project about the encampments, the college encampments on campuses in spring of ’24, and we presented it with the Civilians this past June. And we had a lot of the folks who were interviewed for the project come, and they were in the audience. And I will say that made me more nervous than anything else, was like, “Are we accountable? How have we been accountable to these folks who’ve shared their stories?” And in many cases, it’s their names, their lives, their reputations around the line by sharing. Will they be okay with this, and how will they respond to it? And it was very moving and very powerful, and everybody wanted to talk with the actors afterwards and take pictures with the actors afterwards. That was very exciting.

Scott: But that’s such a sign of, I think, what you managed to do in that project and what I think we’re trying to do, which is, yeah, you do want—the reason you feel nervous is because you feel a duty to this person, to their humanity, to represent them responsibly—and so you want to make sure you’re doing right by them. So yeah, I think that’s such a healthy anxiety.

There’s not a single month where anyone in the room isn’t taken, surprised, a little disoriented, excited, feels familiar about something in these conversations we’re having.

Ash: It’s always the representation element of that work that gets me the most nervous. It’s, oh my gosh, everything from down to the smallest word. I want to make sure it’s accurate, more so just that the subjects are comfortable as opposed to anything else. But how did the audience respond to it? It must be really powerful.

Scott: Yeah, the technique of the in-ear verbatim, I think it can be hard for people to imagine it before they actually experience it. I think a lot of people have some sense of what documentary theatre is in a general way, or even verbatim theatre, this notion of taking something, turning it into a script or transcript and then performing it. But I think that people have a hard time imagining that it’s really true that the actors are listening to the actual recording in real-time while they perform the piece, until they then witness it happening in front of them. And I think the response has been really exciting, that people feel, “Oh, that there’s a sense of conjuring or there’s a sense of channeling happening here,” and that even though these monologues are sometimes fifteen minutes, that it feels very different than watching an actor perform a fifteen-minute monologue. Something about the shape of them feels unperformed in a strange way and very intimate because they were these one-on-one conversations that you then as an audience are listening in on.

And so, the response has been really exciting, and I think exciting to hear how many people in the room who have their own experience of interacting with the US immigration system feel like, “Here’s this person who came from a totally different experience or place than me, and yet I completely resonate with this thing.” It feels democratizing. And I think for folks who haven’t had an experience interacting with the immigration system, it’s deeply eye-opening to see what folks are going through while they’re also trying to just build a life or survive or go to school or whatever.

Ash: Yeah, and you’re donating the proceeds to a local immigration organization.

Scott: Yeah, I think I made the decision early on that look rather than… This is a kind of civic project, and so the event is free every month. It’s just about can we bring people together to have these conversations and build a constellation of stories and just point people towards these organizations to try to help raise money for them.

Ash: Awesome. You touched on this earlier, but I’m curious: What do you think the role of verbatim theatre and nonfiction theatre is in forming and shifting public knowledge about the US immigration system? Why would verbatim theatre be unique as opposed to anything else?

Scott: Yeah, some of my feeling about it comes out of an experience I had a couple years ago. I’d been in Ukraine in 2019 working on a project and doing some teaching. And then when the war expanded a couple of years ago, I suddenly was in conversation with a very close collaborator there and then former students and former collaborators, and I was getting all of these bits of audio, like voice memos and audio recordings. And my collaborator, Alex, and I—she and I were like, “What should we do with this? How should we think about this material, these conversations getting, these voice memos we’re receiving?” And I started to just bring actors together to go through the material and think about it, and the in-ear verbatim was just a way to surface what material was interesting, but very quickly became clear that the technique itself was compelling, and it turned into this project I made with Alex–who was not in the United States, she fled Ukraine and ended up in Germany—along with a bunch of local actors here.

This project that was all about these early weeks and months of the war in Ukraine told through the eyes of young people. And that was a really interesting project, but what I discovered in making it is I had to learn a lot about how to use these tools, how to build things for this verbatim technique, and it just took time. And by the time maybe four or five, six months after the war had really begun already the appetite for stories about Ukraine, the interest from theatres was starting to wane. But if I had made something right then in the first couple of weeks, there was a lot of interest, but we have short attentions culturally, and it had moved on. And in some respects, it’s a challenge of the theatre in that things are either very immediate or we’re interested in something from a hundred years ago that we feel has some resonance with the present, like they get a lot of excitement behind them.

And so that left me thinking a lot about, “But I can feel that this technique could do something. It could do something.” And so, after the election and all of the ways immigration was being talked about, I thought maybe this is that. Maybe the key is to both do something durational—to have something happen over the course of months or years—but also have it be incredibly immediate to have it happen every single month. And so in that respect, finding these recordings, editing these interviews, presenting them sometimes within a week or two weeks of the recording itself means that this monthly event is always living in the present, even as it is a theatrical event, and that we’re also doing this durational thing where over time maybe it will become something else, maybe some form for it more broadly will emerge. Even if it doesn’t, it’s doing the thing that theatre might be able to do in this moment.

Ash: It’s important and necessary. I think a lot of the conversations that I have here, there’s a concern about how do we do something immediate, especially given some of the very real stipulations around funding and access to resources that a lot of theatre artists are navigating right now. When you said that you’re learning some of the techniques, I’ve been thinking a lot about the technology involved in this, because using earpieces… Can you talk a little bit about the technology and how you’ve learned to maneuver that and work with that?

Scott: Yeah, I like tech stuff. I think tech is interesting and exciting, and I always have, but there’s two components to it. There’s the kind of transcription and editing piece of it, and then there’s the presentation piece. So we’re using a program that allows us to edit the text of the transcription, and while you edit the text, like a script, it edits the audio in real-time in the background. Podcasting and documentary filmmaking is one of the key reasons this technology was created, but it allows you to really treat the audio recording like a script and edit the script, but the audio automatically gets edited and then you can go in and do further tweaking with the audio and things like that. But it makes it possible to work with this audio much more quickly than I think in the past would’ve been possible, and it makes it possible to turn around these interviews with care and consideration, but also with speed.

And then we’re storing all of these files in a kind of encrypted drive outside of the United States so that it can’t be subpoenaed, it can’t be obtained, particularly because some of these people aren’t documented or might have potential immigration issues. We didn’t want us to be a source of evidence in some ways. And then the last piece of it is the presentation, which is the actors are given access to the audio in order to perform it. And we use an in-ear system. Some people just use their phone, they just play it back on their phone and that’s fine, but what we generally do is use an in-ear system a little like you would use for a band listening to the playback or something like that in their ear instead of an on-stage monitor, and that way multiple people can hear the audio. It can be controlled from a computer. It’s not complicated, it’s really just a receiver with headphones and something sending the audio to that receiver.

Ash: It’s fascinating, and thank you for explaining that process because I was wondering about that. And is it Descript?

Scott: Yes.

Ash: Yes. I’ve been toying with Descript, so I’m like, “Oh, yes. That’s a good one.” Do you have any favorite stories or memories so far of the Verbatim Salon?

Scott: Yes, certainly. I think there are several really interesting ones. One that comes to mind was an early one we did, a woman who is in her sixties who came from Afghanistan during the war with Russia, settled in the United States, lived here for all these years. And then right after 9/11 found herself facing what she felt was discriminatory practices and she lost her job. And then in finding another job, ended up working as a translator for the US military in Afghanistan during the war in Afghanistan with the US. And a fascinating person because she at once has tremendous affection for the United States and US military, despite the complications of the war in Afghanistan, and as somebody who’s faced discrimination here in the United States as an immigrant, particularly as a Muslim. I think she I think of sometimes as a great example of why individual stories are really important, that you wouldn’t be inclined to write those particular kinds of complications: her personal experience, her set of salient identities coupled with these, I think, on the surface seemingly incongruous beliefs. And yet she’s a real person and it’s true. And that’s exciting to me.

I think of those, and then I think particularly of a couple of the stories we’ve had of folks who came to the US as kids undocumented. And I think one thing that the Salon has already exposed in these early months is the absurdity in some ways of this idea of what it means to be undocumented and the way that we think about that, or talk about it in our politics, as this kind of illegal act that somebody did, when the reasons and ways and all of the things about how a person finds themselves here in the United States without documentation are so complicated and so often wasn’t even their choice in certain instances either. And yet we paint with this kind of giant brush about it.

So I think it’s been heartening to hear a wide range of stories already, but also to feel like… The thing I think I walk away with over and over again is to a person, if you were going to say what you wanted an American to be, these are the folks you would want to be an American: deeply committed to ideas of freedom, deeply committed to family, deeply committed to community, and focused on building their own life. And I think the collective reality of that is what continues to be most moving to me.

I also think that it’s good for us as theatremakers to grapple with the kind of urgency and immediacy of both the kind of culture we live in—the rapidness of the culture as well as what it means to be responsive to the times.

Ash: I’ve found that a lot of times with theatre, there’s preaching to the choir that happens, which I think is important, and I think that there’s real value in having spaces where people’s values are reiterated and motivating, and it allows you to go back out into the world and continue the work. What I keep thinking when I’m listening to you talk is how can we get these stories out beyond the New York theatre, out in front of people who are passing legislation, out to areas of the country where I think immigrants and migration is viewed as evil. Not evil, but where it’s not viewed favorably. How can we elevate these stories? Are you going to be creating an archive? I know you said that you’re recording the stories. What are your future plans with this?

Scott: Well, you’re speaking to something that I’ve been thinking a lot about and comes up absolutely in the conversations at the Salons each month. I think we’re thinking about ways to have people even from New York who don’t exactly share our views about immigration, and they certainly exist, to invite in more folks even from New York more broadly. But as a matter of fact, now that it’s a couple of months along, I’ve started to have conversations with a few folks outside of New York, elsewhere in the country, who are really interested in potentially thinking about what would it mean to bring an event like this to their community. What would it mean to invite us in to, one, record conversations with folks?

It would be great to go to some places and have some of these conversations in person to expand the way these stories are being collected, and I suspect get stories we don’t get otherwise. What would it mean to have people in these communities hear the stories of people in their community, not just New Yorkers or whoever else? What would it mean even to maybe have some local actors perform using this technique alongside some of the folks who’ve been working on it with us here to really do what you’re saying, which is how can we complicate the conversation? Which has been the thing about this work as a teacher, as a theatremaker, that’s always been so exciting to me is about the complications that it causes.

Ash: Yeah, it’s so necessary right now, and I’m sure there are theatres around the country that would be thrilled to have this, would be excited to bring this in as well.

Scott: But to the preaching to the choir thing, I think I agree with you, which is that I have a colleague who says that phrase isn’t a bad thing, that the choir needs fortification too, even though they’re there every Sunday. And so we also need to be reminded about our shared values and whatever. But in truth, one of the complexities of the Salon has been that sometimes the audiences will hook onto something about a story that confirms the thing that they think or believe and want to ignore or rush past a piece of that person or a piece of their story that is inconvenient or disagrees with them. And so I think it’s been really interesting to try to make sure that we don’t turn these stories into just reinforcement, that we grapple with the complexity, that we confront our own assumptions or the ways in which we want to turn these stories into tools for our own beliefs, and let them sit in the room with us as something more complicated.

Ash: Yeah. Do you have anything else you’d like to add about this or that you’d like the audience to know about the Verbatim Salon?

Scott: I think the other than encouraging people to come, which of course I want people to come, but also because I really think that the only way for... I think what I’m grappling with beyond the topic itself is a question about theatre and immediacy in this moment, that I think I feel... I love theatre. I love theatremaking, and I love things that take a long time to make. I think it’s important to make things slowly sometimes. And I also think that it’s good for us as theatremakers to grapple with the kind of urgency and immediacy of both the kind of culture we live in—the rapidness of the culture as well as what it means to be responsive to the times.

And I think that all of the structures we built, all of the institutions we’ve built favor a really beautiful patience for making and process. And alongside that, we also need all of us experimenting with “can you make things that are just as thoughtful and deep and exploratory, and to be a part of the conversation right now in the moment and in an ongoing way?” I think that’s only going to happen if we all stay in that conversation together.

Ash: That’s beautiful. And I learned about this project through an article in American Theatre that came out, I think two weeks ago. It was recent. It was like the July issue. And I was trying to wrap up a couple of more guests for this series, and I saw that, I was like, “Oh, my God, we have to find Scott. This is what this is and talking also about immediacy and process and how do we use theatre to meet this very specific moment.” It was very exciting to come across your work and to come across that article and think some of the, as we’ve said, some of the real criticisms, at least that I’ve had of theatre these last few years has been like, how do we meet the moment and how do we have the resources to meet the moment? Do we actually need the resources to meet the moment?

We can make theatre in the living room, we can make theatre anywhere, but would people come? Would it just end up being the same? You go down the rabbit hole. But yeah, I was super excited to come across your work, just doom scrolling through, and it was doom scrolling, Threads, and they had posted this and I shared it. I was like, “Oh my God, this is so exciting.” So, it’s great.

Scott: Yeah, I think we all have to, I don’t know. I worry that our exhaustion is a tool that can be weaponized against us, and we’re all very tired of working in so many different ways. One of the things that I’ve been lucky to have some great folks helping me with this project, particularly like Raquel Chavez and Dela Meskienyar, who are both people I’ve worked with a lot and who’ve been working a lot on this project with me. I think a big conversation we’ve been having is like, how do we make this a sustainable thing, something that we really can do every month that isn’t intensive from a kind of resource standpoint or expensive to do? And I think I did worry that the stripped-downness of it would make it somehow less interesting, and I think what I’m feeling heartened by is that it’s doing the things we hoped it would do even with all of that simplicity. I love a splashy, technically demanding production as much as the next person, but the times demand something else too.

Ash: And are you getting repeat audience members, or is it bringing in new people each month?

Scott: Oh, we definitely get repeat audience members. We’ve got folks who come every month. We’ve got new folks coming in or coming in and out, or people have come back a few times. And also, absolutely, I think the best version is people who come and then end up bringing other folks along because they feel like, “I want you to see this thing,” or, “I think this thing is interesting.” We’ve even had instances… We had somebody come who has their own story of immigration, who not only was like, “I really want you to interview me, but I also want you to interview my family because I feel like I know their story, but I suspect that you would experience something of their story that I wouldn’t hear, that we don’t talk about,” the more audiences come back and the more they see.

Ash: My God, that’s beautiful, but I’m excited to see it in August. I have it on my calendar. And I can’t thank you enough for joining me today and sharing this work and talking about your process and your vision for it. It’s so needed right now.

Scott: And I’m really excited about this podcast, and I think it’s such a particular area of the work, and it’s so rare that we get to think about it together. And yeah, I can’t wait to be a listener too.

Ash: This has been an episode of The Nonfiction Theatre Forum podcast. I’m your host, Ash Marinaccio. This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and any HowlRound show wherever you find podcasts, including iTunes, Spotify, and non-commercial, open-source apps, like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone or AntennaPod for Android. Be sure to search HowlRound Theatre Commons and subscribe to receive new episodes. If you love this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast essay or TV event the theatre community needs to hear, visit HowlRound and submit your ideas to the Commons. Think you or someone ought to be on the show? Connect with us through Docbloc and on Instagram, @docblocprojects. That is D-O-C-B-L-O-C. Thank you for joining us at the Nonfiction Theatre Forum.