Documentary Theatre

Maia Novi’s testimonial play Invasive Species tells the story of one Argentinean immigrant’s experience constructing her sense of self in the United States in the face of the limitations on her identity that she encounters in her new home. Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas, a Peruvian living in the United States, reviews the production with an eye toward the way that Invasive Species embraces complexity, humanity, power imbalances, and even humor.

After Russian courts found that Svetlana Petriychuk’s documentary theatre piece Finist the Brave Falcon “justified terrorism” due to its feminist aims, Petriychuk and director Zhenya Berkovich were jailed. Viktor Vilisov discusses the production, clarifying the production’s aims to amplify the experiences of Russian women whose attempts to flea Russian patriarchy has landed them in oppressive marriages to Syrian ISIS fighters.

Through a combination of testimony and reenactment, Milo Rau’s Hate Radio stages a broadcast from a notorious media operation that spread racist propaganda during the Rwandan genocide. Joseph Dunne-Howrie discusses the way that Rau’s work, when produced in 2023, reveals a contemporary parallel in the rightwing radicalization that is facilitated by networks like Fox News and GB News.

Julia Hune-Brown and Keira Loughran discuss crafting Then Is Now, a concept album/video playlist they created through conversations with Chinese Canadian women who grew up in Toronto’s Chinatown during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Lisa Rafferty sits down with Ukrainian documentary storyteller Alem Kent to discuss Kent’s Our Response Ability and upcoming work with ProEnglish Theatre. Through documentary and verbatim theatre practices, these productions detail experiences of Ukrainians living under siege and working as war persists around them.

Theatremaker Viktor Vilisov examines the important role theatre can play in supporting migrants and refugees.

Michael Dewhatley sits down with playwright and director KJ Sanchez to talk about her experiences making plays based on real events. They discuss process, responsibility, perspective, and how to create without an agenda.

Margarita Kompelmakher details the Alliance Theatre’s process of adapting Working into a community-engaged production that both modeled grassroots organizing and told the story of the work of organizers in the city.

Anastasia Patlay talks about creating documentary theatre with the Moscow-based company Teatr.doc.

Lee Sunday Evans, the artistic director of New York City’s Waterwell, discusses the power of transcripts in performance, the topics of immigration and deportation, and the urgent attention that needs to be paid to the United States border right now.

Summer Robinson interviews playwright Lynden Harris about her work creating theatre with men on death row across the United States.

Sean Anthony Chia examines the impact of a powerful story—one without spectacle—through the lens of Isaac Gomez’s the way she spoke.

Sam Williams dives into several of the productions at Finland’s Tampere Theatre Festival, which ran between August 5 and 11 and which was curated based on the theme of bravery.

Michaela Goldhaber, current artistic director of Wry Crips, talks to the founding and early members of the disabled women’s theatre group about their history.

verity healey looks at Teatr.doc’s latest show, Torture, and the vital need for “truth-telling” theatre.

Arman Heljic uses the play Roma Armee to discuss how European Roma are rejecting their colonial legacy and reclaiming their narrative.

Katarzyna Pabijanek reflects on Roma presence in Hungarian theatre, both throughout history and today.

Mihaela Drăgan looks at the way Roma are and have been portrayed in theatre in Romania and how Romani artists are working to reclaim their stories.

Mona Merhi reflects on four productions at France’s 2018 Avignon Festival that were created based on real-life events, people, or documentary material and questions whether staging documents is an ethical process.