You took the words right out of my mouth...kinda

Verbatim Theatre: the land where the phrase, “you took the words right out of my mouth” can’t be thrown around lightly. This became especially clear as I progressed through the class readings assigned last week. At first glance, verbatim theatre seems a simple concept - a work that shares the exact words that were spoken by others at some point in history. Thinking about this re-telling of stories can almost begin to feel all warm and fuzzy as you ponder stories you may have heard a family elder recite over and over…until Carol Martin and Robin Soans unwrap the warm, fuzzy nostalgia blanket and hand you the words "exact," "precise," "accurate," and "literal" in it’s place. Anyone else feel that draft?

Like many of the concepts we have studied thus far, the depths to which one can reach when striving towards the true essence of this theatrical style intrigued me. But Martin and Soans have a valid point – verbatim theatre and documentary dramas need a shape of some sort (i.e. selection, order, etc.) and when these dramaturgical choices are applied, then all of a sudden the play doesn’t seen as uniquely different from a conventional play as the playwright might have hoped.

Last year around this time I had the honor of being a part of a Lynn Nottage world-premiere entitled One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue. This was not a play written by Lynn Nottage, but rather a work that was adapted by her. Nottage sifted through thousands of interviews (2,300 to be exact) that were conducted as a part of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) between 1936 and 1938. The FWP was an effort of the federal Works Progress Administration similar to the Federal Theatre Project mentioned in class. During that two-year span, writer-artists were sent to the homes of emancipated slaves in the post war South to interview them regarding their experiences and memories of slavery. They included first-hand experiences as well as stories that were told to them by those who had passed before them. Nottage chronologically arranged the accounts from the beginning of the slave trade through emancipation, without changing the narrative text as recorded. In the "Verbatim Fugue" the narratives are periodically divided by Negro Spirituals that topically correspond to the stories being told.

The cast consists of 2 men and 2 women who tell the stories of multiple former slaves and a chorus. My character was Woman #1 and I shared narratives of 13 different ex-slaves. It was a most humbling and chilling experience to speak those words “knowing” that they had been spoken by actual people who lived those experiences. But to be honest, more than the “verbatim” aspect, what really shook me at my core was the substance of the stories. Whether the interviewers recorded a “de” versus “the,” etc. didn’t really bother me at the time as I took the "verbatim" claim with a grain of salt.
Interpretation is another factor to consider in Verbatim Theatre. I remember a particular rehearsal where Man #2 said the word "galluses" in one of his narratives and the director found it necessary to explain to him that galoshes were footwear and that it had probably just been spelled differently on account of the interviewer trying to capture dialect. The actor then went onto explain that in his research he found that galluses were actually suspenders, which made sense in the context of the text and created a completely different visual enactment of the story.

The Library of Congress has done a fabulous job of documenting and making these narratives accessible to the public. In light of this week's blog prompt, it was interesting to read what has been written about the accuracy of the narratives that Nottage then adapted,

"In the Depression years between 1936 and 1938, the WPA Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview ordinary people in order to write down their life stories. Initially, only four states involved in the project (Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia) focused on collecting the stories of people who had once been held in slavery. John A. Lomax, the National Advisor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP (and the curator of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress), was extremely interested in the ex-slave material he received from these states. In 1937 he directed the remaining states involved in the project to carry out interviews with former slaves as well. Federal field workers were given instructions on what kinds of questions to ask their informants and how to capture their dialects, the result of which may sometimes be offensive to today's readers. The field workers often visited the people they interviewed twice in order to gather as many recollections as possible. Sometimes they took photographs of informants and their houses. The interviewers then turned the narratives over to their state's FWP director for editing and eventual transfer to Washington, D.C."

-- Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938, Library of Congress Link

Lynn Nottage, Playwright

So in addition to the selection, order, etc. of the narratives that Nottage had to arrange, there was skepticism regarding the accuracy of the narratives to begin with based on the phrases that I highlighted in bold text above. So can One More River to Cross really be called “A Verbatim Fugue?” Consider the following insights into the process:

"The Slave Narrative Collection in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress consists of narrative texts derived from oral interviews. The narratives usually involve some attempt by the interviewers to reproduce in writing the spoken language of the people they interviewed, in accordance with instructions from the project's headquarters, the national office of the Federal Writers' Project in Washington, D.C.

The interviewers were writers, not professionals trained in the phonetic transcription of speech. And the instructions they received were not altogether clear. "I recommend that truth to idiom be paramount, and exact truth to pronunciation secondary," wrote the project's editor, John Lomax, in one letter to interviewers in sixteen states. Yet he also urged that "words that definitely have a notably different pronunciation from the usual should be recorded as heard," evidently assuming that "the usual" was self-evident.

In fact, the situation was far more problematic than the instructions from project leaders recognized. All the informants were of course black, most interviewers were white, and by the 1930s, when the interviews took place, white representations of black speech already had an ugly history of entrenched stereotype dating back at least to the early nineteenth century. What most interviewers assumed to be "the usual" patterns of their informants' speech was unavoidably influenced by preconceptions and stereotypes.

The result, as the historian Lawrence W. Levine has written, "is a mélange of accuracy and fantasy, of sensitivity and stereotype, of empathy and racism" that may sometimes be offensive to today's readers. Yet whatever else they may be, the representations of speech in the narratives are a pervasive and forceful reminder that these documents are not only a record of a time that was already history when they were created: they are themselves irreducibly historical, the products of a particular time and particular places in the long and troubled mediation of African-American culture by other Americans."

-- A Note on the Language of the Narratives, Library of Congress Link

This is really interesting stuff - click here for more information on The Limitations of the Slave Narrative Collection

As the Pickering and Thompson chapter on Verbatim Theatre states, at it’s core documentary and verbatim theatre “attempt to represent events objectively for the audience.” Saidiya V. Hartman seems to agree as she assess the limitations and usefulness of the FWP Slave Narrative Collection,

"How does one use these sources? At best with the awareness that a totalizing of history cannot be reconstructed from these interested, selective, and fragmentary accounts and with an acknowledgment of the interventionist role of the interpreter, the equally interested labor of historical revision, and the impossibility of reconstituting the past free from the disfigurements of present concerns. With all these provisos issued, these narratives nonetheless remain an important source for understanding the everyday experience of slavery and its aftermath.... I read these documents with the hope of gaining a glimpse of black life during slavery and the postbellum period while remaining aware of the impossibility of fully reconstituting the experience of the enslaved."

-- Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997), 11.

Basically, acknowledge that one should take in Verbatim/Documentary Theatre with a “grain of salt” but also acknowledge that taking it with that bit of salt is probably more useful than not taking it at all. 

She took the words right out of my mouth.